Earth Force: Engaging Young People and Educators in Environmental Service-Learning  

Throughout the United States, Earth Force is engaging educators and students in environmental service-learning projects making a difference in student learning and communities.

For nearly 16 years, Earth Force has been working to train and support educators to facilitate "a process of exploration, research, and project implementation" that young people undertake, according to Lisa Bardwell, CEO of Earth Force. A professional management strategy was developed by Earth Force to train and support adults who want to work with young people and facilitate education by embedding service-learning in the curriculum.

At the local level, through seven field offices, Earth Force engages school districts to implement a version of the Earth Force Six Step Process[i] that enables young people to build valuable skills, take action in their communities and improve the environment. The Earth Force process takes young people through steps of identifying a community need related to what they are learning in the classroom, determine how they can address that need, identify stakeholders, undertake extensive research, build a plan of action, and work together to implement that plan.

For example, in a Kentucky a high school, students studying watersheds undertook a project to reduce the pollution in their local watershed. The students researched the causes of pollution affecting their local watershed, and tracked and monitored where the pollution originated, including run-off from their school. The students measured storm-water running off their school’s building and researched tools that could be implemented to prevent the runoff, leading to a plan for building a rain garden on school grounds. Throughout the project, students learned valuable skills for evaluating community needs, taking measurements of storm-water, determining the best dimensions and location for the rain garden and developing a comprehensive plan for the various components of implementing a practical solution to the identified community need.

“They had this great interdisciplinary experience leading up to their project,” Lisa said. “The outcome is important but not always as important for us as what it took for the young people to get there and what they gained in that process that they would not have if they just went out on Earth Day to install the rain garden.”

Students have ownership over the projects, with teachers acting as facilitators. The project duration depends on the educators and how it fits in their curriculum; however a project normally takes a semester term or at least four weeks.

In addition to classroom teachers, Earth Force is increasingly working with community-based organizations running after-school programs and summer programs. Earth Force aims at supporting them in the process of embedding more youth leadership into their programming and putting young people in the driver’s seat to identify issues and ways to address them.

Moreover Earth Force is focusing on partnering with school districts and universities to experiment with policy changes and professional development schemes to incorporate environmental service-learning across the district. Earth Force is also working with universities who are looking for pre-service teachers and ways to embed the Earth Force model into pre-service education so that future teachers leave college with a sense of how to conduct environmental service-learning projects with their students.

Earth Force offers also national programs through partnerships. One partnership, with the GREEN Program started 10 years ago in order to incorporate the experiential learning component, and it also brought GREEN’s largest funder, General Motors (GM), to Earth Force. Through this project, Earth Force is partnering with community-based organizations in 32 GM green communities to empower them to engage young people through Earth Force’s methodology. Several national staff people are supporting these partner organizations and training educators. Through the field office and national programming, Earth Force is annually engaging approximately 20,000 students and 700 educators.

Earth Force began with funding from the Pew Charitable Trust to engage young people in their communities around environmental issues. In 1997 Earth Force decentralized its work by establishing local sites whose responsibility was to create opportunities and a network of support for young people to identify and address environmental issues. Students recognize ecological challenges and work on a great variety of environmental projects as awareness of global climate change increases through media coverage and campaigns every day.