ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES IN INDIA AND CONSERVATION EDUCATION AT JUDSON UNIVERSITY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TWO ELEMENTARY EDUCATION CURRICULA

By the date of this conference, I should be back in the US after a Fulbright Fellowship term of six months at the Indira Gandhi Open University (IGNOU) in Delhi, India. IGNOU’s School of Education provides teacher training through Open and Distance Education (ODE) mode. My project was to help the School with the creation of online teaching materials using virtual teaching platforms such as the Blackboard, Moodle, etc, in Science Education, and to prepare resource manuals for K-12 Science education. I also organized and led several teaching workshops for schoolteachers in the best practices of curriculum planning. One such workshop has been designed specifically for the elementary school teachers in the teaching of Environmental Studies.

Indian school curriculum blends sciences and social sciences for elementary students. Their teachers train accordingly, with their own curriculum designed to develop growing “environmental care and concern” in the student.

At Judson University, in the Elementary Education Program has a required course in “Conservation Education”, which is essentially an Environmental Studies Curriculum. After a week-long intense, experiential learning in Environmental education, students prepare and teach a Social Studies unit in an elementary classroom. Here again, there is a Science-Social Sciences connection.

I propose to do a comparative analysis of the IGNOU and Judson University curricula for Environmental Education for elementary training and thus provide fresh ideas for pre-service and in-service training for Earth/Environmental Science teaching and learning.