From Livleen Kahlon, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi
Posted 1 February 2007
I have been working in the field of Environment Education (EE) for around 10 years now and am currently with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). During this period there has been a growing interest of various stakeholders in the subject, and though a Supreme Court directive emphasised the importance of EE in the school curriculum only a couple of years ago, it seems to me that this has been an integral part of education across all subjects for several years.
Recently many new areas of work and specialisation have come into focus as a result of the Supreme Court directive, but the important issues remain the same, such as the effective teaching and revision of EE in schools, especially in a country like India where there are so many linguistic and geographic barriers, the possibility of standardising EE as a single simplified concept, and the availability of tools to enable this process.
In this background, I would be grateful if members could share their experiences on the following:
- What is the current status of integration of environment education in the school curriculum of respective states?
- Have any difficulties been encountered while dealing with this subject in your respective projects? What was the nature of some of these difficulties?
- What could be an acceptable mode of transfer of knowledge to make EE percolate to all regions of a country as vast as ours?
- Examples of documentation that may be available to strengthen the process of enhanced learning.
We propose to produce a document called “Environment Education: Multi-stakeholder Perspective and Case Studies”, and would like to include members’ responses in it. The document can then be circulated for the use and guidance of all, and used for the preparation of a road map of what needs to be done so as to address the concerns raised.
I would therefore be most grateful for members’ support and help in answering the above questions.
Please see attachment below for the responses.