My Air, Your Rainforest: An Experiment in Global Responsibility.

ENVIRONMENTAL education; PARTNERSHIPS in education; SEMINARS; EDUCATIONAL exchanges

ARKANSAS; GUATEMALA

This paper reports on an effort by the Arkansas International Center of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and members of Programa Latinoamerica Nino-a-Nino (PLANAN) to develop a program to foster a sense of global responsibility for the environment in students. In 1988, the Arkansas International Center, eight Arkansas school districts and the Rockefeller Foundation initiated Advancing Teaching and Learning in Arkansas Schools to help prepare students for a global society by redesigning the way of teaching in humanities. In 1989, four new schools joined the project for a study of the environment of the Americas. In Guatemala, PLANAN organized a seminar with the Arkansas teachers and teachers from different parts of Guatemala. After criticizing their own government, the Central American teachers began to discuss the role the U.S. government and North American companies had played in damaging the Guatemalan environment. Arkansas teachers have initiated an art exchange and the Central American teachers have invited them to participate in a writing project. Teachers who came back from Guatemala with a number of ideas found that the overwhelming complexity of the details stopped or slowed many of their projects. Furthermore, what was supposed to be a global education project has ended up creating links between schools and local communities.