Focus on environmental education

A new wide-ranging educational initiative, launched last month by the government of Pakistan, which aims to incorporate environmental studies into the curricula for school years one to 12, lacks an essential teacher-training component and this could adversely affect the project, according to experts. "This is a stark and yawning gap in the project, that they are only going to change the curricula and help write textbooks," Hassan Rizvi, who heads the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) education and communications unit in Pakistan, told IRIN from the southern port city of Karachi. "But this project does not focus on teacher training, not even teacher sensitisation... Textbooks may have been written but the people who would use these textbooks - the teachers - would not be affected at all and they would not even be directed how to teach this new curricula. So that is a big gap," he explained. The 26-million-rupee project, called "Environmental Education Promotion at School and College Level," is funded by the Swiss Development Corporation (SDC) and will target more than 200,000 institutions and 26 million students across Pakistan. It was developed under a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and donor-funded National Environmental Action Plan - Support Programme (NEAP-SP) and is being jointly handled by the Ministries of Environment and Education. "We welcome the project and would like to support it as much as we can. By the way, the kind of thing that they have planned to do for the whole of the country has partially been already done in the northern areas, mainly through the initiative of IUCN of incorporating environmental education in the curricula and text-books from class one to class five," Rizvi added. INCORPORATING TEACHER TRAINING A Global Environment Fund (GEF) official told IRIN in the capital Islamabad that teacher training for the ambitious four-year project had been scheduled as a second phase after a final decision on what to incorporate in the curricula had been made. "The curricula has still to be changed. There still have to be additions as far as the environment is concerned. Once that is accepted by the federal government and the provincial education boards, then it would be incorporated in the next edition of the textbooks," Abdul Qadir Rafiq, a GEF programme officer, said. "Once the approvals are there, but before the additions are incorporated into the textbooks, we'll have the training-of-teachers component," he added. Rafiq said the stakeholders were interested in a project that would focus specifically on teachers. "We're already testing it on one of our projects in the northern areas and NWFP [North West Frontier Province] and there we have introduced, not in the regular curricula, but additional information that teachers can impart to their students. So teachers are being trained there, but, at the national level, we'll have to wait and see how the project develops," he explained. NOT TARGETING ATTITUDES "We are not targeting attitudes. We should be targeting attitudes and then attitudes should be converted into positive behavioural practices," Ali Raza Rizvi, the head of policy and programmes at IUCN, Pakistan, told IRIN from Karachi. "Environmental education is a very sensitive thing because, apart from religious education, this is the only one which talks about values and ethics and this needs to be inculcated. By just introducing textbooks, it will not happen, it never has anywhere in the world. We need teachers who need to be taught that environment isn't a foreign agenda, it's got everything to do with our daily lives," he stressed. Teachers needed to be sensitised to what they were supposed to teach before the project got off the ground, the policy head said. "They need to target master trainers and they need to go and train all the teachers," he emphasised. COMPLETE PACKAGE The head of the Environmental Pollution Unit (EPU) at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) told IRIN from the organisation's headquarters in the eastern city of Lahore that he thought the addition of environmental education in the curricula countrywide would prove to be extremely beneficial for students. "You're provided a basic start. You're talking about changing the mindsets, you're talking about changing habits, attitudes. These have to be inculcated in the very beginning," Hammad Naqi Khan, the EPU head, said. That was why, Khan stressed, he felt there should be a "package, complete with teacher training" because environmental issues were sometimes mishandled by the local populace because of a simple lack of understanding. "Water is a main issue in this country. We waste our water, we pollute our water. Our consumption practices are not sustainable. we're not using water sustainably," Khan said. "Let's not focus on the environment as a buzz-word. Even the agriculture universities curricula don't have these issues in them. Ninety percent of freshwater is used by the agriculture sector. Just see how we pollute the available resource," he said. NO NEED TO SEPARATE IUCN's Ali Rizvi said, however, that he thought that there was no need for a separate environmental course to be taught. "First of all, there shouldn't be a separate environmental education subject because, in the past there were many attempts in different fields - you know, drug education, population control education - but after some time, these initiatives died down," he said. "Our main focus, which we've been trying to promote, is to infuse environmental education so that there is no extra education burden on the teacher or student, and that's an expert's job: you could work with science teachers, for example, to infuse it in the science curriculum," he emphasised. Teachers needed to put through a capacity-building regimen before any positive results could really be achieved through the exercise, Ali Rizvi continued. "When they are saying they want to reach 200,000 schools countrywide, if they think they'll do that by just putting one essay or something in textbooks, it will not achieve the desired objective," he said. "Environmental education is not just information: it hits on attitudes, the way we live, the way we consume [natural resources]" he stressed.