Senator NELSON. Our next witness is Mr. Edward Ames, Division of Resources and Environment of the Ford Foundation.

The committee appreciates your taking time to come here today and present your statement. It will be printed in full in the record and you can present it however you desire.

STATEMENT OF EDWARD A. AMES, PROGRAM OFFICER, THE FORD FOUNDATION

Mr. AMES. Thank you, Senator Nelson.

I am very pleased to be here in response to a letter of invitation from the chairman.

I would like to summarize my statement. The Ford Foundation has had a variety of programs in the environmental field and, more specifically in education, starting in June 1966 and going through the present.

Today I would like to talk about programs in elementary and secondary schools, and about how schools may affect behavior in relation to the environment. In doing so, I will give you some specific examples because, among other difficulties, the term environmental education suffers from a lack of definition.

Virtually all learning consists of coming to grips with one's environment in one way or another. The problem that has concerned us is that the schools present a very special environment which is different from that of the community and quite separate from the life which surrounds them. This separation is pervasive throughout the school experience, both in the elementary and in the secondary schools.

Children learn about the environment of their community from being in it, and from their direct experience in it. In schools, they learn about school environment and how to survive in that special setting.

This is a fundamental problem of education, and it is the level at which we have sought to develop programs at the Ford Foundation. As we have gone around to schools and have talked to people about programs in environmental education, we have been concerned by the separation between the school and the community.

This separation comes about because the teachers are not trained to take advantage of the resources in the immediate community. It also comes about because the textbooks treat the environment in a very generalized way, and because the administrative practices in many schools make it difficult for classes to go out into the community and have a free exchange of materials and experiences in the local surroundings.

This separation exists even because of the architecture of the schools. For instance, I.S. 201 in the city of New York is in a building without windows. It is also lifted up a floor above the street level. This was done with a constructive purpose in mind, but it does, we have to recognize, represent at least a symbolic separation between school and community. This symbolism is in all probability not lost upon the children who go to school there.

I think we can assume that this separation has a behavioral effect on children, although it may be hard to measure. Our concern has been to find ways of making the actual experiences of children in their

environment as important a part of the learning environment of schools as possible.

One way of doing this is exemplified by a program on water pollution at the Tilton School in Tilton, N.H. Forty or fifty teachers from both public and private schools have been trained to date in teams with children from those same schools.

The teachers and the children go out into the local communities and they make measurements, observations, assessments of the water quality in local streams. They learn the technology of making these measurements, and of using the appropriate instruments in addition to learning a good deal of basic science.

They then investigate water pollution control law, the economics of the enforcement of this law, the practical problems of standards and the enforcement of standards and what this means to the communities, including the question of financing secondary sewage plants, and the question of industry's attempts to comply with the laws.

The result is a very broad program organized around a specific topic, namely, water quality. Significantly it also involves some changes in what goes on in the school and these changes are quite important, I think.

First, the student is put in a central position to contribute to the design of his own academic program. At the Tilton School the training involves teams of teachers and students, who prepare research programs to be carried out in their own schools during the following school year.

Secondly, the work is organized around problem solving in the community around that school, so that each team serves as the nucleus of student groups doing extensive field work or local pollution problems.

Thirdly, the course work transcends the academic boundaries and is organized around the requirements for solving that problem. As a result it draws freely on courses in social studies, government math, sciences, and various other aspects of the academic curriculum of that school.

Finally, there has to be some arrangement made in the school scheduling to allow the students to get out and do the fieldwork and do work together on these problems. This means being able to use blocks of time so that students can accomplish some of these tasks which cannot be done in the normal 50-minute class period.

Another example at the secondary school level is a program in the marine sciences which has been developed at the John Dewey High School in New York City.

Incidentally, the school is built on a tidal estuary which has long served as an informal, illegal dumping ground. A fact again, I think, which was not without significance to the students who go to school there.

In any case, Dr. Joshua Segal, who is the principal of John Dewey High School, was determined to draw very deeply on the community resources for the academic program. Fortunately, the New York Aquarium is located in the school neighborhood. He was able to make arrangements with the Aquarium so his students could make full use of its facilities both informally and as part of their academic pro

grams. This was coupled with fieldwork on the beaches of Coney Island, which is also in the immediate neighborhood.

The reason the school could work in this way was because they found administrative methods of injecting flexibility into the scheduling. The students were allowed to use blocks of time to go to the Aquarium, to do fieldwork on the beaches or to do laboratory work in the school and to make real headway on some of these problems.

The spirit in that school is quite extraordinary and what they are accomplishing shows great promise. This is a perfectly normal New York City high school in other regards.

This kind of environmental programing is best started in the elementary school but there it has a somewhat different form. Whereas in the secondary school you deal with topics such as water quality or the marine sciences, in the elementary schools, because of the nature of elementary education, the work is not organized around topics or academic disciplines.

I believe that you heard yesterday from Prof. David Hawkins of the University of Colorado, who has done some very interesting work in elementary schools in this country and more recently in Great Britain. I would like to mention the work that has been done in some of the British primary schools and its significance for what might be done here in this country and for what is indeed going on in some American schools now in an experimental way.

The British primary schools have developed a program called Integrated Day, which we think has considerable significance for environmental education. This significance lies from the fact that “Integrated Day" makes good use of physical materials which are collected from the neighborhood by children and by their teachers and brought into the classroom. It gets the children out into the community to pursue investigations using the school neighborhood for the learning experiences that are invariably to be found there. It allows children to to work together in teams on problems which interest them with the teacher working in a supporting role to guide them.

