One of the joys of Environmental Education is - or should be - that it can happen anywhere, at any time, including in an ordinary everyday street.rnI spent my schooldays thinking that there was no interesting history, and no significant geography, where I lived, nor on my journey to school. I have spent the rest of my life discovering how wrong I was. And yet I still encounter the attitude that real history and geography, and significant environmental education, occur somewhere else.rnThe real local item that we can touch and feel, see, hear and even smell can be a vivid environmental experience. And if it links with a historical or geographical concept, it makes that concept seem real, comprehensible and memorable, rather than distant, irrelevant, and remote from real life. If the experience links with a live environmental issue, that is even better.rnThis applies to ALL ages! Think of the shiny eyes of 4- or 5-year-olds, achieving some 'Knowledge and Understanding of the World' [as their cur-rnriculum now requires], when they experience the street by their school. Yet this is so similar to a good experience for sixth-formers in their very first session in September: go out into the local street, and seek geographical or historical examples and concepts. If this point is valid for 4- to 5-year-olds and 16-year-olds, it must surely be valid in between those ages as well. And it's a 'no cost' activity - so important for when money becomes tighter, as it surely will. Also let's value and respect the students' knowledge that they can develop on the daily walk to school: see my ENV ED articles on the subject, Summer 2000 and Spring 2005 - this article has developed from these starting-points.
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