44
The next questions, 16 and 17, give some clues. Question 16 was: ‘How much do your students observe trees and environment from the human point of view?’ According to 29% of the teachers, 50% of their students observe trees from the human point of view. This result is possibly affected by school education and its human-centered orientation. It must be remembered that the ecological orientation, born especially after the publication of the Report of the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth in 1972, is not very old, and the information in the teachers’ textbooks does not usually contain the latest state of discourse. Encouraging results, however, are obtained in the answers to question 17: ‘How much your students observe trees and the environment from the point of view of the whole ecosystem?’ According to 28% of the teachers, 50% of their students observe trees from an ecological point of view. This means that the human and ecological points of view are represented equally. A difference is revealed, however, when we observe the groups of more committed students. According to 12% of the teachers, ecological thinking creates 90% of their students’ motivation. The success of ecological teaching is perhaps even clearer in the finding that 44% of the teachers consider ecological thinking to create 60-90% of the students’ motivation to observe and care about trees. In turn, there were no observations of students for whom the ecological motivation would have been under 30%.
Pedagogical conclusions For future development of the ENO programme it seems necessary to find a pedagogical model which could combine leisure and non-profit activities with the educational duties of the students and teachers. As mentioned above, we view this as interest-directed learning. In order to be able to identify the knowledge, skills and attitudes that the students have acquired through their hobbies, teachers need to develop their imaginative capacity. This could enable pedagogical innovations needed in finding connecting points between the aims of the school lessons and the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the students. An example could be a student whose hobby is philately and who is trying to write an essay on history. His assignment can be formulated so that he can use his expertise on the pictures and symbols on stamps. Alternatively, he might be able to tell the history of, e.g. ecology