“Education is not about filling with water, it’s about lighting a fire”, an elegant turn of phrase from Flora, one of the team members and presenters of the GECKO programme. She was describing to me her motivation for doing what she does: educating, but more importantly inspiring the high school students of China to care for their environment.
Our mission for the day: to convert 100 students from Chongming Xinguang Middle School, located on an island just off Shanghai, into enthusiastic green ambassadors!
According to Winnie, another of the GECKO team in action on this bright blue November day, “We’d like the children to take away green knowledge, but more importantly we want them to share the knowledge that they’ve learned with their friends and their family. Protecting the environment is important to everyone, especially for children to understand because they are the next generation of China, so it is even more important for them to learn about these things.”
As the GECKO crew prepared their materials, and the students assembled in the large classroom, I was keen to observe how they would react to a group of strangers dropping in for the day to talk about caring for the environment. There was was a nervous anticipation, and shy looks from the students as the multinational presenters introduced themselves… complete with a multilingual renditon of the French children’s classic “Frère Jacques”, sung in Slovenian, German and booming Canadian English… and this was returned in kind by the students, singing the same tune in Mandarin. Well, that was the ice broken, then!
It was then down to business, with the energetic GECKO presenters delivering their curriculum to a very enthusiastic and receptive class. Among the highlights were: a quiz on environmental knowledge, with the students guesstimating the size of accumulated rubbish in the Pacific Ocean, while learning that the air-conditioners and refridgerators are the most energy intensive home appliances; a multimedia retelling of the Easter Island story, and the collapse of societies that don’t respect the productive capacity of their environment; and various games to illustrate important lessons on sustainability.
By the end of the long afternoon session, the children were still brimming with enthusiasm, and surrounded all of us for photos and autographs! It struck me that this was no ordinary classroom experience – the GECKO crew had managed to deeply engage the students and, through their own passion for the subject and quality of the teaching materials, create a lasting impression on these fertile minds. Ms Li, the school’s English teacher, observed of the days activities, “I think it is very useful and it can enrich the students’ knowledge, and it can help the students realise that protecting the environment is very important.”
All at GECKO are realistic that while all of the students enjoyed the day, only some will walk away and put their newly-acquired knowledge into action. “It can be frustrating when people don’t get it”, according to Tom, another of the enthusiastic team members. But clearly undeterred, “You look forward to getting up in the morning and doing this work. It’s really meaningful, it’s really fun and I’m really motivated to do it. Our work will be done when the GECKO programme is taught in every high school in China!”
So did we succeed in our mission? Well, perhaps not all 100 students will change their behaviour to become more environmentally-aware… but being there on the ground and in the classroom, it was clear to me that the sparks of inspiration had been ignited. And with a little fanning, some of those bright sparks will catch and the “fire” of environmental consciousness will take hold in the lives of a few more future citizens, parents and leaders.
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