But what it really does, and I think this is really very important, it gives children the message that their perceptions of their environment, that their work in their surroundings means something and has relevance and importance. I think this is the challenge that we face in environmental education. We may introduce topics, academic disciplines, courses, textbooks, films about the environment, but unless we do something to give children the expectation that they as individuals count for something and can have some ability to change what goes on in their environment or to cope with it, these more specific topical treatments will be for nought.

The sense of isolation from the environment that exists in some classrooms is hard to exaggerate. I have gone into classrooms in New York and talked to the children and found that they have never seen a river although their community may be surrounded by rivers on three sides. These children, either alone or as a class have never gone the two or three blocks down to the Harlem River or the Hudson River or the East River. They have very little understanding of what tides are, of what a river is, of how it is used by man, of what its significance is. We have gone into classrooms in the Bronx that are two or three blocks away from Van Cortlandt Park and discovered that the chil

dren have never been in Van Cortlandt Park or have never been in the Bronx Zoo or have never been in the Bronx Botanical Garden, and this isolation, I think, is very serious in terms of our expectation that these children will be able to understand the concepts that we would like to introduce into the school about the environment.

I would suggest that if environmental education is to be pursued as a national policy and with Federal support, that we should, among other things, seriously consider these very fundamental aspects of the problem. I would not say this is the only things that should be done, but it is an aspect of it that has interested us. It is tempting, I think, to do a far easier job of just introducing materials into the curriculum, into the classroom, but while such programs would be easier to implement, at least initially, I just don't think they would stand the chance of achieving the results that we are looking for.

I also think that the greatest need at this point in environmental education is for programs which help teachers in a very direct way in the classroom.

This means that I would place a much higher priority on the kinds of fundamental educational change involving the schools, the classroom, and the relationship between the classroom and the surrounding neighborhood than I would on the more conventional work at nature centers and sanctuaries.

I would also place a higher priority on work in the schools than I would on school sites for outdoor education, for instance, because the problems we are dealing with have to do with man, his interactions, his economic activities. I think in studying those things the community and streets, transportation systems, its marketplaces, are a much more cogent subject to deal with than are open spaces and the natural environment.

In conclusion, I would say that the basic problem we face is that environmental education is an abstraction which is not very well understood. It covers a great variety of programs which while only to be expected make it difficult to define and evaluate and it certainly is going to make it difficult to support. At least we have found that to be true in our experience at the Foundation.

I think it is going to be hard to make environmental education a national priority unless we do clarify what it is and how it functions and how it relates to some of the other educational goals that this country has set for itself. Certainly curriculum reform has come before from social crises such as war, economic stagnation during the depression, immigration, or the launching of sputnik.

There are many examples we can look to in the past where broad social concerns have had their impact on education and resulted in reform in the schools and very fundamental changes in curriculum. We have had improvements, for instance, in vocational education and agricultural practices and in the teaching of science, math, foreign languages. But all of these involved a considerable mobilization of talent, of money, of effort, and it is not clear now that mobilization is taking place in the environmental field.

I hope that it will take place and I hope that these hearings are helpful to you in your work in the development of this bill through the legislative process. I am very pleased to have had this chance to

be here.

Thank you.

Senator NELSON. How would you provide the teacher with the kinds of supportive services, assistance, and counseling that you think he needs?

Mr. AMES. To take the example of New York City, there are a number of institutions which are interested both in the subjects of environmental education and in doing something with teachers in the schools. These institutions in some cases are universities which have an interest in environmental programs, or institutions like the American Museum of Natural History, or the Wave Hill Center for Environmental Studies in the Bronx, which is working with school districts in the Bronx.

I think new ways have to be figured out to get people from those institutions to work more directly with teachers and to get them out into the schools. We have thought in the past of using our cultural institutions such as zoos, museums, botanical gardens, as sites for field trips, and that is fine and perhaps we should do more of it.

But I think also if these people have something to say that is important, we must get it more into the mainstream of education and make it more important in the curriculum. One thing that we might do is make it possible for these institutions to have workers, educators working with teachers who can go out into the schools using the institutions as a base of operations, but who do their work primarily in the classrooms with the teachers.

Also we do have a tradition in this country of having supplementary personnel in the schools working with teachers, but normally as supervisors. For instance, we have had in New York City a science coordinators program. We have not had enough of these people, but they have been teachers with special training in the sciences who help teachers as they develop their course outlines and as they develop their programs in the classroom.

I think the supervisory relationship perhaps is less good than the advisory relationship in this sense. I think it might be more useful to call on teachers who have worked in this field, who have received some special training in this field perhaps at a university and then support them without the responsibilities of teaching in a classroom, but support them so they can work with a number of teachers in a number of classrooms in some specific schools.

We may need some new institutions to support them. This might be done in some cases out of our colleges and universities. I think this is one way teachers' colleges and universities could become involved in this kind of educational programing.

I don't think it is useful for them just to offer courses in educational theory. I think it would be far better for them instead to figure out ways of getting out of the college, out of the universities and into the school, or into the classroom to work directly with the teachers. Senator NELSON. The most pervasive experience we have had in that, I would assume, is the Agricultural Extension Service, isn't it?

Mr. AMES. That is very true and the extension service is a great success story. Perhaps there is some analog to that which could be developed in this field. I understand, incidentally, that in California the University of California is attempting to develop a program of this sort, an environmental extension service out of the University of

46-880 0-70-13