PASS (Peel Alternative School South) presents the Energy Hog Award.

Modelled on the ‘Fossil of the Year’ awards, PASS has designed and implemented an Energy Hog award - for classes who’ve forgotten to open the blinds, use half of the lights, turn off computer monitors, unplug the LCD projector and other energy-conscious behaviours.  The award rotates weekly - and teachers and students must try their best to avoid the three-headed beast!

We love your creativity, PASS ecoteam! 

A post for educators: Teaching Electricity can be (and should be) Environmental Education

a post by: erin (erin@ecospark.ca)

A few weeks ago, I got the chance to talk with a group of teachers about electricity conservation initiatives in schools – their importance, their links to environmental education, their challenges, and ways to make them significant.  Here’s a breakdown of some of what we talked about and my further thoughts on electricity, environment and education.

Electricity Monitoring and Conservation is Environmental Education

                In schools, it’s important we begin thinking about environmental education as something that wraps around all of our teaching, content, activities, and the school infrastructure itself. Electricity education is an opportunity to engage in all aspects of environmental education:  IN, ABOUT and FOR the environment.

IN:  Where is electricity generated?

‘In’ the environment shouldn’t be limited to appreciating and experiencing local, natural habitat. Ask your students to research where electricity is generated - and see what out-of-school experiences you can provide them given the answers they come up with.  What about taking students to the Niagara plants group of power plants, to see and learn about the windmill at Exhibition place – or even take a tour of the Darlington nuclear plant?  Each of these tours would require appropriate preparation before and discussion afterward.  Students should be encouraged to apply their ‘critical’ eyes, as the tours they take may not expose some of the more serious problems with that particular generation type.  Having students learn about electricity generation from the source, and how this might affect the surrounding ecosystem, connects well to education ‘in’ the environment.

ABOUT:  Connecting social justice, environmental issues and electricity generation

It’s important for students to understand where electricity comes from, what impacts it has on the environment as well as on people and communities. With a lot of environmental issues, the social aspects are often overlooked. Talking more openly about the connections between social justice and sustainability will lead to a more holistic understanding of environmental issues as being socially significant as well.  Some starting points:

• Where does the nuclear waste go? Which communities are storing radioactive waste and what risks are they taking?

• How do hydro companies interact with land and water rights? How are these interactions affecting First Nations communities and traditional ways of living?

• What are the health effects of coal-fired plants? Where these are located in Canada?

Understanding our own usage and impact

Usually, there’s a difference between our perceptions, our habits, and the reality of what devices are using the most electricity in a school. The lights are almost exclusively making the largest impact on our consumption, because they are on for long periods of time and there are so many of them.  In some secondary schools, computers can rival the lights, but almost never consume more electricity than the lights do. This is surprising to most students – and even was to the group of teachers I was chatting with!

I recently worked with an EcoTeam who calculated that they would need to plant 25 trees to offset the GHG emissions from the school’s light usage in one day alone!  In a school year, that’s 4700 trees – just to compensate for the electricity generation required to power the lights.

Remember that in our schools (and institutions), we can’t choose the kind of electricity we want. We get electricity from Ontario’s grid – which includes all types of electricity, both good for and harmful to the environment.

FOR:  Thinking about what we can do about it.

In our institutions we are more likely to allow waste since we are not paying directly out of pocket for this electricity use. Where do we see waste in schools, and how can we get students to work towards minimizing that waste – not to save money necessarily since that doesn’t drive us institutionally – but for the effects of electricity generation on our environment?  Students can generate and implement their own conservation ideas and hopefully learn that their ideas and actions can really make a measurable difference.

         Electricity education allows us to think about and extend the INs, ABOUTs, and FORs of environmental education – especially in an urban setting where nature can be hard to access.  Thanks for the conversation!

(check out Wattwize, our electricity conservation program, right here!) 

OISE - Masters of Teaching Environmental Education Conference

Today, Paul and Erin were delighted to be a part of the Environmental Education Conference at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto.

We facilitated two workshops.

Paul’s morning session examined how outdoor environmental monitoring activities with classes can be an effective tool for developing ecological literacy.  OISE students brainstormed various monitoring activities that are open to them (both EcoSpark programs and non-EcoSpark programs like FrogWatch or FeederWatch).  

Students also discussed the various benefits that environmental monitoring would have for students. Here are two of their idea maps:

After doing a “dry run” of a stream monitoring activity (using benthic macro-invertebrates as indicators of stream health) the masters students discussed what discussions and actions teachers could facilitate completing such a study. Here are two of their idea maps (specifically about discussions and actions after discovering poor local water quality):

Erin’s afternoon session had students discussing (and experiencing) the effectiveness of engaging students in electricity conservation campaigns. Erin led participants through each step of the process including: electricity audits, campaign planing, and implementation. They also discussed the challenges and possible solutions to running such a program with students.

All in all it was a great day. Thanks to OISE and to all of the other presenters (including The Stop, OISE faculty, Claire Leslie Walker, and Greenpeace).