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CHAPPAQUA, NY, July 31, 2012 — Earlier this month several local area teachers, including Janine Fugarino of , took time away from their summer vacations to dive into a topic of growing importance in many classrooms: sustainability and how best to teach it.
Fugarino, a life and physical sciences teacher in the , joined over twenty other educators at the 2012 CELF Summer Institute, an intensive 4-day teacher training workshop that took place mid-July at Manhattanville College.
Designed to help educators seamlessly integrate Education for Sustainability (EfS) practices into existing curriculum across all subject areas, the professional development workshop is one of many programs developed and run by Chappaqua-based Children’s Environmental Literacy Foundation (CELF). This year’s Institute marked CELF’s fifteenth summer workshop to date. In June, CELF kicked off a specialized EfS curriculum-training program for New York City’s public schools, having been tapped by the New York City Department of Education as a leading authority on the subject.
According to CELF’s Executive Director Katie Ginsberg, the goal of the Institute is for every participant to “walk away not only with a better understanding of how to teach sustainability and systems concepts, but also with a set of relevant and exciting lesson plan ideas for immediate implementation.”
Joining the Fugarino at the Institute were a wide variety of private and public schools from the Westchester County, NY, Fairfield County, CT and the greater New York City regions including: Harrison High School and Louis M. Klein Middle School (N.Y.), Hastings High School (N.Y.), Rippowam Cisqua in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., Pleasantville Middle School (N.Y.), the Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., Greenwich Country Day School (C.T.), three schools in the Danbury Public School District (C.T.) and two New York City area schools. Additionally, for the first time the program included international participation, with the enrollment of an academic supervisor from a United Arab Emirates private school.
Generously funded by corporations, private foundations and individual donors, the Institute has provided professional development and curriculum design support for hundreds of teachers over the past eight years. Con Edison is a longtime advocate of CELF, as is Praxair, a Fortune 300 corporation headquartered in Danbury. Praxair provided full scholarships to teachers from the Danbury Public School District.
For more information about CELF or the CELF Summer Institute, go to www.celfeducation.org.
