WHATELY — While winter’s warmest days remind us that our climate’s future could be bleak, the future generation reminds us that it may not have to be.
Stephanie Apanell’s fourth grade class at Whately Elementary School joined forces with Amherst’s Hitchcock Center for the Environment this October for a series of climate-related explorations. Students engaged in hands-on activities over the course of three sessions at Whately Elementary, as well as during one visit to the Hitchcock Center. Monya Relles, the Hitchcock Center’s environmental educator who headed the program, said they primed their lessons to make climate-related education about more than “just being hopeless.”
“In my personal work, I keep coming back to (climate activist and writer) Adrienne Maree Brown who said all climate education is science fiction,” Relles said. Climate education is “inherently revolutionary,” centered around envisioning an idealistic world that has yet to exist, they elaborated.
And what better catalyst for the revolution than a child’s imagination, they reasoned.
“In broad strokes, I think key pieces of teaching children about climate change is to be hopeful and … to be solution-oriented,” Relles said. “I think students thinking about themselves as problem-solvers is really important.”
Relles’ lesson plans revolved around “deconstructing the idea that nature is somewhere.” Rather, nature is everywhere, they argued. At Whately Elementary, they introduced students to a confluence of human innovation and the natural world: “solar panels we can play with.” Working within “the language of engineering and of problem solving,” the children were presented with real voltmeters, circuits and other related paraphernalia to expose them to “what’s actually getting done” to preserve the climate.
“A really key piece is not telling them how to feel and letting them come to their own conclusions,” Relles said.
Aside from being “a place to dream and feel hopeful,” the Hitchcock Center facility delivered a lesson merely by existing as a “living building,” or a self-sustaining structure that operates and is dependent on natural cycles, such as rainfall. Additionally, staff gave visiting students insight into how career actuarial architects and engineers think, Relles recapped. After a tour of the center, the children were tasked with drawing something beautiful they observed before shifting gears to redesigning wind turbines.
People walk around during the Grand Opening of the new Hitchcock Center Saturday, Oct. 1, 2016 at 845 West Street in Amherst.
