US$2 million environmental education programme aims to change the nature of teaching over the next three years China's Ministry of Education, the World Wide Fund for Nature and British Petroleum this week launched the third phase of a US$2 million environmental education project aimed at embedding 'education for a sustainable environment' into the mainland's schools. The third phase of the Environmental Educators' Initiative (EEI) programme, which will run from 2005-2007, will focus on integrating the National Environment Education Guidelines, based on the EEI model, into teachers' lesson plans and activities in 500,000 primary and middle schools in China. Alex Marston, communications co-ordinator for WWF education programmes in China, said the new guidelines, issued by the ministry in 2003, would be applied in all schools in China. The aim was to integrate environmental education throughout the school curriculum. 'It's not just about the environment, but about looking at education in a more holistic way,' Mr Marston said. 'This is not just the teacher standing in front of the class, but getting the students involved in taking action themselves.' The key to the success of the programme over the next three years was to find a way to implement it in local areas, he said. It was important to get the local education bureaus on board because the 'real power lies with those bureaus,' he added. Zhu Muju, director of the ministry's Basic Education Department, said the EEI now covered 17 provinces and municipalities, with research centres in 12 teaching universities. More than 1.5 million students had benefited from the programme since its launch in 1997. 'EEI is now entering its most crucial phase,' she said. 'Now is the time to put all the hard work and research of the last eight years into practice.' The WWF said in a statement that with memorisation and repetition currently the predominant teaching method in China, it hoped the new programme would have a significant impact on the mainland's education system. 'Such an approach is intended to have lasting influences and impact, not only on future Education for Sustainable Development programmes in China, but also on the future of China's overall education development,' the statement said. Teachers involved in the programme said it had an impact that went beyond just environmental education. Liu Furong, a teacher at an EEI pilot school in Beijing, said some students in the programme who had in the past got poor grades had demonstrated abilities not highlighted by traditional teaching methods. 'Their academic performance improved a lot as a result of boosted confidence,' she said. The first phase of the programme focused on the integration of professional development, curriculum development and resource development strategies. In its second phase it took advantage of new opportunities for curriculum restructuring in basic education to introduce environmental studies into the mainstream of local primary and secondary schools.
