educating for sustainability at BUGS
“...you cannot protect the environment unless you empower the people.”
-- Wangari Maathia, environmental and human rights activist
Reimagining How We Educate for Sustainability
At BUGS we believe that students get excited about learning when they engage in content that is relevant to their lives. Collaborating with our wonderful BUGS educators, we developed some new elements to our program to cultivate the knowledge, skills, and positive mindset of BUGS students who will change the world.
Our educating for sustainability approach provides students with exciting and meaningful opportunities to engage their leadership and voice, critical thinking, problem-solving, service learning, and strategic-thinking skills to create sustainable change in their communities.
BUGS students graduate prepared to succeed in high school, lead change, and to thrive in a rapidly changing and challenging workplace.
Our model for affecting change and framework for student work is grounded in educating for sustainability standards, field research, and community action projects. Sustainability at BUGS occurs in Sustainable Design Class (twice a week across all grades), during monthly Field Study days, through our focus on project and place-based learning, and the integration of Education for Sustainability (EfS) standards and grade level Sustainability themes across content area curricula and student projects.
In classrooms at BUGS you see students designing a solar oven for communities with limited resources, surveying and analyzing water consumption, or developing a plan to promote the school’s community market.
“In 6th grade, our topic of the earth and food systems and our community was integrated into all of our classes differently. For example, in math class, we looked at trees in greenwood cemetery and found the circumference and diameter of them. In science class, we learned a lot about ecosystems and food chains which tied to us learning about plants and animals in sustainable design. In social studies, we learned about features of our earth, and how humans impact our surroundings and adjust to our surroundings and how sustainability connects to all our classes and not just about caring for the earth. ”
““At the end of the year in sustainability design class we do a blue schools design project where we can integrate our learning from the year and also mix in our creativity to create a new, more sustainable blueprint of the school where we can manage the amount of water we waste. And I personally think that this is a very good project for creative and out of the box thinkers because you aren’t really limited to one thing and there really isn’t like, one answer because the design is yours and it can really be anything.””
BUGS IS GRATEFUL FOR OUR COMMUNITY PARTNERS
