Why Study ESS?
When I ask my students why they are studying ESS I receive a range of replies going from the negative, well I didn't want to study another Science, to the inspirational, "I want to be an environmental engineer". Whatever the reason, I find that students who take the course love it, no matter what their initial reasons were and many become proselytisers, saying that everyone should take the course, it's the most important course I take!
You will be hard pressed to find a more relevant course for today's world. Every day the news tells us something about the environment, whether it is the controversy between billionaires fighting over whether planting trees is a good thing (doh, answer is yes) to droughts, floods, access to food and water, chemicals in our bodies, fast fashion, fast food and conversely, slow food, upcycling, the right to repair, circular economy or students coming up with solutions to the climate crisis.
ESS prepares you for the job market we need now, be that Chief Sustainability Officer, Financial Investment, Conservation Biologist, Renewable Energy Advisor, Waste Management, Circular Economist, Climate Justice Advisor, Water Management Engineer, Policy and Governance Specialist, SDG Designer, Environmental Lawyer to name but a few.
The nature of ESS means that there are many student-centred learning activities that allow you to explore the subject. These have to involve working with others to understand multiple perspectives and gaining from the collective mind in your community.
Before diving into how humans interact with the world, you need to understand how ecosystems function, how matter and energy flow through these systems and the very nature of systems themselves. The concepts of perspectives, value systems and sustainability then infuse the whole course.
As an IB Diploma course, ESS is officially classed as an interdisciplinary course between the Sciences and Individuals and Societies but one could say that it is actually truely multidisciplinary and therefore the future of eduction now! Students need to be able to analyse text and images for environmental messages with different perspectives; is it green-washing? Although not aquiring a new language, students need to be culturally aware and understand how different cultures, including indigenous cultures understand, and live in the environment. Skills are developed in map interpretation, survey design, interviewing, experiemental design, fieldwork, modelling and system analysis.
Once the challenges in a system are understand, the focus is very much on the solutions that could be applied to solve this situation, the perspectives that might influence the solution chosen and the effectiveness of said solution. There is scope for personalisation of the course for students to implement their own solutions.
ESS requires students to have studied local and global examples of systems, challenges and solutions in context. These may be local to the student, i.e. in their own locality, but it could and should include examples from around the world so that students are culturally aware. From 2024, students will need to have a much greater understanding of indigenous knowledge and environmental justice.