EcoBuzz 2008 - Workshops
In the Outdoors: Sketch, Paint and Shoot
With Gary Mascola
What better way to experience the local urban environment than to saunter the Fletcher Meadow S.S. community. Explore surrounding urban development including the local storm-water pond that provides for local aquatic life forms. Capture images of local relationship – culture/nature and/or nature/ nature through your mind’s lens. Create and communicate these important images through digital camera photography and/or pencil or water-colour sketches. This is a fun, hands-on outdoor workshop that will open understanding about the ecology of this local urban wilderness. Art kits and journal sketch pads are provided.
Be Prepared: Dress for the weather and bring your camera.
This is a group problem solving workshop about your school leadership team’s challenges/concerns. Voice stories of success - your team’s influence on important environmental issues within the community. Speak to leadership concerns such as total membership involvement issues. Articulate stories about how your school/club managed to sustain club membership throughout the year. All stories worthy of this circle’s attention are welcomed. Respectful listening and respectful speaking are highly valued in circle. Your story of club/school success may constructively influence – help to solve another leadership group’s story of concern. This workshop will touch on easy and inexpensive ways to use environmentally friendly products for cleaning at home. The importance of environmental consciousness when making consumer choices will be discussed, and students will have an opportunity to make 'Green' cleaning products of their own! This is your chance to make a difference in what environmental education could look like in Ontario schools. Think Global, Eat Local! Have you ever thought about the impact the food you eat has on the environment? How was it grown? How far did it travel? And what doesn’t the label tell you about what’s in your food? In this workshop we will look at this and more, by taking a traditional cake recipe and shaking things up to make a more sustainable creation to share with everyone at EcoBuzz. We will also explore ways to take a bite out of climate change, as an individual and as a school, through the food we eat. This workshop will take the cake! Do you ever feel burnt out? In environmental leadership, we often talk about sustainability. We also discuss how to achieve the maximum impact possible with our actions. Despite this rhetoric, we too often push ourselves too hard in the short term as student leaders, and this causes us to burn out and therefore sacrifice our long-term ability to make a difference. This fun and interactive workshop will help us apply some great sustainable practices to our own lives so we can accomplish more, live happier AND maximize our long term impact, and that's what it's all about! Note: This workshop is designed mainly for secondary school students, or anyone else who tends to overwork themselves. In this workshop, elder Anthony Templer and Karen Gellman will share the history of native hand drums. You will explore ceremonial, self-healing, grounding to mother earth and community bonding uses of the Big Drum. With a group of fellow students, learn a song and find your rhythm. Get ready to keep the beat of all creation! Guerrillas of the Word: Youth Rhyming on Racism, Poverty, Environmental and Social Justice R.H.Y.M.E (Revolutionaries Honouring Your Mind's Eye) is a by youth, for youth spoken word collective committed to educating and empowering through poetry. Influenced by the consciousness of hip hop and dub poetry, R.H.Y.M.E members hail from all corners of the globe, from Somalia to Colombia, representing numerous cultures, diverse voices and experiences, culminating on the concrete of Toronto's Streets. R.H.Y.M.E's EcoBuzz poetry writing workshops will be centred around the use of written and performance poetry by youth as a tool to bring about 'environmental awareness and action'. The workshops will provide a very relevant sample of the type of work that R.H.Y.M.E. members do in high schools throughout the Greater Toronto Area with "at risk" youth." Get out and get dirty… As leaders in your schools, YOU can help others make the connection from Action to Education and from Education to Action. We’ll talk about the fundamentals of ‘ecological restoration’, discuss why the planting of native trees to help connect Fletcher’s Meadow Secondary School to its surrounding environment is important, and why monitoring our future forests for combating climate change is key. Learn how you can do it at your school.
Leadership: Circle of Concern - Circle of Influence
With Gary Mascola
Be Prepared: Bring important stories about your school leadership team’s challenges/concerns. Come dressed for the weather as the workshop will be in the outdoors.
