Ralph Jeffrey, inspired by a book by De Wolfe written in 1964 on Italian towns, was one of the first to advocate a formal system of environmental appraisal to stimulate community participation in local planning. He advocated that this should start with local people making a 'visual enquiry' to establish the local 'spirit of the place' by posing leading questions centred on
its spaces;
its decoration;
its light
and its buildings.
However, it was not until the 1980s that attempts were made to formalise local environmental appraisal. In 1987, based on several hundred village appraisals in England, 'Action for Communities in Rural Areas (ACRE)' and 'Common Ground', launched a national promotion funded by the Countryside and Rural Development Commissions. This reached Wales in 1988 under the name 'Jigsaw', with the aim of increasing the awareness of local communities in the Principality of issues such as local housing, planning, ecology, culture and heritage. 'Jigsaw' was based on a local questionnaire designed to make a 'community appraisal', and a 'local map'. The appraisal is a stock-taking of a village, town, or community; its people, its services, facilities, and environment, how it has changed, what is important, what needs improving, and what is lacking. The map is a representation of local feeling about a place, its culture, history, and environment; in other words, its distinctive character seen through the eyes of local people. It can be a map in the conventional sense, but there are many other imaginative ways of presenting what is really a community knowledge design. Furthermore, this knowledge design does not have to be assembled all at once. It makes organisation sense and often meets the financial realities to take up each major element of the environment in separate thematic campaigns; i.e. this year might concentrate on 'infrastructure', next year on 'trees', and the year after on 'water' or 'local history'. This emphasises an essential requirement of continuity. Appraisals are hardly ever embedded in the community and once the survey has been completed, the energies evaporate, and the report ticked off and put on the shelf.
The value of a Jigsaw campaign is to produce a corporate identity to the
community. This means bringing important elements of the community to a common point of focus, which of necessity will involve the delivery of the necessary education, and training to produce a corporate identity.
The three main factors limiting the involvement of communities in environmental appraisal, and which require funding a permanent organisation within the community, are:-
the difficulty of making and sustaining links that have to be established between a relatively small voluntary body, and the permanent organisations providing help, contacts, resources and detailed information;
the lack of knowledge and confidence in establishing procedures for local volunteers to participate and act in environmental appraisal schemes;
the need for data handling systems associated with a permanent community 'office' (to serve the requirements for typing, filing, and telecommunications), to elicit, manage and monitor actions arising from the appraisal.
the difficulty of carrying out regular repeat surveys and making and sustaining external links;
who represents 'the community'? Even the smallest village will have at least two adult groupings with legitimate claims.
The original booklet to back the local Welsh Jigsaw campaign, from which a community gets its guidelines to set up a village appraisal, presented the volunteers with an awesome list of the expert skills and contacts they will probably need.
To make their appraisal it says they will require the help of professionals and experts such as photographers, clergy, doctors, health visitors, designers, local historians, the local school and its children, and policy and planning officers.
To fund their activities they have to persuade the local community council to raise a special rate. They have to make sponsorship requests to local businesses, government agencies and trusts for grants to maintain their initiative and carry out their action plans for years to come. Although the County Voluntary Council was indicated as the community's "first point of contact which allows you to plug into the system", the 'Jigsaw' guide listed 14 regional and national contacts as sources of help, from the "Countryside Commission" to "UK 2000".
A particular problem here is that Jigsaw is not the only initiative aimed at linking communities and environment in Wales. At that time, local environmental improvement grants were provided independently by UK 2000 Cymru, and the Prince of Wales' Committee. UK 2000 Wales also gave grants and provided support training, and was a focus for all voluntary environmental groups in Wales. In South Wales, Gwent Community Design operated a questionnaire system, with follow up workshops, and the Welsh Natural Economy Research Unit in the National Museum of Wales supported the establishment of community action groups based on a computer loan scheme, and helped with follow-up sponsorships, to buy a computer 'office' for the community.
This brief account of the complex world of local environmental action indicates the importance of establishing a firm physical/secretarial base for the community operations which may be described as a community office.
A common theme of discussion throughout the history of environmental appraisal has been a failure of our schools to educate children to participate in local planning and the community politics that drive it. Young people emerge from school unaware of the imperatives governing their local environment and the possibility of changing them; most, therefore, although familiar with global environmental issues, have no confidence in their own ability to make local environmental improvements for the benefit of themselves or others.
