Educational Reforms that Foster Ecological Intelligence

There are powerful forces of resistance that must be acknowledged when introducing educational reforms that foster ecological intelligence. The foremost source of resistance is the paradigm gap that now separates generations. That is, the vast majority of university professors, classroom teachers--and thus the general public that has been educated by them--were socialized to take-for-granted many of the conceptual underpinning that supported the idea that intelligence is the attribute that is the basis of individual autonomy. Given the current "race to the top" approach to educational reform being sponsored by the federal government, and given the late twentieth century mindset that still dominates in most colleges of education and in the social sciences and humanities, it would be easy to think that the scale of resistance is too great to warrant the effort of promoting the exercise of ecological intelligence. Exercising ecological intelligence needs to become part of the students' culturally mediated embodied experiences--which will engage all the physical senses along with memory, and a heightened aesthetic awareness and moral responsibility. In this article, the author offers practical steps to making the exercise of ecological intelligence part of students' taken-for-granted experience. Many teachers expect specific lesson plans on how ecological intelligence can be reinforced in different curriculum units and experiences. Presenting actual curriculum units contradicts the primary characteristics of ecological intelligence--and how to foster it. Rather than reinforcing the tendency to rely upon packaged learning experiences, the stress should be placed upon the teacher's awareness of the issues, misunderstandings being perpetuated in the curriculum, and examples of ecological thinking that can be introduced in different learning settings. The author presents a summary of the main issues and concepts that can be brought into the discussion at almost any level of the educational process and in almost every area of the curriculum. (Contains 1 note.)