Schools for a Living Planet Goes North

WWF Canada

Today WWF is proud to announce the launch of a unique educational initiative funded by CIBC for schools in Canada’s North.
WWF is expanding its Schools for a Living Planet resources for students across the Northwest Territories (NWT), including curriculum for Grades 3 to 8 on issues such as climate change and northern waters and ecosystems.
This opportunity to bring locally-relevant resources to northern classrooms is a very special one and will help connect hundreds of students to their own regions, watersheds, species and communities.

"Robert Service School is located on Tr'ondek Hwech'in traditional territory. The Tr'ondek Hwech'in people were traditionally a nomadic people, following the salmon run and caribou herds across the land," says teacher Melissa Hawkins. "Both Elders and environmentalists are calling for schools here to reconnect the curriculum to the land." © Robert Service School
Robert Service School is located on Tr’ondek Hwech’in traditional territory. “The Tr’ondek Hwech’in people were traditionally a nomadic people, following the salmon run and caribou herds across the land,” says teacher Melissa Hawkins. “Both Elders and environmentalists are calling for schools here to reconnect the curriculum to the land.”
© Robert Service School

WWF’s Schools for a Living Planet is a very well-established school program – engaging more than 9,000 teachers across Canada – but we discovered that it wasn’t being widely accessed by northern teachers where northern issues and contexts differ from southern classrooms. Environmental resources adapted to the North, teachers told us, were hard to find. So WWF-Canada teamed up with Ecology North, an environmental organization based in Yellowknife, to create a curriculum made by northerners for a northern context.
Teachers across the territory were consulted to come up with a tailor-made resource tested in NWT classrooms with glossary terms available in seven official NWT languages. The curriculum also gives teachers the tools and resources to adapt environmental education to the NWT’s cultural curriculum.
The team at Chief Sunrise Education Centre focus on four key goals: "To improve the diet of our students and their families by improving access to affordable, healthy foods; To educate students and their families about the environmental impact of food production and transportation; To reduce our carbon footprint associated with food production and transportation; and to build capacity within the community." © Chief Sunrise Education Centre
The team at Chief Sunrise Education Centre focuses on four key goals: “To improve the diet of our students and their families by improving access to affordable, healthy foods; To educate students and their families about the environmental impact of food production and transportation; To reduce our carbon footprint associated with food production and transportation; and to build capacity within the community.”
© Chief Sunrise Education Centre

WWF-Canada’s Schools for a Living Planet program empowers educators and students of all ages with the tools they need to lead us into a sustainable future. It was important for us to extend this curriculum into the North, a priority conservation area for WWF, where conserving important ecosystems is fundamental to creating a healthy and sustainable long-term economic and environmental future for the region.
Today we are pleased to be launching the new curriculum with CIBC and presenting it to a gathering of 900 members of the Northwest Territories Teacher’s Association in Yellowknife.