“We must teach our students that they can be architects of the future, rather than its victims.” - Buckminster Fuller, architect and philosopher

That was the quote use by Explorer West Middle School teacher Ben Wheeler on April 26 to explain the driving force behind the sustainability curriculum he has taught EW students for the past six years, and the words he shared with 16 Japanese middle school teachers touring United States schools with sustainability curricula.

Called the Japan-U.S. Teacher Exchange Program for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), the exchange brought Japanese teachers to the States in April for a tour of schools “to learn about ESD efforts and strengthen ESD curricula in both countries.” In June up to 24 U.S. teachers will travel to Japan to tour their schools for the same purpose (although Wheeler said he will not make the trip).

Explorer West, located at 10015 28th Ave S.W. in West Seattle, was chosen as a stop along the tour because of their longstanding sustainability program and the number of awards it has won over the years at the local, regional and national level, Wheeler said.

The Japanese teachers' visit started out with a slideshow and presentation from Wheeler, a history teacher who incorporates economic, environmental and societal sustainability into his teachings. After that, EW students came into the classroom and sat down with their visitors for a teacher-student exchange. The kids talked about their experiences while the teachers, in some cases with the help of an interpreter, listened and asked questions.

“It is a big new topic that people are trying to figure out and for most schools it is more of just a green campus thing – which is great, you know, start close to home,” Wheeler said, “but then you sort of grow it from there to, 'What about the health of the community, food issues, what kind of food is being served in the cafeteria?'

“Our curriculum is pretty unusual, our entire 8th grade social studies course is global studies … so instead of another history course we do global issues and sustainability the entire year, which is just magical because 8th graders are young adults basically … their eyes are opened up to the world and they really want to know what is going on, they don’t want it sugar-coated, they want to know, ‘What are the issues, what are the challenges like climate change, population growth, food and water issues and what are the solutions?’ They want to know, ‘What can we do?’ so we try to make that class very solutions oriented.”

To that point, Wheeler said his 8th grader’s final project for the school year is learning the principles of sustainable design, including mimicking nature in design and “looking at the inputs and outputs of the ecosphere. What do we get from the ecosphere to make a chair or a car or a boat, and what do we put back into the ecosphere as we look at the life cycle of that product? So, pretty radical approach to design, which these kids have to learn how to do …”

That may sound pretty intense for 8th graders, but Wheeler believes in his students abilities, realizes they are our future, and employs an approach that harkens back to the Buckminster Fuller quote.

“They have to redesign the world, basically,” he said. “If we are going to have 10 million people on the planet in 2050, what we are looking at around us – this is not going to work – we already know that. We can and will do without oil. We can’t do without food, we can’t do without water and we can’t do without the basic technologies we depend on, so they are going to figure this out for us we hope.

“We have left them a few potholes, so our biggest goal is to enable them, through sustainability literacy, to take that challenge on.”

The Japanese-U.S. teacher exchange program is administered by Fulbright Japan and funded by the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the U.S. Department of State and the Japanese Government’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

For more information on Explorer West Middle School, visit www.explorer-west.org.