From Window magazine: Teaching Green

Mike Town wins national acclaim – and inspires students to reach further – with a focus on environmental education

While a missile can be aimed across continents, teaching and learning are more akin to throwing gravel in a pond. Sure, ripples go out, but exactly what a university like Western accomplishes might not be entirely clear until years or decades after graduation. Did inspiration really take root? Was a key lesson really learned?

How far will those ripples go?

Then someone like Mike Town, ‘84 and ‘85, helps change the world. And you know the collaboration works.

Town got direction in life from Western and Huxley College of the Environment. And he, in turn, has given direction to about 1,500 of his environmental education students at Redmond High School, while successfully lobbying for new wilderness and pioneering alternative energy in his “spare” time.

And his “pay it forward” enthusiasm and strategies are beginning to influence high school teaching across the country.

After winning a $25,000 national prize in environmental education, Town, 51, is now an Einstein Fellow at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., hoping his success at putting high school students in the front line to fight global warming will inspire environmental education nationally.

“I want to do in public high schools what Huxley College did in American universities,” he says. “Huxley was the first, or one of the first, environmental colleges in the nation that brought an interdisciplinary, problem-solving approach to environmental education. I want environmental science as an interdisciplinary curriculum to become a common core class in high schools.”

Read the rest of this story on the website for Window magazine.