ZEMCH 2015 - International Conference Proceedings | Page 45

The first step towards education role is to pave the way for our children to find their purpose in life instead of making their decisions; children can be concerned about the environment equally as they are concerned about other subjects and that comes by enhancing awareness about sustainability and what are the negative impacts of the daily practices towards the environment and how the children can help in reducing the CO2 emissions; if the children are treated like they make a difference in the world, they will make a difference. The second step is to motivate the children to work with others to build a sustainable future by developing their social skills and encourage them to participate in environmental activities out of school. The third step is to develop the human right education and focus on efficiencies and how the school is managing to reduce energy consumption, minimizing waste and water use, and link it to the classroom learning. Figure 11 shows how to approach education for sustainability, it includes different adjectival approaches (Human rights education, environmental education, peace education, and multicultural education), schools should not neglect the social , economic and political factors in addition to the environmental factor; to achieve a sustainable learning these five areas should be covered within the school curriculum (Gilbert 2004:195): • Studies that support social sustainability • Studies that support economic sustainability • Studies that support ecological sustainability • Studies that support democratic sustainability Figure.11 Sustainability Strategy Model (Calder & Smith 1992:12) Because sustainability is hard to define, one of the biggest challenges in educational sector is to teach sustainability, it might be easier to change the young generation behaviours than adults as children are more flexible and easier to adapt, on the other hand, it is a great responsibility to prepare a generation who will be the decision maker for the future, therefore the academic experience should be rich of tangible resources and professionalism in teaching. Developing environmental practices from social aspects: a case study of Dubai 43