By Søren Breiting, associate professor (breiting@dpu.dk)

If you walk through a primary school in Thailand, you will often hear the roar of children answering their teacher's question together. You will also see teachers who spend a lot of time explaining and using the blackboard, and you will see the pupils individually trying to master the intricacies of the 'curly' letters of the Thai alphabet by writing in notebooks and doing tasks. From a contemporary Western viewpoint, the teaching seems old-fashioned and authoritarian.

This is also true for the teaching on sustainability and the environment. In connection with a recent research project, I went to visit several primary and secondary schools in the country, and I met classes where the pupils were to demonstrate to me what they had learned in environmental education.

One teacher would ask his class in Thai 'What shall we do with the waste?' and the children would all shout 'We – shall – recycle!' This pedagogical approach obviously has a very limited impact in terms of making the children relate to the complex environmental problems that grow and grow all around them.

Teaching about local environmental issues
In 2000, the Thai Ministry of Education decided to promote environmental education in Thailand and launched a project, Strengthening Environmental Education in Thailand, SEET. The initiative came about on the basis of widespread environmental problems caused by extremely rapid economic growth. The basic premise of the project, however, is such that we might as well call it an effort to develop Education for Sustainable Development in Thailand.

The objective was to develop the pupils' action competencies in relation to environmental issues. This was to take place in close collaboration with local communities and as a 'whole school'-approach with an emphasis on child centred education. This last idea denotes a need for a relevant content and curriculum for the children as well as for meaningful approaches for the learning situations as opposed to the traditional Thai style of teaching. See the box below for further explanation of these terms.

The common approach to teaching about the environment at the most advanced schools was, at the launch of this project, to examine nature and the environment as objects of science. Since fresh water is a key issue in many local communities, this could, for instance, mean that a class would be assigned the task to examine the status of a nearby stream of water. When the class concluded that the water was contaminated, nothing much would happen. When teachers and their advisors were asked about child centred education, the best they could come up with used to be group work.

Water and people
In the course of the SEET-project, these approaches were radically changed, to the point where teaching about a nearby stream of water would include the following:

• In class, the teacher establishes interest in the local stream of water as a 'natural resource' and asks the pupils if they think the local area always looked the way it does now. This initial motivating focus on one particular thing concludes with the teacher helping the pupils set up a survey of the local area.
• The pupils then move out into the local community and interview two groups of people; elderly people who have lived in the area all their lives, and people who play a key role in the local community now.
• The elderly are interviewed about how they used to draw upon the 'natural resource', in this case the stream of water, and what the area used to look like. Also, the respondents have to explain how the area has changed, and what they think of these changes.
• The active people have to explain how they use the water now, and what they think of the current situation.
• Also, both the elderly and the active younger respondents have to explain what they think will happen to the resource in the future, and what they would wish for, for this particular resource, and the fish in it and so on.

Back in class, the pupils compile and categorise the responses they have collected. Each group receives four very large sheets of paper. On the first one, they have to make a drawing of how the local area used to look like. On the second one, they have to draw the area as it looks today, and provide information about how the different areas are put to use. And lastly they have to use the remaining two sheets to present two visions for the future; one showing how people expect the area to develop, and one showing how people would like the area to develop.

These visualisations are then mounted on the walls so that they present a sort of timeline, with the 'past' to the left and the 'present' to the right, demonstrating the development of the water course. Finally the two 'futures' are mounted further to the right, one above the other, to show how the future may look.

Action directe
The posters provide a nearly perfect visualisation of the complex changes the local area has seen, and includes many personal accounts told to the pupils during their round of interviews. An added bonus is the pupils' increased insight into people's expectations to the future, and their wishes. As it turned out, there was a surprising overlap between people's wishes for the future, but a strong divergence between these wishes and people's realistic expectations. Most people's wishes ran along the lines of countering the damage to the environment and to social relations, and to an increased personal responsibility for managing the resources, although most people feared that the situation would in fact only deteriorate even further.

