Sustainability News provided by 3BL
Social Media, Social Justice & Environmental Education

(3BLMedia/theCSRfeed) September 22nd, 2010 (Santa Monica, California): KooDooZ to be joined by Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, Alliance for Climate Education, Green My Parents, ReUse Connection,Team Marine and Real Curriculum on September 25th, 2010 for a bonus Social Media Week event.
Social Media Week, a multi-city global conference connecting people, content and conversations around emerging trends in social and mobile media, amassed experts from all over the social media landscape to showcase the impact our 2.0 worlds have (or could have) across industries, countries and economies.
The KooDooZ event, entitled “Social Media, Social Justice & Environmental Education” will examine our current and future capabilities of advancing environmental literacy, and the import thereof.
“At the surface, Americans appear to be environmentally literate and capable of making sustainable choices,” said Lee Fox, founder of KooDooZ and moderator of the event workshop. “But when it comes to practicing what we preach, everyday Americans aren’t taking an action-oriented approach to environmental stewardship. As most social and economic issues have major environmental components, the quality of information we put on the grid can’t be so significantly different than what’s in our classrooms.”
Reportedly, 85% of teens (13-17 years old) rely on school as their main source for eco-education, which is alarming being that last year a groundbreaking study revealed that U.S. students ranked 34th out of the 57 countries in both environmental science and geosciences.
As American youth have grown up with climate change as a big part of their national dialogue and were witness to the most severe environmental disaster our country has ever seen, there is an agreed-upon need to put a higher emphasis on environmental education, as seen by Obama’s inclusion of environmental literacy in his new education budget. As a further punctuation, just today, the Maryland school board ruled that their schools must include environmental education in their pre-kindergarten through 12th grade classes, but will not make it an official graduation requirement.
“Our classrooms are in need of an upgrade,” asserts Fox who recently authored an editorial entitled Empower Kids With Service To Their Community. “My hope is that we get the public to consider how leveraging the best part of social media – essentially providing more peer-to-peer and user-generated opportunities – will further cultivate environmentally literate citizens.”
Research indicates that interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning environments provide a meaningful way to ignite youth's participation. If "green" has become the new face of youth activism, with millions of young people around the world recruited online to impact change, should educators be structuring environmental education (i) as a “core subject” status in schools and (ii) in tandem with the social web, to ensure real-time, relevant information?
"When we ask young minds to work together as a group to investigate environmental problems and solutions, we're empowering them to take action on issues that directly affect them," concludes Fox. "Schools should give students the best tools to nurture leadership."
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