Colin and Mog Ball in the mid 70s were the first to champion a community approach to environmental education. They put it this way "Whatever we call home, comely cottage or high-rise flat, we live these days in a built environment. Yet although the fields, streets, buildings where we live and work, and even the very air we breathe, are all made by PEOPLE, they have an iron grip on OUR actions. They are the imperatives which define the scope of our lives. Maybe we are just kidding ourselves when we say that we make and shape our environment: for most of us it is the environment which shapes us. This results in the paradox that, as adults, we are controlled, dominated and harassed by the very environment people have created".
Accordingly, the community design is "concerned with highlighting the imperatives which limit our lives and the lives of other people, within the small community round about. It is a programme TO ENCOURAGE INDIVIDUALS TO DESIGN THEIR OWN KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM that delineates the places people have made, and the way they and others respond to them".
A community design metaphor, i.e. 'jigsaw', 'mosaic' 'community map', or 'learning frame', is a conceptual knowledge system produced by the members of the community. It is based on the gathering of local data and information. This is then structured to provide knowledge to encourage 'helping-relationships' between people. In particular, it enables young people, growing up into an adult-made world, to see that it is necessary and possible to change that world. The design starts from the appearance of a local need for environmental knowledge or know-how to back action for improvements. It is rooted in the community. The aim is to create a depth of understanding and awareness of their community in individuals, essentially on a personal (and probably emotional) level. This should broaden personal understanding of environmental concerns and encourage altruism.
It is in the above context the 'Schools in Communities Agenda 21 Network' emerged. It rapidly developed in the fertile no-mans land of education for community participation as a 'curriculum friendly' procedure to make community designs, and create local management plans to soften the environmental impact of local economic development.
SCAN was invented in 1995, within the Dyfed teacher's advisory service, to help schools carry out neighbourhood quality of life surveys and biological monitoring. It germinated from a working part set up jointly by the Dyfed County Council's educationalists, and the Countryside Council for Wales, to develop, test and launch an interactive environmental road show, named DAEARTH (Earth Watch). DAEARTH was created in the Dyfed teacher's resource centre at St Clears, with the objective of providing resources and training for Dyfed's schools, and encouraging them to take up the environmental curriculum recommended, but seldom implemented, by the National Curriculum guidelines. SCAN emerged from the methodologies of the Welsh community appraisal campaign (Jigso), and Dyfed County Council's long-standing commitment to stimulate and support cross-curricular work in local schools. A recent St Clears production at the time was 'The Haven', a cross curricular teaching pack about 'place', for the National Curriculum years 1 to 9, which set out educational advantages of concentrating on the school's local patch.
The actual starter stimulus was the children's Agenda 21, published in 1994 by Peace Child International (Rescue Mission Planet Earth). The youth group that produced Rescue Mission made several suggestions as the way children could open communication channels with local politicians and planners. 'SCAN' (originally entitled 'Linking Through Landscapes') is a practical way forward.
The aim of SCAN is to encourage children to produce local environmental management plans to help their communities develop the local Agenda 21. These plans quantify local problems, define what should be done, identify what the school should do, and say what others, in and around the community should do.
The main objective is to help schools define a local picture by:-
finding environmental problems, issues and challenges - (e.g. crime, homelessness, transport, health, wildlife, recreation);
measuring them;
doing something about them.
A wider view may then be developed by:-
finding out what the local authority is doing to help its environment;
telling the Council what the school is doing to help;
discovering how things used to be in the community;
seeing the total picture across the curriculum.
SCAN is complementary to other national educational initiatives currently being promoted in the arena of sustainable development, and local environmental education; such as 'Rescue Mission Planet Earth', 'Eco-Schools', and Learning Through Landscapes". It has been enthusiastically received by local authorities, schools advisors, examiners, teachers, students, environmental agencies and business.
SCAN is unique in its objectives to:
involve schools in the workings of local government;
create a depth of understanding and awareness of how their community is governed;
develop a national network of councils to share ideas about how to involve schools in the Local Agenda 21.
