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BY YINGJIA WANG

In print | Published February 7, 2008

Looking to expand their reach outside of the Swarthmore community, four Earthlust members recently began leading environmental enrichment sessions at Wallingford Elementary School. Kavita Hardy ’08, Ambar La Forgia ’11, Greta Pittenger ’10 and Ashley Werner ’08 spend one hour a week at the school teaching third graders a curriculum based on environmental issues.

According to Werner, the idea for the environmental sessions was born when senior Elisha Ann ’08 was student teaching at WES last semester.

The fourth grade students in Ann’s class read a Time for Kids article about sustainability and the Arctic Circle, and several students expressed interest in further exploring the issue of sustainability.

“Personally, I got really invested in the issues … lo and behold, a few girls from another fourth grade class, with the support of Debbie Wile (the enrichment teacher), approached our class with their interest in forming a Global Warming Group. The Global Warming Group would specifically think of ways to combat global warming in the school, and met every Friday during lunch. A group of fourth grade students sacrificed their lunch time (and recess) to gather in the enrichment room, eat their food and talk about the issues and how to combat them,” Ann said in an e-mail.

Ann remained involved with the group, but did not have the time to be as active a member as she felt they deserved.

“I wanted to support the group in anyway possible, and since my time was busy with teaching, I thought about inviting Earthlust to talk to the group. I asked a few students and the enrichment teacher, Debbie Wile, how they felt about this, and they seemed to like the idea … I think it’s history from there,” Ann said in an e-mail.

Ann connected Pittenger and Werner with WES, whose administrators asked the Earthlust members to work with the school within the framework of its official third grade enrichment program.

This program, which engages all third grade students at WES for an hour every Friday, exists in the form of two six week long sessions. According to WES Enrichment Teacher Debbie Wile, the program allows students to pick from a wide array of classes. Aside from the environmental class, the options for this session also include learning about the elections, scrap booking, songwriting, astronomy, theater, card making and experimenting with hot and cold, which happens to be led by Swarthmore professor Michael Brown.

According to Wile, the enrichment program includes a total of approximately 88 students. Eleven of those students are enrolled in the environmental session, Hardy said. Wile explained that WES chose to utilize this particular model of enrichment for its third graders due to the special circumstances surrounding that age and grade.

“Third grade is an absolutely magical year in which the students are interested in absolutely anything and everything. By the time they’re in fourth grade, the curriculum gets much more inflexible, so finding time to do it is difficult. And before [third grade], they don’t have the skills to do it,” Wile said.

So far, the school has only held one of the six total sessions. During this first session, the Swarthmore group gauged their students’ interests and prior knowledge.

“The kids were already passionate about the environment, and they already knew so much. They really knew so much more than we thought,” La Forgia said. “In developing our lesson plan for the next session, we upped it up a bit. They surprisingly wanted to know more facts and scientific stuff, which we didn’t expect for third graders.”

La Forgia said that the group’s goals for the class include showing their students the implications of global warming and explaining to them how they personally can affect global warming. While the students commonly think of the pollution caused by cars as a major factor in global warming, they do not easily consider the effects of their own actions, such as keeping the television on or hot water running for too long, La Forgia said. “We wanted to make it more personal,” La Forgia said.

Werner also said that the group wanted the students to understand water issues and the international scope of environmental concerns.

As for the structure of the curriculum, Werner describes it as an interactive one.

“We’re trying to bring the lesson down to something that they can understand, and not overwhelm them. We’re asking them what they already know and adding on it in knowledge. We also want it to be a solution-based kind of curriculum by asking them what they think the solutions are and then bringing in things that we can all use in our lives to help,” Werner said.

La Forgia and Hardy say that the group’s most significant difficulties arise with encouraging all 11 students to talk and with scaling the curriculum down for a six-session program.

“Our biggest difficulty is with making the curriculum. There are so many ideas we want to introduce,” Hardy said. “We only have six sessions to convey what makes the environment important. It’s such a broad topic that having to narrow it down to what we feel are the most interesting and important things is difficult. We also have to consider on what level they can relate to it.”

The Earthlust members’ reasons for their involvement with the environmental enrichment class lie in their desire to incite activism in young students.

“I’ve just really been craving working with children in particular. I think it’s really critical that we teach our children right now what’s going on and the ways that we’re really related to the environment. If we take care of the environment, it’s something that we have. I’ve been working on projects here with the administration and students our age, and in college you just don’t get as much age diversity,” Werner said.

“We want to make environmentalism something that people of all ages can engage in. It’s not just something you do as a college activist, it’s not something that just politicians do and it’s not something you do when you have a house and pay an electricity bill. It’s something you can do anytime,” Hardy said.

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