Courses › Forums › Service Learning and Sustainability › Module 3: Identifying Relevance for Sustainability Education › Sustainability & Education "big picture" › Reply To: Sustainability & Education "big picture"
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“Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition.”
Love, love, love this! I do my best with my elementary students to model “adult behavior” in the world…including mine. Let me begin with social/emotional learning. Think about the last conflict/challenge/frustration YOU had lately…home life or work…doesn’t matter. Did you handle it perfectly? Did you apply all of the “desirable characteristics” that we instill in children?
Perhaps you did and I’m still just a 50-year old kid trying to learn human interaction skills myself. Perhaps I don’t come from a elementary/high school environment that taught/modeled these skills for me. Maybe I make bad job choices and I am not surrounded by people who can build me up.
My point? I firmly believe that no individual wakes up and says, “How can I make the world suck today? What can I go out and destroy?” My mission revolves around Barr’s quote above. “Bad things” happen over time as an accumulation of all the small moments in our life.
Going back to SEL, when something happens to me (the teacher) that I didn’t handle to the best of my availability, I use that as a discussion point for my kids. 1) To teach them empathy 2) To model that adults deal with the same sort of issues kids face and 3) That life long learning requires constant daily reflection of “How can we do better?”
I understand that a lot of learning designers think of sustainability and systems more so in the natural world of things. I, however, use it to apply to the human condition.