At a number of schools, they then invited parents and everyone else in to see the pupils demonstrate their findings. I saw pupils in the fourth grade present their findings most convincingly to a large group of adults. In some schools they invited the local (sometimes the previous) chief, who often turned out to be very interested in the pupils' findings. Many of the schools were subsequently directly involved in taking action towards some of the issues that the pupils had identified, which obviously increased their action competence substantially.

Outcome
In a country of some 60 million inhabitants, 12 million of whom live in the capital of Bangkok, and which boasts some 36.000 primary and secondary schools, one should be careful to exaggerate the impact of one single project. But since the project spanned the range of the Thai society, from the top of the Ministry of Education through to forty-seven schools selected for this experiment, a close collaboration with five NGOs as well as a major zoo and indirect collaboration with numerous universities and teacher training colleges through involvement of individuals, we can safely say we covered a vast range of the educational system in Thailand.

We can now document that participation in the SEET-project led many to initiate changes in their own institutions, as a result of new insight into the traditions that dominate teaching and courses, and the participants accordingly developed new competencies. During the project period, I had them fill in group-specific questionnaires in order to track the effect of the work that we did. Approximately one year after we finished SEET, I conducted a series of interviews to assess the participants' mental ownership of the new ideas and methods, and of the sustainability of the innovations. It turned out that the majority of the ipeople nterviewed had, in fact, developed mental ownership of the new approaches and the complex issues, which would indicate that the learnings are not soon forgotten. Key people in the Ministry of Education and in teacher training colleges have discovered some ways Education for Sustainable Development can play out in Thailand in the future.

The ambitious objectives for the SEET-project were made even more ambitious by the inclusion of the requirement that a democratic environmental education had to help everyone involved to develop aspects of their professionalism in accordance with a recent reform of the Thai school system. This may, however, actually have been an advantage for the project. Just about everyone who took part in the project and showed a minimum of commitment became far better prepared to address the future challenges of the Thai schooling system.

At the same time we had great success with our action research system, in which some three hundred teachers, supervisors and headmasters took part in order to research their own professional development. This effort was based on a commitment to promote the reflective practitioner. The results were extensively documented by the staff at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

In the final analysis, the project's success is due, in large part, to genuine participation by Thai stakeholders and a very limited participation by foreigners; we were one and a half person, of which I was the half.

Key concepts in the SEET-project

Action competence
The idea of action competence as a goal for democratic environmental education or education for sustainable development is an attempt to underline the importance of critical active participation related to environmental and development issues. Action competence is not to just do what others are telling you. Actions are intentional, and decision making and real action experience is important. By emphasising actions and not teacher-initiated activities ESD helps pupils understand the importance of their intentional actions.

Child centred education
Child centred education has been one objective of the modernisation of Thai schools and teaching. The idea denotes a need for a relevant content and curriculum for the children as well as for meaningful approaches for the learning situations. This happens with a constructivistic view on children's learning as opposed to the traditional Thai style of teaching.

'Whole school'-approach
The notion of the whole school approach denotes to a school culture with more synergy effects between the teachers etc. than in a traditional school where a lot of the tasks are done on an individual bases in a hierarchical structure. The focus on the whole school approach was a part of the school reform in Thailand and our work in SEET had a kind of pioneering function. E.g. we tried to make use of the approach of schools as 'learning organisations' as a way to implement a 'whole school'-approach. In a 'whole school'-approach, an alignment between the curriculum and the actual life in school is also considered important.

About Søren Breiting
Søren Breiting is associate professor at the Department of Curriculum Research at the Danish University of Education, where he conducts research into environmental education and science education. Søren Breiting served as consultant for the design and implementation of the SEET-project through to the end of 2004, and has since then made follow-up studies with a particular emphasis on the concept of 'mental ownership'. Mental ownership means that the participants maintain and try to implement the things they learned in the course of the project.

Visit Søren Breiting's homepage at the Danish University of Education.

Søren Breiting also runs the following websites, where you can find more information about ESD and action competence:
http://www.ActionCompetence.com
http://www.EducationForSustainableDevelopment.com
http://www.Environmental-Education.net

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Punchline

"I saw pupils in the fourth grade present their findings most convincingly to a large group of adults."
-Søren Breiting

Action competence, child centred education, 'whole school'-approach

Read about these three key concepts in the SEET-project.