Standing before other future high school teachers, a WSU education student sliced up an apple that represented our planet. She picked up one slice, a mere 1/16th of the apple, and peeled it — then compared that sliver of peel to all of our topsoil. With this small fraction of Earth, she explained,we need to grow food for more and more people.

The engaging lesson impressed Francene Watson, a WSU doctoral student, instructor and a veteran teacher. She recalled it when we were discussing a new Washington professional standard for teachers. Standard 5 includes a requirement teachers to demonstrate that they can prepare students “to be responsible citizens for an environmentally sustainable, globally interconnected, and diverse society.”

This aspect of Standard 5 puts Washington ahead of virtually every other state in the country in that it explicitly identifies education for environmental sustainability as a responsibility of new teachers, according to Dawn Shinew, chair of our Department of Teaching and Learning.

“The state’s emphasis on sustainability provides exciting opportunities to incorporate more place-based learning into our teacher preparation program, engage our pre-service teachers in more community-oriented projects, and develop their understanding of their responsibility to students beyond bringing them to grade level in reading and mathematics,” Dawn said.

A Palouse Pollinators lesson

The College of Education has made great strides toward “greening” our curriculum. One sign of that is our Palouse Pollinators workshops. Created with a big push from Francene, the workshops involve our student teachers with local school children. (Did you catch the related video of Kathryn Baldwin’s science methods students?)  College-wide, faculty members are incorporating sustainability into their work. For example, Susan Finley at WSU Vancouver, known for her focus on education for the homeless,wrote an article titled “Ecoaesthetics: Green arts at the intersection of education and social transformation” for the journal Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies.

At the Pullman campus, and thanks in large part to Dawn’s efforts, WSU launched the Palouse Project, an initiative that brings together faculty from various disciplines to raise interest in sustainability education. On all of our campuses, sustainability is a important component of science education initiatives, including the WSU STEM Education Partnership.

One reason that Francene was impressed with that “apple slice” lesson was its message that protection of the soil is everyone’s responsibility. In the same way, I believe that teaching sustainability is every educator’s obligation.

A.G. Rud

Since becoming WSU College of Education dean in 2010, I’ve wanted our three kinesiology programs to be better integrated with the undergraduate teacher preparation program, and more generally with the health sciences at our university. But first they need to be better integrated with each other.

Faculty members have been working hard to make changes to unify and strengthen our undergraduate kinesiology programs. Those efforts will bear fruit next fall, when we’ll institute the following changes:

• The Movement Studies Program will be renamed Sport Science and will culminate in a Bachelor of Science degree in kinesiology. Students in the Health and Fitness Program will continue to earn a teaching certificate along with their B.S. in kinesiology. Our Athletic Training Program will continue to offer a Bachelor of Arts in athletic training. 
  
• Students in these programs will take common core courses: movement fundamentals, anatomy, fitness, strength training, biomechanics and exercise physiology. All course numbers will have the prefix KINES.

• We will add a practicum and an internship program to sport science. As faculty member and student adviser Judy Schultz puts it, “we’ve been missing hands-on experience in exercise education.”

• We’ll increase the number of course sections offered to sport science students. With increased numbers of students pursuing that specialty, we expect our kinesiology enrollment to grow from approximately 450 to 600.

Eventually, sport science students will have the option to earn certification from the American College of Sport Medicine along with their degrees. (Hint to college supporters: That depends on our purchase of the necessary equipment for the certification process.)

Our kinesiology graduates work in many settings, from public schools to exercise clubs, sports medicine clinics to corporate gyms. Many go to graduate school. We’ll keep working hard to launch their careers in the best Cougar fashion.

Thanks to Stacy Mohondro, Kelly Ward, and program faculty for their input on this post.

A sense that there is something larger than a human being, accompanied by capacities for awe, respect, and shame; often expressed in, and reinforced by, ceremony.

That definition of reverence, from Paul Woodruff, guided me and my longtime friend and collaborator Jim Garrison of Virginia Tech as we edited Teaching with Reverence: Reviving an Ancient Virtue for Today’s Schools. The collection of essays, published in January, explores what has been called the “forgotten virtue” that’s vital to education.

As an educational philosopher, I’ve long been intrigued by reverence. It was the subject of my last book, Albert Schweitzer’s Legacy for Education: Reverence for Life. The word often connotes religion, even a prim solemnity. While religious and spiritual connotations are important, Jim and I took a different perspective.

The essays we chose confirm that reverence, though it may be hidden in our everyday practices, characterizes much good teaching. While much public, political and professional discussion about education focuses on skills and abilities, we believe that there is something else that attracts us to the profession.

Jim and I believe, as we write at the start of the book, that “good teaching involves forming character, molding destinies, creating an enduring passion for learning, appreciating beauty, respecting silence, caring for others, and much more. In some sense, teaching is a spiritual, although not necessarily a religious, activity. When done well, it paves the way for human sociability and allows teachers to find creative self-expression in the classroom community.”

Editing Teaching with Reverence provided a great opportunity to gather smart people and invite them to think along with us.

Several essayists recalled reading and teaching Annie Dillard’s book from the 1970s, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which Dillard emphasizes the value of silence and mindfulness. As author Michael Dale points out, “In Dillard’s hands such silence not only quiets and opens up inner space but also renders us receptive to the world around us.” Michael explains how school administrators at first questioned the relevance of a book about a woman living alone in southern Appalachia, and how his students discovered, through Dillard’s writing, the connections between nature and learning.

Bob Boostrom discusses in his chapter how he practices reverent teaching by keeping in mind that a teacher needs to listen, think, laugh, love, and correct. It is in laughing while thinking that he sees the humility of reverence. Bob recalls how, early in his teaching career, he helped a second-grader with addition. The student was stymied by a word problem that asked how many houses Godzilla smashes if he crushes eight with one foot and seven with the other. Bob asks if the student is familiar with Godzilla. When the student says no, Bob describes the large lizard in funny and almost nerdy detail. The student looks at him, and says, “OK, I get it.” He solves the problem.

Bob can laugh at what may have been unnecessary detail about Godzilla, but realizes that he may have helped that student solve the problem by showing he cared about the student’s understanding. He is not sure what made the lesson “click” for the student, and this mystery inspires in him a sense of wonder about learning. We teachers know that it is not easy to reach all students. But our willingness to try, sometimes with a chuckle  or a wink, is a sure sign of reverence.