How to Change the World. Clare Feeney
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The Third Wave
This book is for environmental experts delivering training and training experts supporting them.
It’s also for people in the process of becoming environmental experts in their own workplaces or for their own sectors.
It’s needed by people in both the developed and developing worlds:
It’s needed by people in every occupation:
Businesses and utilities: use this book to help set up environmental training for your own staff and subcontractors. You can also have input to government-sponsored environmental training programs for businesses in order to make sure that your needs and constraints are well understood. In this way you will strengthen the relevance and effectiveness of the training for all parties – and enjoy the increased staff engagement, productivity and profitability that will result.
Professional, trades and industry associations and workplace unions: take the initiative for the professional learning and development of your members with regard to the environment – with the associated benefits in skills and engagement.
Tertiary educators: this book will help you develop your students’ capacity to make a difference in their chosen workplaces and communities.
Human resources personnel: HR specialists, especially those involved with learning and development, can use this book to offer support to environmental experts developing and delivering training programs
Professional trainers: companies or institutions that deliver environmental training and education can build up specialist environmental expertise or partnerships with environmental specialists to help them deliver excellent training
Supply chain managers: this book will help you encourage and require good environmental practice in your supply chains and procurement policies. It will help you take a training approach to building the environmental capacity of your existing and prospective service providers.
Environmental regulators: councils and government environmental agencies – use this book to develop and enhance the education and training programs you run or support, and to work constructively with your community stakeholders.
Government agencies and not-for-profit groups: use this book to set up your own environmental training programs for specific target audiences, such as people doing on-the-ground environmental work.
Environmental community groups, first (indigenous) peoples with environmental objectives and other environmental and not-for-profit groups: these groups have always played a major role in environmental improvement. They are a great example of the skills and capacity-building that result from well-run environmental initiatives, and the associated flow-on economic benefits.
People in these groups are adult learners: they have left their formal schooling and are working or looking for work. There are case studies of environmental training in some of these sectors in Chapter 3.
 | You don’t have to be an environmental expert to start with. Just start and your expertise will grow over time. |
If you want or need to set up environmental training, you don’t have to be an environmental expert to start with. The people who set up the training that is the major case study for this book were experts at rural soil conservation – but they had to learn about urban soil conservation on big, fast-moving and temporary construction sites, a field where they were novices. They understood soil and water, and in writing their guidelines, learned a great deal about erosion and sediment control on construction sites. But it took probably five or six years before people working with those sites really became experts – and they’re still learning. Real experts never stop learning!
Figure 1 shows how becoming a genuine expert is a personal as well as a professional journey of life-long – and, as Jost Reichsmann says – life-wide, learning. It doesn’t matter where you start – with the right support anyone can become one of the environmental experts that every sector needs.
Focused as it is on work-based performance training, this book is not for school teachers and their pupils – though the partnership principle and other elements of the seven-step model will certainly help teachers make a strong case for introducing, or continuing, school-based environmental education programs.
However, many environmental regulators and not-for-profit groups deliver excellent environmental education programs in schools. If your organisation runs any school programs or if you are aware of any in your locality, ask the people involved if you can interview them about what’s working well and what they’d do differently next time: the findings may be applicable to your training program. And there is much useful research into professional learning and development emerging from schools which people involved in vocational training can learn from.
And, of course, boys love diggers! So using a local erosion and sediment control guideline can be a wonderful way of getting boys interested in class. Boys and girls alike will be intrigued by the physics and mathematics of erosion and sediment control, and the biology of impacts on water bodies of accelerated sedimentation and the benefits of its control. Longer term, this can also help address the critical shortage of engineering and environmental professionals in the workforce.
Figure 1 Becoming an environmental expert in your sector
There is a growing body of environmental resources for teachers of many other subjects, and they can also make good use of information from environmental management and research agencies; many provide curriculum-related material for schools. Some examples are listed in ‘How to find out more’.
We’ll come back to how adults learn and why it’s important to know this in Chapter 7.
I keep waiting for the guillotine to fall on paper-based notebooks, but, thankfully, it has yet to happen.
Ed Bernacki
This book is designed to be used with the free downloadable Action Planner that accompanies it – follow the instructions at the very front of this book to download it.
The Action Planner asks leading questions and provides note sheets and mindmaps that will prompt reflection, research and action for your environmental training