SCAN:-
builds upon the work of two national campaigns 'Jigso' (Wales) and 'Enviroscope' (England), which promote environmental awareness at community/family level;
is driven by teachers who have developed successful classroom exemplars; - is supported by their advisors and local authorities;
harnesses the national curriculum to the workings of local government and its plans for sustainable development emanating from the Rio environment summit;
provides a stimulus for teachers to use the local environment and its problems and issues, as a challenging educational resource;
makes what schools already do within the National Curriculum more meaningful and, although not prescriptive, provides a standard IT structure for schools to communicate their work, plans and feelings about the future of their community to local government;
models best practice in environmental management to help schools make and operate action plans for local improvements in the context of the Local Agenda 21.
enables people to understand the interdependence of all life on this planet and the repercussions that their actions and decisions may have both now and in the future on biological resources, globally and locally;
increases people's awareness of the economic, political, social, cultural, technological and environmental forces which foster or destroy biodiversity;
develops peoples awareness, competence, attitudes, and values, enabling them to be effectively involved in sustainable development at local national, and international levels;
helps people to work towards a more equitable and sustainable future, particularly through the integration of environmental and economic decision making.
The current work programme involves:-
encouraging teachers to produce key stage exemplar packs;
carrying out information/training visits to schools, and groups of schools, to develop and bolster a county-wide network with their supporters;
training local evangelists, either in individual schools, or as part of the local teacher-supply service, to maintain and spread SCAN membership within the authority;
working with local authorities to produce educational materials and information routes that encourage schools to interact with local government as a learning experience.
Each school is networked by :-
providing an information pack on standard methods, compatible with national curriculum objectives, for reporting on the local quality of urban and rural life in the spirit of Rio;
demonstrating how to derive local environmental management plans from the data;
defining routes to channel their concerns to their local authority;
helping the implementation of projects for environmental/social improvements; - establishing a central database of survey data, management plans, achievements, and information on the local Agenda 21, and Biodiversity action plans open to all schools and their local authorities;
training local support workers who will respond to requests from schools to develop and maintain the county/ district network;
registering the schools in a national/European network, and collect nominal membership fees;
spreading best practice between schools in 'management education' at the community/local government interface.
In summary SCAN makes what teachers already do for the national curriculum more interesting to pupils, more relevant to local problems, and more challenging in that it prompts youth to management in the real world. In this way it is possible for a school to realise the idea of a 'citizens environmental network' by rooting an environmental information system within the community, and working through the Schools In Communities Agenda 21 Network to spread the ripples.
SCAN protocols encourage the study of the environmental ethos and operations of countryside management as a constantly developing holistic interplay between environment and local economic planning. This knowledge system is set apart from schools. On the one hand it resides in the science and practice of nature conservation, and, on the other, it is locked into the local planning department, and the policies of the elected representatives SCAN fills this gap by providing a teacher training package, and classroom resources, which focus on the duties and grass roots tasks of site managers, and planners, and their connections with local government and the communities they serve. Here, SCAN encourages attitudes and qualities necessary for everyone growing up in a world dominated by concerns about the environment, and who eventually, as voting citizens, will have to take a stand on the local and national problems, issues, and challenges of world development.
Schools who are members of SCAN are finding ways to delineate curriculum objectives which bear on the Government's plans for sustainable development. A start can be made with the school community by asking which of its activities are unsustainable. This may be followed by surveys of community life, business, local services, and the biodiversity of parks and gardens.
Understanding the problems arising from economic policy requires participation in the local planning process. The Local Agenda 21 is about balancing management of the environment to support jobs and on the one hand, and to preserve community services and enhance local biodiversity, on the other. A school taking part in Community SCAN enters this planning arena, interacting with families and communities which depend on the planning process to maintain jobs and services in equilibrium with nature (Fig 3.02).
Environmental management plans saying what the school can do, and what others should do, are the civic outcome of this interaction. These can be passed on to local government, business and the environmental agencies.
A succession of pupils taking up the same approach from year to year ensures that a local checking and monitoring system remains in place. The year to year progression also provides an interactive environment for learning how local government works, and how citizens can participate.
Computers are tools which allow us to overcome our inherent limitations to storing and articulating large amounts of information, and thinking about how to manage systems. Schools software is available for carrying out environmental surveys. Results can be communicated in a variety of IT formats. SCAN brings IT to bear across the curriculum to deal with real information of local importance. Further, local data can be shared with others, and added to a national database, for comparisons to be made with other communities.
