Cultivating New Partnerships: How Vermont's Sustainability and Place Standards Evolved
This piece originally appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of Community Works Journal.

“Over the last 25 years, Vermont’s natural resource, agriculture, and environmental educators have developed award-winning programs for Vermont’s K-12 students. However, these different programs exist primarily through non-formal, grassroots efforts, and have not always spoken with a common voice...” So explains Anne Bijur of Shelburne Farms in the “Cultivating New Partnerships: Education for Sustainability” brochure. Community Works Journal spoke with Anne and her fellow coordinator Erica Zimmerman recently about the efforts of this project to unite multiple grassroots initiatives, K-12 educators, and higher education into a network of educators with similar goals. This work has taken place in partnership with Vermont’s Department of Education, VISMT and others. As a result of their work, Vermont has a “Sustainability” standard in place of the Environment standard, and a new“Understanding Place” standard that helps define how place-based education and service-learning fit into the curriculum. Their work continues as The BESS Project (Building Education for a Sustainable Society, a professional development program for K-12 educators).

Background
When the Vermont Department of Education distributed the Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities in the spring of 1996, there was some concern among non-school-based educators about whether the Framework included the topics and skills their programs address, including knowledge about issues related to the continued vitality of communities and their resources. Would teachers still bring their students on field trips to farms, for example, or to environmental education opportunities offered by SWEEP (Statewide Environmental Education Programs)? To foster communication between the Department of Education and the many groups around the state involved in non-school-based educational efforts, a memorandum of understanding was produced during a meeting between then Commissioner Marc Hull, Barbara Ripley who was Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, and Larry Forcier, then Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at UVM. The memorandum showed that Commissioner Hull was open to suggestions for revising the Framework.

Sustainability means...“working to meet the needs of the present while not compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The Education for Sustainability (EFS) Project
To build communication among the non-formal educators across the state who were involved in all the diverse aspects of place-based education, the “Cultivating New Partnerships: Education for Sustainability” project was initiated by SWEEP, and funded by the Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation. The Project hosted regional workshops for “agricultural, natural resource, environmental, and other non-formal educators” about Vermont’s Framework in September, 1998.

The EFS project next hosted public forums around the state in the fall of 1998 to gather community input on what education for sustainability means and what Vermont students need to know and be able to do to help achieve sustainability. Their input was analyzed by a steering committee that came to consensus about how to revise the Framework to incorporate this important concept. As their pamphlet explains, “When we say sustainability, we’re simply using a new term for a long-standing Vermont tradition: working to meet the needs of the present while not compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The pamphlet then mentions another rich tradition in the Green Mountains, the “connection between people and their communities to the working land,” explaining that the EFS Project is designed to “strengthen students’ understanding of both these traditions, encompassing citizenship and responsibility toward those resources we have in common, including our environment, economy, and human resources.” By integrating the need for economic security with ecological integrity and social equity, the partnership hopes to instill a sense of civic empowerment and responsibility among students, and an understanding of the interconnectedness—and need for balance—among all these aspects of life in Vermont. The forum participants answered questions like “What does a person act like who embodies the principles of sustainability?” and “What skills and knowledge do people need to live sustainably in the 21st century and beyond?”

Revised and New Vermont Standards
The result was a document listing 35 recurring themes that came out of these public forums. The EFS Project then compared these themes with the corresponding standards in the existing Framework. They noticed that while most areas were well covered by the standards, several were inadequately represented. The CNP data supported expanding vital result standard 3.9 (Environment) into making decisions about sustainability, and adding standard 4.6 on Understanding Place. After a long process, the group’s final suggestions for revising these standards were presented to the State Board of Education and the Vermont Department of Education at a meeting on March 21st at Montshire High School, and were formally accepted.

Appreciated Partners
We offer the greatest appreciation to Megan Camp (then of SWEEP and now Vice President of Shelburne Farms) and the many project participants for their hard work and persistence! VT EFS and its partners continue to work on a revision for a Science, Math and Technology Field of Knowledge standard about natural resources. The earlier work was funded by grants from the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation.

VT EFS Project continues to support teachers in developing EFS curriculum and building on the network created by the earlier partnership initiative to support collaboration among teachers and non-formal educators.