Environmental education (EE) connects us to the world around us, teaching us about relationships and interactions between natural and human systems. Bring nature into the classroom, take the extra-curricular courses, or find impromptu teachable moments on a nature walk with our families bring real benefits for youth, educators, schools, and communities.
What is Environmental Education?
According to EPA, Environmental education is “a process that allows individuals to explore environmental issues, engage in problem-solving and take action to improve the environment. As a result, individuals develop a deeper understanding of environmental issues and have the skills to make informed and responsible decisions”.
The components of environmental education are:
- Awareness and sensitivity to the environment and environmental challenges
- Knowledge and understanding of the environment and environmental challenges
- Attitudes of concern for the environment and motivation to improve or maintain environmental quality
- Skills to identify and help resolve environmental challenges
- Participation in activities that lead to the resolution of environmental challenges
Approaching this methodology to help people pick up familiarity with their surroundings and secure learning, abilities, values, experiences, and passion. That will empower them to act separately and aggregately to take care of present and future environmental issues. In summary, environmental education is provided so that people can have a better understanding of the world around them and know how to take care of the world to be a better place.
Top 5 Main Benefits of Environmental Education
Provides information about specific environmental concerns
Environmental education provides information about specific environmental concerns or problems to the general public instead of a specific group or community.
It includes all efforts to make the general public aware of the knowledge of the environment and environmental challenges. That might be through print materials, media, brochures, bulletins, videos, or other media techniques.
Enhance Imagination and Critical Thinking
Environmental education is a field that integrates biology, ecology, earth science, geography, atmospheric science and Maths. To understand how the environment works and keeping it healthy requires knowledge and skills from many disciplines.
Interactive learning sparks the imagination and encourages creativity. While learning EE, students are more enthusiastic and engaged in learning, which helps students to earn hands-on experience. Moreover, it offers opportunities to make connections and apply their learning in the real world
Teachers could enhance the consequence of curriculum by incorporating EE practices with science, math, language arts, history, and more into one rich lesson or activity. Such lessons provide an excellent backdrop or context for interdisciplinary learning.
Empower individuals
EE empowers youth to share their voice and make a difference at their school and in their communities.
It expands individuals’ Knowledge and mindfulness about nature’s domain and difficulties related, creates abilities to resolve the difficulties. Besides, students in different data-gathering that help them to discuss, analyze, predict and interpret data about environmental issues that lead to responsible individual and group actions.
Environmental education does not defend any particular viewpoint. Rather, environmental education teaches individuals to have various views of an issue through critical thinking. It enhances their own problem-solving and decision-making skills.
EE encourages students to research, investigate how and why things happen, and settle on educated choices and make dependable moves in the field that they are working with. By enhancing critical and creative thinking skills, EE helps raise a new generation of consumers, workers, as well as decision-makers that help to address complex environmental problems that have no simple answers.
Encourage Healthy Lifestyle
EE encourages students to investigate varying sides of issues to understand the full issue. Then, give the decision to choose the best thing to support green lifestyles. In addition, it also promotes tolerance of different points of view in different cultures.
Learning and practicing outside help address some of the health issues that many children are facing today, such as obesity, attention deficit disorders, and depression. EE fosters biophilia, appreciation, and respect for the environment and reduces stress due to increased time spent in nature.
Strengthen Communities Involvement
EE promotes a sense of connection through community involvement. While students decide to learn more or take action to improve their environment, they reach out to environmental experts, donors, volunteers, and local facilities to find solutions. As a consequence, it helps bring the community together to understand and address environmental issues impacting their neighborhood.
EE improves students’ understanding of how their decisions and actions affect the environment. The necessity of builds knowledge and skills to address complex environmental concerns, as well as ways to keep our environment healthy and sustainable for the future.
Conclusion
In short, environmental education will help you look at any situation that you may be in different views. It will assist you in being able to make a decision that is beneficial for the environment. With a background in environmental education in mind, whatever plan you have, you will be able to decide it so that it is more eco-friendly.