The importance of computers in providing explanations and predictions about dynamic phenomena makes them of fundamental importance to teach people about environmental management. Learners have two basic approaches, they can either use explanations provided by others, or seek to develop explanations for themselves. The former produces some level of understanding quickly. The latter has the potential for producing a deeper and more lasting understanding by 'ownership of knowledge' through 'discovery'. Preparing a management plan to deal with school litter, or sustain a patch of wild flowers, are, again, real applications of IT, which give ownership of knowledge and require thinking about the system of resources of which the plan is only one component. A computer database makes it easier to trace dynamic behaviour patterns of the whole system, and predict effects of management on its future condition. By encouraging the creation of school environmental management plans SCAN promotes systems thinking. Finally, computers can make cross-curricular learning resources about environmental management easier to use if packaged as self-indexing files (electronic books and documents). SCAN provides backup of this type.
The core of the famous carnival in Rio de Janeiro is a twelve-hour-long procession of song, dance and street theatre. One troop of players after another presents its piece. Usually, the piece is a social comment dramatised through music and dance. The processions are not spontaneous. Preparing them as well as performing in them are important parts of Brazilian life. Every group prepares separately- and competitively-in its own learning environment, which is called a 'samba school'. These are not schools as we know them: they are social clubs with memberships that may range from a few to many hundreds. Each club owns a building, a place for dancing and getting together. Members of a samba school go there most weekend evenings to dance, to drink, to meet their friends. As they dance everyone is learning and teaching as well as dancing. Even the stars are there to learn their difficult parts. There is a great sense of social cohesion, a sense of belonging to a group, which is part of a community of groups, and a sense of common purpose.
The samba school* represents a set of attributes that every learning environment should, and could, have. Learning is not separate from reality. The dance samba has a social purpose and learning is integrated into the school for this purpose. Novice is not separated from expert, and the experts are also learning.
SCAN is also a 'school' for learning with a purpose. By producing a small environmental management plan a class can see what is involved in planning to put things right.
Tasks can be separated into those that can be tackled by pupils and those that are the responsibility of others. Year to year monitoring provides a check that things get done. It is an educational innovation that is sensitive to what is happening in the surrounding culture; the flow of ideas from community to school is not a one-way street, and there are opportunities for youth to get together with others engaged in similar activities.
Knowledge being learned by questioning the local environment is continuous with world culture. There is a lot to talk about and there are important things young people can do. In a democratic society everyone has the right to have views. and make them known. Our elected leaders need to know our opinions if they are to act on our behalf. Such activities are likely to be most effective if our opinions are well informed, and channelled through the Local Agenda 21. Politicians are also accountable to us, and we can check up on their actions, which should emerge as action plans for sustainable development and biodiversity in the Local Agenda 21.
* The samba school was chosen as an educational metaphor by Seymour Papert to promote educational methods that do not need continuous support once they take root in an actively growing mind.
SCAN has a bearing on all subjects, but is particularly important in presenting the local environment as an educational resource for geography, biology and cross-curricular environmental education.
The SCAN methods of enquiry meet most of the study requirements of geography at all levels. The links develop from first two Key Stages where SCAN meets most of the curriculum targets. These requirements are aimed at giving pupils opportunities to express their own views about places and environments. Additionally, the SCAN theme of 'sustaining local biodiversity' can link geography and science through objectives which require studying the ways in the local environment is managed to protect living things.
For each place, and its features, the curriculum states that the enquiries should be based on pupils asking What is it?: Where is it?: What is it like?: How did it get like this?. SCAN focuses the answers on the local Agenda 21 as a route to get action about things that concern them.
The geography syllabus says pupils should develop their knowledge, by describing and comparing their own locality, and its features, with two other places, one of which should be an economically developing country. Two schools communicating the results of SCAN surveys on quality of life and biodiversity can generate a structured dialogue about sustainable development.
SCAN surveys satisfy the syllabus requirements that pupils should:-
collect and record information;
communicate information and ideas;
identify and name physical and human features of the locality; - recognise the features that give the places their character;
express views on the attractive and unattractive features of the locality; - investigate how land and buildings are used;
identify similarities and differences between localities by studying landscape, weather, transport, jobs;
identify differences between local environments that affect which animals and plants are found there. These differences, which influence local biodiversity, can be studied by:-
describing and grouping rocks and soils on the basis of their characteristics;
understanding the water cycle, and the part played by evaporation and condensation;
assigning locally occurring animals and plants to groups using keys,
discovering how animals and plants in two different habitats are suited to their environment, and recognise that the idea of evolution provides an explanation.
From these general enquiries, SCAN supports more detailed study of one of the following three statutory themes, each of which is central to understanding sustainable development and biodiversity.
