Greenfox Schools: Greening the Obama Generation
EP: How does your experience teaching influence the Greenfox mission?
KVH: I believe in teaching children about the five senses - sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch. I believe in incorporating sensory orientation into subject teaching as much as possible. I believe that children are naturally inclined towards this direction, more so perhaps than adults. By teaching them to explicitly engage their senses in the fullest way possible, children learn to be more self-aware, and more aware of others’ needs. A child who is tuned in to the world around him develops compassion and a sharpened sense of understanding.
Ultimately this process helps my students develop stronger interpersonal skills, because they understand the depth of interconnectedness among people, and eventually, among industries, economies, and cultures.
The truth about globalization, including depletion of natural resources, will require that the most intelligent decisions pay attention to both the details and the big picture, and find as much of a balance as possible. That’s what sustainability is all about.
It is my experience as a teacher that sensory orientation allows decision-makers to feel as well as think.
I realize now, more than ever, the importance of schools as community-educators, a topic I recently wrote about for our blog. Schools educate their communities because children are connected to families and parents, who are in turn connected to various industries and cultures. And so the network grows.
EP: Is “Gree” a trend in schools? Is “Sustainability” a trend?
KVH: This is a great question. It is true that “green” is catching on in schools, particularly because children are interested in and sensitive to the issues of global warming, and because many teachers are activists or passionate about change in their own right. However, I would not call it a trend because that suggests it might be a passing vogue.
The sustainability movement or green revolution is here to stay because the overuse of resources—which is at the heart of the environmental problem—is a problem that affects every person, and cannot be easily reversed. Furthermore, as the definition of sustainability suggests, environmental degradation is intrinsically linked to all economic sectors, and all parts of the world. Therefore, it is in everyone’s best interest to create systems that can sustain themselves over long periods of time and with minimal harm to the planet.
EP: Please describe your program – is it more “Green Building” focused? Or “Green Education”focused? Or does it help schools to go green in their administrative practices?
KVH: Greenfox is both Green Building focused and Green Education focused.
Our audits look at the building design and internal systems and make recommendations for service providers and products. We do not, however, implement the physical building changes, meaning we do not install actual solar panels or plant green roofs.
We also design our own sustainability curriculum, and have programs that teach students, teachers, and administrators how to implement a sustainability initiative, such as how to run a school-wide composting system, how to run an energy-efficient classroom, and how to implement a school-wide sustainability pledge.
[...] Read an interview with Kristen von Hoffmann as she talks about Greenfox Schools for Ecopreneurist in Reenita Malhotra’s article, “Greenfox Schools: Greening the Obama Generation.” [...]