Vladimir, 23-27 June 1997

 

Since 1995 the non-profit organization Green Cross Russia has been conducting an annual conference on environmental education. The conferences are organized logically according to a four-year schedule; during this period the entire spectrum of environmental education will be covered, beginning with pre-school programs and ending with environmental education of the adult population. The first conference took place in Moscow. It attracted highly qualified specialists, teachers and educators of the pre-school and early elementary school years. The following year, at the Tula conference dedicated

to environmental education in secondary schools, and particularly in the higher grades (forms), more than 200 participants came from the largest cities in Russia, Udmurtia, Belarus, Sweden, and Switzerland. This year's conference in Vladimir attracted guests and participants from America, the Czech Republic, Armenia and Kazakhstan. It was dedicated to environmental education (EE) in universities, and its goal was to promote discussion of the methodological problems in this sphere, exchange of information between scientists, specialist-practitioners, and representatives of social organizations, and distribution of the most modern achievements and scientific recommendations.

At the conference, professors of the leading institutions of higher education in Russia repeatedly brought up the problem of the loss of narrow specialization in technical universities. Now Russian universities are leaning increasingly toward broader specialization, many of which are environmentally oriented. The Education and Methodology Association has introduced, in accordance with developed programs, such specialization as "Ecology and Nature Use" for traditional universities and "The Safety of Vital Life Activities" for the nation's technical schools. Along with the general state system of a five-year undergraduate degree, a three-tier system of higher education is developing: four years--bachelor; five years--specialist; six years--master. In the opinion of the participants of the conference, such a system could become nation-wide. Within the framework of the conference, the Council for Ecological Specialization of the Education and Methodology Association approved the completed standard for the degree of baccalaureate in "Ecology and Nature Use." In addition, along these curricular lines in the very near future an obligatory course entitled "Geo-informational Systems" will be introduced in universities.

 

Specialized environmental training for school teachers is of principal importance in continuous ecological education today. During the work of the section on "The Problem of Teacher Training," it was noted that young teachers in regional schools, which often call themselves noosphere schools, simply do not know how to teach ecology, and for that reason children frequently do not develop a respect for the subject. Here the deciding word belongs to teacher-training universities, the task of which is to provide a stimulus to today's student to reach an individual understanding of the harmony of humanity with the environment.

 

According to Academician Nikita Nikolayevich Moiseev, President of Green Cross Russia, ecology, the science of protecting the environment, is gradually becoming the point of contact of varying scientific disciplines. The most important role in environmental education and enlightenment belongs to universities; it is they that must teach students to cope with all the new information that is flooding our time. The world is being subjected to such a great pace of change that it is no longer possible to follow traditional educational methods. It is necessary to search for new educational forms and areas of knowledge, since it is difficult to determine what professional skills will be needed by young specialists in the upcoming decades.

 

Information prepared by the press service of Green Cross Russia.