Weather- Pupils should observe, describe and record a range of weather conditions of the local area and investigate the effects of weather on themselves and their surroundings.
Jobs- Pupils should identify some of the jobs done by adults who provide goods and services for the community, and investigate why people make journeys, and where people in the community go to obtain goods and services
Quality of environment- Pupils should express views on the attractive and unattractive features of the environment and investigate activities which have changed the environment and consider ways in which they can improve their environment.
The curriculum recommends comparative enquiries between schools so that pupils become aware of places beyond their own local area. In particular, SCAN's investigative work could develop to compare:
climatic conditions in other parts of the world;
issues that show how conflicts can arise over the use of land and that different people have different views;
how people look after and manage the environment to protect living things.
SCAN's philosophy is that environmental education is more about facing up to cross-curricular issues of economic development and consumerism, than gaining detailed knowledge in core subjects about how the environment works. It is a practical expression of the UK non-statutory guidance on environmental education, and highlights eight out of the ten areas recommended to develop knowledge with understanding. These areas deal with human impact, the need for environmental legislation, planning and local environmental management.
In stressing the importance of teaching about environmental management, SCAN falls in with government guidelines to create an environmental curriculum. In particular, it encourages teachers to develop knowledge and understanding in the following areas where management impinges on families and communities :-
local, national and international legislative controls;
how policies and decisions are made about the environment;
the environmental inter-dependence of individuals groups, communities and nations.
how human lives and livelihoods are dependent on the environment; - the conflicts which can arise about environmental issues;
how the environment has been affected by past management;
the importance of planning, design and aesthetic considerations;
the importance of effective management to protect and manage the environment;
the impact of human activities on the environment;
different environments, both past and present.
SCAN follows government guidelines by encouraging pupils to express the following attitudes and personal qualities which are important in taking a personal view on environmental issues:
appreciation of, and care and concern for, the environment and other living things;
independence of thought on environmental issues;
a respect for the beliefs and opinions of others;
a respect for evidence and rational argument;
tolerance and open-mindedness.
Regarding topic teaching, SCAN stimulates and supports environmental enquiry within all curriculum topics recommended to develop basic knowledge and understanding of the environment, and which are directly related to local issues of economic development.
These topics are:-
people and their communities;
materials and resources including energy;
buildings, industrialisation and waste;
water;
plants and animals;
oils rocks and minerals;
climate.
By focusing on the local Agenda 21, SCAN links these topics to form a web for a cross-curricular environmental curriculum exemplified in the local natural economy. This structure defines the flows of natural resources into developing communities, and the adverse impact of unchecked development on the availability of these resources. The knowledge navigation system recognises that local educators have a duel responsibility to integrate environmental and economic aims.
In relation to this scheme, SCAN encourages direct involvement with local management of 'development' and 'nature', to conserve and improve landscape and habitats, to protection land and sea from destructive developments, and to reduce the impact of consumerism on the global climate.
At a practical level SCAN is a vehicle to implement long-standing national curriculum recommendations that the neighbourhood should be used as a resource for the development of skills through direct experience, enquiry and investigation.
SCAN's practical methods encourage values, attitudes and positive management concerned with:-
finding ways of ensuring caring use of the environment, now and in the future;
finding solutions to environmental problems, taking into account the fact that there are conflicting interests and different cultural perspectives;
informing the choices which have to be made.
SCAN's emphasis on the production and operation of local environmental management plans is a unifying practical thread to follow curriculum guidelines for environmental education. The school's Agenda 21 methods for backing action provide routes from classroom to environmental management, which have been mapped successfully by teachers. These methods can lead to concerted management to tackle the problems, issues and challenges of local development, and improve the local quality of life. School-produced environmental management plans, demonstrate the problems, state what should be done, 'projectise' what the school can manage, and tell the local elected representatives, and their Agenda 21 planners, what they should do. Repeat surveys incorporated into a school's long-term teaching plan check things get done.
Teachers who are already participating in Community SCAN have delineated routes from principles of subjects within the syllabus to their expression in the neighbourhood. The use of the environment as a curriculum resource may be directed to study the environmental relationships of local organisations, such as businesses and conservation bodies, as examples of environmental management in action. Here the professional model is the UK Conservation Management System (CMS), which is widely used by government agencies and voluntary organisations for managing nature sites.
Guidance in how to produce and manage action plans for school/community projects is available at http://www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/nww/index.html