Document Actions
Key Characteristic 4 -- Action Orientation
Environmental education resources should promote civic responsibility, encouraging learners to use their knowledge, personal skills, and assessments of environmental problems and issues as a basis for environmental problem solving and action.
Guideline 4.1: Sense of personal stake and responsibility.
Resources should help learners to examine the possible consequences of their behaviors on the environment and evaluate choices they can make which may help resolve environmental issues.
What to look for:
- Resources promote intergenerational and global responsibility, linking historical and current actions with future and distant consequences.
- Learners are provided with opportunities to reflect on the effects of their actions and to sort out their opinions about what, if anything, they should do differently.
- Resources contain examples of people of different ages, races, genders, cultures, and education and income levels who have made a difference by taking responsible action.
- Resources convey the idea that many individual actions have cumulative effects, both in creating and addressing environmental issues.
Guideline 4.2: Self-efficacy.
Resources should aim to strengthen learners' perception of their ability to influence the outcome of a situation.
What to look for:
- Resources challenge learners to apply their thinking and act on their conclusions.
- Resources include a variety of individual and community strategies for citizen involvement and provide learners with opportunities to practice these strategies through projects they generate individually in their school or in the larger community.
- There are examples of successful individual and collective actions. Learners are encouraged to examine what made these actions successful. (Where actions were not successful, students are encouraged to examine the reasons for failure.)
- Learners are encouraged to share and celebrate the results of their actions with peers and other interested people.