Teach Your Curriculum Using Environmental Themes

What’s up with this poster?

Click here to download a copy of the GEOEC Lessons poster. Acrobat PDF, ~1.3 Mb Poster size is 8.5 x 14 inches

The poster available for download on this page is our attempt to make it easier for you to teach the Alberta curriculum, using the environment as an integrating context. The Alberta Teachers Association’s Global Environmental and Outdoor Education Specialist Council has identified some powerful integrating themes that you can use to teach your Social Studies, Science, and other curricula simultaneously – and we’ve written detailed unit and lesson plans for each of these themes, all available free of charge at www.geoec.org/lessons.

Why should you take the trouble to do this? For one thing, nature itself is an “integrated topic” – ask the autumn leaf whether it is science, art, drama or economics! Only through teaching in an interdisciplinary manner can we do justice to the way nature – and environmental issues – work.

Need another reason? How about this: as you probably already know, integrated education is good education. In 1998 the U.S. State Education & Environment Roundtable (www.seer.org), a cooperative initiative of 16 state departments of education, studied schools that teach using the environment as an integrating context. The results, published in Closing the Achievement Gap, showed that student achievement was higher, there were fewer discipline problems, and students read and retained more than their peers in more traditional classrooms.

But you don’t need to take my word for it – download one of our unit plans, and see what you think! If you like this approach, you can help us out: please tell other teachers about this at your next staff meeting, and put up the poster in your classroom (we’ll send one to your school later in the year). By all means send us feedback at info@geoec.org. I hope you enjoy teaching using the environment as an integrating context: your students, and nature itself, will benefit!

Gareth Thomson
GEOEC Affiliate Representative, and
Former Education Director, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS)