When we are concerned about the environment around us, make everything can become learning resources, more and more people will be successful like Watt invented the steam engine through look at a kettle. When we start to pay attention to the farmers and beekeepers, the distance and barrier between human and nature can be reduced.
‘People are certainly becoming more interested in bees and it's great to have this interest’. Ruth, who is secretary of Dorset County Beekeepers, said，‘And <the threat of varroa> has changed our beekeeping but if people really love and understand their bees it's easy to do it. It just takes a bit more time and dedication’. (2009) Nowadays, most of people probably know that bees are beneficial to human beings, but which are totally concepts for the city people. Is there an opportunity to let people to put on the bee suits, look at how to use the bee hives, and how to develop related plants, how to collect honey... this process of beekeeping?
Life as education – the education comes from life, and then goes back in life, this process in order to make a better life for people. Thus the content of environmental education should come from the life more than others. Thus beekeeping course could be a positive impact on people, especially on children. ‘Children are intellectually curious, keen to find thing out, and actively engaged in making sense of the world they live in’. (1994:3) If children could do more of the kind of work we have described and suggested, they would get, not just knowledge, but skill. This is important to a child. ‘To be able to do something well, to get visible results, gives him/her a sense of his/hers own being and worth which he/she can never get from regular school, from teacher-pleasing, on matter how good is at it. There is too little opportunity for this in school’. (1983:212)
Whether the Herbart’s pedagogical theory or Dewey’s theories of progressive education, they have emphasized the interest and practice are both important in the education. The value of interest on the one hand is cognition, which is help people to explore and understand the world; on the other hand, a more important aspect is action, which could push people into practice to promote the ecological nature and reform society. As social, scientific, cultural studies are the main parts in Goldsmiths, we should go with practice of ecologies, technology and society to be a sustainable university.
‘Learning is active. It involves reaching out of the mind’. As Dewey says, ‘Not knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the goal’. (1971:9) Therefore, the beekeeping at Goldsmiths is not only a course to teach the technology and skills to students and kids, it is also a workshop to cultivate an interest, which could be an ethical culture. The beekeeping workshop can get people to work with and understand their bees; the relationship of human-bees could be changed to a new way like the bees can teaching us, training us, food us, even plant us. We aim to raise people’s awareness about the value of beekeeping for sustainable development, and promote sustainable beekeeping to conserve biodiversity on both a local and global scale.
Reference:
- BBC (2009). Available at:
(8/December/2010)
- Darling, J. 1994. Child-Centered Education and its critics. London. Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd.
- Holt, J. 1983. How Children Learn. London. Penguin Books.
- Dewey, J. 1971. The Child and the Curriculum and The School and Society. London. The University Of Chicago Press.
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