Reflections on My Guiding Question (SAT 6/10)

A key part of work preparing for my TGC teacher exchange was crafting a guiding question.  This question was supposed to help me frame my experience and to allow me to connect learning back to my classroom.  As an environmental science teacher, my guiding question came to me pretty easily.  I am always trying to find ways to inspire my students to become environmental stewards, so my question for my Ghana travels was “How do educators in Ghana inspire students to care about and connect to the environment?”  Most environmental issues are also global issues, so I was really interested to see how teachers approach this challenge in a country that is very different from my own.  

Early in my trip to Ghana, I took advantage of a long bus ride with our country host, Gideon, to learn more about the environmental issues that impact Ghana.  He told me “An environmentalist in Africa will shed some tears” and we mostly discussed water quality issues.  Later, when I talked with my host teacher, Ray, he expressed concerns about water quality and water access issues, illegal fishing by China, illegal mining practices, and pollution.  Ghanaian students brainstormed a list of environmental problems that they perceived as major issues, the list included bushfires, floods, pollution, deforestation, mining, water quality, and commercial overfishing.  When we visited the American Embassy in Ghana, the diplomats told us to never trust the tap water, and in fact, we were told to only drink bottled water, not the water sold in plastic cubes called “sachets,” as studies showed that even though they are commercially prepared and sold, because a large percentage of them contained fecal coliforms.  I personally witnessed the pollution issue everywhere we went, and I felt the effects of poor air quality, the particulate matter pollution from fires used for cooking and burning trash, as well as transportation in Kumasi was visible and in the “unhealthy” range at least part of the time when I was in Kumasi.  According to USAID global environmental indices, Ghana has poor rankings in areas of water and air quality, climate change, deforestation, climate change vulnerability and mitigation.  

The first school we visited as a TGC group was in a rural fishing village, outside of Accra.  This was an elementary school, the classrooms had crumbling and moldy ceiling tiles, children sat on broken desks, and many students came from extreme poverty.  I had the opportunity to sit down with one of the 5th grade teachers to ask her how environmental science is taught at her school.  She handed me a well-worn book and I was so surprised to see that the book in her hand was a religious text called “Religious and Moral Education.” She explained that at the elementary level, environmentalism was taught as a moral topic.  Sure enough, as I thumbed through the book, I found pages that talked about air pollution, deforestation, water quality, and more as well as chapters about respecting the human body (including advice such as don’t get tattoos or try to lighten your skin).  It was so interesting to me that the main framework for environmental education was religious at this level.  This makes sense though, given the importance of religion in Ghana, where more than one half of the population is Christian, one-fifth is Muslim, and a small portion practice traditional indigenous religion.  Only 5.2% of the population identifies as non-religious.