ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION
Formal EE:
1. Preparing curriculum textbooks – As an outcome of the Honourable Supreme Court’s ruling on making environmental studies a compulsory subject at all levels of education, CPREEC has taken up the task of writing textbooks on environmental studies. Our textbooks emphasize on hands-on nature activities and adopt examples from everyday life to enable easy association.
Published textbooks:
- Environmental Studies for undergraduate students (University of Madras) Environmental Studies for classes I – V (CBSE syllabus) for Allied Publishers Private Limited
- Environmental Science for classes I – V (Matriculation syllabus, Tamilnadu) for Allied Publishers Private Limited
- Environmental Studies for Classes VI–XII (CBSE syllabus)
2. Teachers-training programmes – CPREEC has been organizing workshops for school / college teachers, in order to integrate EE into the school curricula, in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Orissa, Pondicherry, Tamilnadu and the Andaman and Nicobar islands. This initiative has been in collaboration with the State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT) and the District Institute of Education and Training (DIET).
3. Framing curriculum for Environmental Education – CPREEC has been actively involved and provided valuable inputs for developing the curriculum for environmental education in schools at the national as well as the state level.
Non-formal EE:
1. Exhibitions, workshops, seminars and training programmes are regularly conducted by the centre in order to raise the level of environmental awareness among the masses, with special focus on youth, women and grass root-level organisations.
2. Publications in the form of books, booklets, pamphlets, posters are prepared and distributed.
3. Our ‘video-on-wheels’ travelled extensively to different parts of south India and presented audio-visual shows and lectures.
MAJOR PROGRAMMES
- National Environment Awareness Campaign (NEAC)
- National Green Corps (NGC)
- Environmental orientation to school education (sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.)
- GLOBE (Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment) workshop for teachers
- Kids for Tiger (in collaboration with Sanctuary Asia Magazine and Britannia Industries)
- Workshop for textbook writers and curriculum developers (in collaboration with Directorate of Education, Government of Tamilnadu), 2004.
- Vatavaran Travels – Film festival (in collaboration with the Centre for Media Studies, New Delhi), 2004 & 2006.
- Establishment of the Multimedia Environmental Education Centre (MEEC) at the CPREEC campus (sponsored by the British Council, Chennai)
- GLOBE (Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment) workshop for teachers
- Environmental Journalism Seminar and Workshop (partnership with the International Centre for journalist, Washington D.C. and New Media, Bangalore), 2002
- Workshop on ‘Management of Environmental Information Resources’ for broadcasting journalists from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Srilanka (in collaboration with Asian Media Information & Communication Centre, Singapore).