Calgary Board of Education Students Embrace imagineCALGARY Vision for Sustainability
The Calgary Board of Education is one of the most active Partners in the imagineCALGARY Partnership. Recently, Susan Macaulay, a teacher at Olympic Heights Elementary School, approached imagineCALGARY to learn more about its role in creating a sustainable future for the community. John Lewis, imagineCALGARY’s Communications and Awareness Committee Coordinator, was invited to address several grade 6 classes at the Olympic Heights School, and to share the imagineCALGARY vision. Susan’s story below profiles the impact of that visit – and the importance of sharing sustainability goals with the next generation of Calgarians.
At Olympic Heights School in Calgary, the Grade Six students are exploring our city and how it might look during the next century. Three overarching questions guide our investigation. How can Calgarians develop a sustainable city? What is Calgary’s identity? How do we ensure sustainability for what we value?
How can Calgarians develop a sustainable city?
To begin this project, the students in one classroom explored and identified values that they embrace, particularly those that apply to the urban environments in which many people live and work during most of their lifetimes. They decided that urbanites’ quality of life is strongly affected by factors such as beauty (aesthetics), safety, efficient transportation systems, and the presence of natural green spaces and recreation facilities. Guest speakers, including John Lewis of imagineCALGARY, Alderman Joe Connelly and visitors from The City of Calgary Planning Department, have shared with students their knowledge and understandings about how Calgarians can develop and maintain sustainable working and living environments in their city.
As part of our process, we have walked the streets of downtown Calgary, recording our observations on paper and film. We have penned poetry, illustrated by photographs that we took, to describe our findings and feelings about our city, as it is now.
Next, our class will generate questions to launch research inquiries about possible ways to make our wonderful city an even better place to live and work. Then we will use GPS software to record on-site observations, impressions and suggestions for improving specific locations in our city. We will deliver our work for this project to our alderman and the city’s planning department for their consideration.
What is Calgary’s identity?
Another grade 6 class in our school has been working towards building an understanding and appreciation of our rich Calgary heritage. The students understand that they are members of a democratic and therefore participatory government. This means that they will be the future caretakers of our history. The students first started researching different heritage places and spaces throughout Calgary. This initial inquiry helped us broaden our definition of heritage to include to the words ‘iconic’ and ‘spirit’.
The students were quick to realize that heritage is much more than preserving, excavating, displaying, or restoring a collection of old things. It is both tangible and intangible, in the sense that ideas and memories -- of songs, recipes, language, dances, and many other elements of who we are and how we identify ourselves -- are as important as historical buildings and archaeological sites. The students are seeing heritage as an important component to understanding their identity.
The students are now in the process of answering three questions. Does the city see heritage and sustainability on two opposite ends or can they co-exist? What can citizens do to uphold our heritage? And, how is the city going to uphold our heritage when they plan land usage? We are using the tools available to all members in a democratic society to help answer these questions. Through the use of blogs, web research, interviewing our local representatives and experts and conducting surveys, the students are starting to build an understanding and more importantly a relationship with the important and historic places and the spirit that these places hold.
How do we ensure sustainability for what we value?
This final question has become very relevant for two classes of Grade 6 students at Olympic Heights School. In the fall, the students noticed that their school forest was being damaged. They observed garbage, torn limbs and chopped tree trunks. Knowing what the forest means to them, they chose to interview students from grades three, four and five to gather data regarding how our forest is used and valued by others at our school. As we interpreted the results of the survey it became clear that our forest is a unique learning feature of our school. The forest is an important tool for education as it provides a means for hands-on enrichment of the elementary curriculum. Our forest is also appreciated for its beauty, tranquility and the sense of calm it provides for our students. There were so many positive experiences shared by the other students during the interview process, we knew that we had to take action.
If we don’t take care of our forest what will happen in the future? Who is responsible for the forest, if not us? If we don’t take action, is it possible that in the future the trees could be torn down and be replaced with a parking lot?
From this place of concern and inquiry, we became aware of imagineCALGARY. From John Lewis’ presentation, our students understood that our first step is to inform our student and parent body as well as community leaders about the issues surrounding our forest. Through a variety of presentation formats we plan to educate others about the problems our forest is facing, why it is important to our school and the actions we can take to save it. We know we need to encourage the school and greater community to value the forest as well.
Our forest will only survive if everybody cares and pitches in. John and imagineCALGARY helped us envision how active citizenship can create a sustainable future for our forest.
