Biodiversity contests: indigenously informed and transformed environmental education

Abstract

The ‘biodiversity contest’ is an educational innovation designed to uncover the plant diversity knowledge of children. This article, based on the experiences of the winners of 31 such contests, seeks to identify the methods through which children learn from their elders and the beliefs that the elders communicate to them. While elders develop in children knowledge about plants, they do not communicate a belief in active conservation. Though elders have a culturally determined preference for boys as apprentices, they do accommodate the education of girls. Systematic instruction, demonstration, questioning to test knowledge and memory, encouraging observation, and supervised practice, are methods the elders use during an extended apprenticeship. The contests have helped recognize the knowledge that children have acquired outside the school, and have helped teachers introduce curricular relevance. In India, a national education policy formulated in 1966 led to the inclusion of environmental education within its scope. About thirty years later, a national plan for biodiversity conservation noted the need for formal environmental education systems to create space for “community/ traditional knowledge systems and practices” (Pandey, 2000; Sharma, 1999; Raina, 1999). These systems were under threat since knowledge about conservation and management of biodiversity was being eroded as a result of degradation of biodiversity resources (Gupta 1996). This phenomenon has also been observed elsewhere (Atte, 1989; Peacock, 1995; Richards, 1987). Gupta (1996) also noted that areas where the threat of knowledge and resource degradation was high were also those which were economically backward, showed poor educational performance, and were inhabited by indigenous communities. Transferring the traditional knowledge that such communities possess into formal environmental education is one way of preventing the disappearance of the knowledge associated with biodiversity.