It’s Easy to Clean Green!
With Amanda DiBattista, Region of Peel
Be Prepared: Please bring TWO reusable containers – a 500mL plastic bottle with lid and a margarine/yogurt type plastic container with lid to put your green cleaning solutions in.
Environmental Education Policy Making: Make an impression without a carbon footprint!
With Beth Brown and Josie Vite, Ministry of Education
• What environmental issues are most important to you and other students?
• What is happening in your school and your community to improve the environment?
• What advice would you give us to encourage students to become involved in environmental initiatives in their school or community?
• If you could make one change that would make an environmental difference in your school or community what would it be? why?
By answering these questions you are part of government decision-making processes in action. This focus group will contribute to a province-wide consultation process about an environmental education policy framework for Ontario schools.
With Tarrah Young, EcoSource
Sustainable Student Leadership
With Joel Hilchey
Our Heart Beat with a Big Drum
With Anthony Templer and Karen Gellman, Peel Aboriginal Network
With RHYME
Roots and Shoots: Measuring our Success!
With Leslie Cauchi, ACER and Heather Yates, Credit Valley Conservation
Costume Creation from Found Material
With Amber Brandenburg, SKETCH
Come armed with your creativity, materials for reuse and plenty of spook! We will be crafting your Halloween costume out of recycled, reused or found materials, so you can strut your stuff at the evening EcoBuzz Halloween party.
Be prepared: please bring any old clothing, or textile scraps you have at home, as well as any old costumes or costume accessories, you’d like to revive for yourself or share with others!
Climate Change, Global Politics and YOU It's easy as students to feel powerless about the climate change situation of our world. But youth today realize more than ever how big a stake they have in climate change negotiations, and the future of our earth. In this workshop, find out how YOU, as a student in your community, can tackle climate change and make a real difference, and learn more about what youth across Canada have done to have a voice at the United Nations climate change negotiations. This is your opportunity to speak directly to youth who are taking global climate action, as both presenters will be participating in this year's Canadian Youth Delegation to the UN climate negotiations in Poland. Today bottled water is a billion-dollar global industry, and in Canada, consumption of bottled water now outpaces coffee, tea, apple juice and milk! Just ten years ago, most people drank tap water. Dominated by soft drink and food-processing giants – Coke, Pepsi, Nestlé, and Danone - the bottled water industry has serious environmental, health, social and economic impacts. There is also a growing movement challenging it. This workshop will examine waste, in particular plastic, and its impact on the planet. Students will learn a little about plastics and the alternatives that exist.Then, we’ll get in touch with the science geek in all of us and cook up our own 'green' plastic! Some things just go together. They just rip off the tongue. Fish and chips, salt and pepper or Stephen Harper and sweater vests. What about education and sustainable behavioural change? Doesn’t quite flow, but the two are becoming connected. As schools and school boards get more exposure to environmental education programs, and new policies and curriculum are becoming familiar and mandated, managing the change at our schools will become important in understanding how and if these actions are altering our schools ethos and supporting student learning. Efforts to make educational institutions more environmentally aware and sustainable, should include a discussion of school dynamics. An examination of school culture, leadership and student participation can highlight opportunities to support and encourage a move toward sustainable behaviour and ultimately institutional change. This workshop will lead you through an exploratory exercise on how your school operates, where the entry points are currently for further opportunities and providensight into how to scale your action projects up to ensure that the actions affect the change you are looking for.
With PJ Partington, Taking IT Global
Ditching bottled water and getting back to the tap!
With Zoe Maggio, Polaris Institute
How does bottled water and lack of access to public tap water systems relate to the context of schools? This workshop will focus on these issues and discussion on ways that students can raise awareness, take action and resist the corporate control of water.
Make Your Own Biodegradeable Plastic
With Kelli Hazzard, Fletcher’s Meadow S.S.
TEACHER WORKSHOP:
School Evaluation and Action Planning
With Soni Craik, EcoSource and PEYA Executive
