Content area
Full Text
Pollution of the Fox River, which flows out of Wisconsin south through the town of St. Charles, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, and eventually feeds into the Illinois River at Ottawa, Illinois, is an environmental issue that requires scrutiny and investigation. This problem received significant attention from teachers at St. Charles North High School, and they wanted to develop curricular experiences for students to investigate and find solutions to this issue. Improving student learning in all areas of science and technology became a central focus for North High School educators, and to do this, teachers consulted a model of environmental education and advocacy developed by William Stapp, a pioneer, visionary, consultant, and reformer in this discipline.
The environmental education movement, which started in the mid 1960's, is based on two basic activities. They are action research, in which environmental topics of study are investigated and information is gathered concerning these issues, and problem-solving, in which "students, teachers, and citizens devise actions to raise the quality of their environment" (Mitchell and Stapp 1991, p. 4). The environmental education movement arose from a perceived need by environmental educators and advocates to educate people about environmental conservation and sustainability of the earth's natural resources. In the mid 19 60's the rate of population growth throughout the world and the overuse and pollution of the land, air, and water became major environmental issues. The potential impacts of natural resource quality, consumption, and use on future generations of people caused many to infer that, unless environmental education became a priority in people's lives, the earth's ability to sustain its global population would decline in dramatic fashion (Mitchell and Stapp 1991, p. 202). One of the architects of what is known today as environmental education was William Stapp.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence that William Stapp had on the environmental education movement. Stapp inspired people to become involved in educating the public about environmental issues of conservation and sustainability (Simmons 2001, p. 1). Environmental education scholars wrote about Stapp's definition of environmental education, coalitions he started, seminal documents he published, and his involvement with organizations like the United Nations. Environmental educators laud Stapp's individual accomplishments, but the personal, local, regional, national, and global impact...