The collaborative environmental hope program
about the CEHP
The Collaborative Environmental Hope Program (CEHP) is designed to address one of the study’s key findings: that environmental educators currently feel isolated in their endeavours and are looking for more collaboration, connection, and community. The goal of the CEHP is to integrate all the 7 components of the environmnetal hope framework through a year-long co-teaching program. The program will bring environmental educators and students in K-12 together for a variety of outdoor experiential lessons over the course of each of the four seasons in one school year.
Program structure
The CEHP runs over the course of one school year, with sessions in the fall, winter, spring and summer. Environmental educators are paired up with another environmental educator of the same grade level, from a different school community. The two teachers will meet 12 times during the school year (3 times during each season) to co-plan, co-teach and co-debrief a series of experiential lessons for each of their respective classes. The teachers will use their co-planning time to develop lessons tailored to their particular classroom community, that integrate the elements of the H.O.P.E.F.U.L curriculum. All the lessons will be experiential and outdoors and will center around a seasonal theme, described in the sample program below. At the end of each lesson teachers will co-debrief and reflect on their lessons together–identifying what went well, how they and their students felt, moments of empowerment, moments of discomfort, and areas for improvement–and tailoring and adjusting their next lesson to their particular learners and contexts. The aim is that by the end of the CEHP, students and teachers will feel more connected to each other, their inner and outer landscapes and their community. Furthermore, they will garner the social, emotional and critical skills to take empowered, hopeful environmental action.
One-year curriculum overview
This chart (downloadable below as a PDF) outlines a proposed one-year CEHP overview. This CEHP curricular outline is grounded in the research-based themes of Enivornmental Hope. Seasonal themes and a guiding structure for the co-planning, co-teaching and co-debriefing sessions provide a cohesive year-long plan that creates continuity in the program while also allowing for the necessary flexibility for teachers to differentiate their lessons to their particular contexts and integrate cross-curriculum topics from the Ontario curriculum if they wish to. This CEHP curriculum is intended to be applied and facilitated alongside corresponding K-12 teacher education workshops/training. Over the long term, teacher facilitators can lead these workshops as the program grows. The ultimate vision is to build and grow hopeful communities of educators and students who feel empowered to take relevant action towards social-environmental justice.