Pauline Etienne
16 October 2007
Port Louis — The Mauritius Institute of Education (MIE) held two workshops on merging environment topics in the main subjects as part of the National Curriculum Framework.
An initiative of the United Nations Development Programme brought Richelieu school to hold a small exhibition on the environment last June to raise pupils' awareness about the island.
"Environmental education aims at developing the citizens of tomorrow." This is the main reason why the Mauritius Institute of Education (MIE) recently organised two workshops on "Developing Environmental Education Standards in Mauritius". The conclusions reached will be integrated in the process of the National Curriculum Framework for lower secondary that the ministry of Education is preparing. The lead researcher and coordinator of the programme, Dr Rita Bissoonauth-Purbhoo from the MIE, hopes to finalise her proposals within the next two weeks.
The initiative goes to the ministry of the Environment and is funded by the Southern African Development Community - Regional Environmental Education Programme (SADC-REEP). "When the ministry launched its invitations to tender last March, I submitted my project and it was approved," says Rita Bisoonauth-Purbhoo. This is how the senior lecturer who did a doctorate on environmental education became the lead-researcher and coordinator of the project.
Difficult to teach
Developing environmental education standards does not mean that it will be introduced as a subject in the curriculum. "Some countries have tried to do this but it appears quite difficult to teach," says the MIE senior lecturer. So the standards developed are designed to help the pedagogical team preparing the curriculum "to develop the material by integrating environmental dimensions into different disciplines".
Hence, the workshop gathered different stakeholders of the educational and environmental sectors. Teachers, inspectors, non-governmental organisations, the MIE, the University of Mauritius, the ministry of the Environment and AREU, and others took an active part in the preparation of these standards to make sure different aspects of environmental education were covered.
"Mauritius has signed agreements concerning the environment but there was hardly any pedagogical material that took environmental elements into consideration," deplored Rita Bissoonauth- Purbhoo. So introducing aspects of environmental education into different disciplines is a way of making sure those issues are tackled at school level.
For instance, the formation of Mauritius could be tackled by the geography teacher. But a text on the formation of Mauritius could also be studied in French or English. Or the Mathematics teacher could decide to make his/her pupils calculate the number of natural resources in the country. This is exactly what the lead researcher would like to achieve through the development of these standards.
Community approach
The ministry of Education will have to give its approval after it receives the content for the National Curriculum Framework. Developing citizens of tomorrow also implies a community approach. "The idea is to make sure those citizens will be able to solve the problems the whole community is facing," says Rita-Bissoonauth Purbhoo.
These are all the challenges that await the new curriculum. "Environmental education is a process that aims to develop environmentally literate citizens who can compete in the global world" but it appears also "essential in promoting a sustainable environment for future generations and finding adequate solutions for the damaging patterns of consumption and production".
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