The Green School - Promoting Environmental Stewardship In Students

‘The Green School’ is an education programme for schools initiated by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in association with Tata Steel, to create awareness and sensitize students, teachers, and the community on issues related to the environment. In this article, Neha highlights that this project promotes environmental stewardship in identified schools through classroom and outdoor activities to improve critical, interdisciplinary, and holistic thinking.

- Neha

The Green School partnership between TERI and Tata Steel provides a new and active landscape for schools to work enthusiastically on environment and related issues. The project was formally launched in April 2017 at Joda in Odisha with the following objectives:

Review and assess the current level of environment education in schools and develop a whole school approach for promoting sustainability message in the classrooms

Enhance situational knowledge related to cultural and environment best practices and develop a mechanism for collaborative activities across locations

Promote good practices by sharing the learning with schools and related communities associated with the project.

Being the pilot phase of this programme, the year 2017/18 uniquely targeted students from the middle sections (Classes 6–8) of the select ten schools across Tata Steel operational areas in the states of Jharkhand and Odisha. Students are the best medium to disseminate the message of environmental protection as they can easily share the messages with their parents, community, and the society as a whole for judicious use of the resources.

Various activities, such as pre and post-project need assessments, initiation workshops, hands-on activities, sensitization workshops, capacity building programmes, intra- and inter-school competitions, review of curriculum, teachers training programme, informative resource material, etc., are planned under the programme. So far, the following activities have been successfully completed:

Pre-project need assessment: The pre-project need assessment was done through a survey questionnaire in all the nine schools except one. The survey was conducted with the following objectives: