Note: This blog post is a continuation of part 1 which can be found here.
We continued to work on those two reports over the weekend, finalizing and emailing them to UNESCO on Sunday, one day before the actual day of Holi, which was on Monday. It wasn’t the first nor will it be the last weekend that we worked on a CEE project, but one thing still stands out about this particular weekend: I was truly passionate about the words I was writing and understood the context behind them; I was excited to be proud of something I had worked really hard on. It was a genuinely motivating feeling.
At five months into the AIF Banyan Impact Fellowship, I was walking on solid ground: I understood so much better the scope and details of the projects and policy documents with which we were working; our team had completed other projects and established communication norms amongst ourselves; we had invested a lot of time and energy into the field work and curriculum analysis necessary for these reports.
These two documents I now feel so proud of were the National Pilot Reports for the Greening Education Partnership for India. Basically, UNESCO was developing two guiding documents for schools worldwide as a part of the Greening Education Partnership (GEP). The first is the Green School Quality Standard, which outlines the ways that schools worldwide can become UNESCO-accredited Green Schools, with a goal of 50% schools worldwide achieving this by 2030. The second was the Greening Curriculum Guidance, which is a suggested framework for how schools can teach about climate change, the environment, and related concepts, with recommended concepts organized into three subject domains by age group — a very extensive document and the first of its kind to be launched on a global level. The purpose of our two reports was to put forward ways to make the final documents more feasible and applicable for schools in India, and include feedback and suggestions for improvement from Indian stakeholders. In addition to India, UNESCO also involved education organizations in Algeria, Zimbabwe, Bahrain, Eswatini, Albania, Jordan and more to study and report on the same, to ensure that the final document would be truly globally applicable.
What all this meant for the Climate Change group at CEE was that we had two tasks:
- Survey teachers and school officials about the ~150 actions in the Green School Quality Standard to see how feasible the actions are in their schools.
- Compare the 136 key ideas about climate, environment, and sustainability in the Greening Curriculum Guidance to the Indian curriculum to see whether and where the key ideas were covered, and which concepts were present in the Indian curriculum which could be suggested for inclusion.
These two reports took me to various schools around Gujarat and into the depths of the NCERT textbooks from 1st to 12th standard. I learned that one of the challenges for one rural school in working toward these actions was the bureaucracy of mandates or lack thereof from the government education bodies, another challenge was that monkeys had dismantled the solar panels installed on the roof. I loved reading the NCERT 1st Std English textbook’s story of “Murali’s Mango”, where characters grow and enjoy food from their own backyard, a serendipitous example of many of the Greening Curriculum Guidance suggestions about food, land, and family and community aspects of sustainability.
I came to know that the Indian curriculum covering environmental topics has its gaps but also had aspects that the GEP guidance did not have, such as an equity and gender lens regarding climate issues, particularly notable in younger grades. In 3rd Std Environmental Studies, Chapter 3 “Water O’ Water” the teacher’s notes says: “In many places, certain people are not allowed to take water from the common source. It is important to discuss this so that children are sensitised towards issues like discrimination.” Additionally, in Chapter 20 of the same Environmental Studies textbook, titled “Drop By Drop”, the textbook teacher’s notes read: “In the above visual, consciously defined gender roles of women have been shown (fetching water). Discuss this issue in the class to remove gender discrimination.” It was a fascinating way to get to know a part of India at a much deeper level, and to be a part of the process of having that part of India be known to more of the world.
Fast forward three months to June, when UNESCO globally launched the two guiding documents on a webinar that the CEE team was invited to join. Before the launch, we hadn’t seen the new documents or heard about how India’s reports were specifically incorporated, so we pulled the UNESDOC links up while the meeting was on to see what had changed since March, when we gave our analysis and feedback from India. What I did not expect to see was on page 6: our entire teams’ names in the Acknowledgements on the sixth page of the report. We were ecstatic — imagine some picture perfect example to show management the importance of giving someone their flowers.
I am honored to have been able to write these reports as a part of the CEE team, and grateful that we were acknowledged for our hard work. It was a unique experience of feeling passion and pride in one’s own work, a feeling I find myself chasing now. I just hope that in the future that feeling is the only thing I’m chasing, and not any more trains!
Curious about the reports? Read more about the Greening Education Partnership on their website and see how the two guidance documents turned out — GEP Greening School Quality Standard and GEP Greening Curriculum Guidance — on UNESDOC.
