Ms Jerrica Spizarsky Brown
Reflections from the 2009 Toyota International Teacher Program
When I was in elementary school or junior high I remember doing a poster board project for one of my classes on the rainforests. It was an environmental protection poster focusing on the destruction and deforestation of the rainforests. On the poster board one of the countries of focus was Costa Rica due to the amount of rainforest that covers the country. While many other countries have rainforest, I remember thinking “It would be a terrible thing if all the rainforests disappear. I want to go see the rainforests in Costa Rica before they are gone.” That thought became a reality when I received a scholarship through the Institute of International Education and Toyota Motor Corporation to go to Costa Rica for two weeks with a group of twenty-five teachers to study sustainability and environmental conservation and protection.
I am a High School Spanish teacher. My knowledge focuses on language, culture, customs, and traditions. I have traveled a lot and love learning about the people of a country and their culture (way of life.), however I have never traveled with a focus on environmental conservation. In my free time I enjoy spending time outdoors and exploring nature by camping, hiking, and an occasional bike ride, but my knowledge about sustainability and global conservation issues came from what I read in magazines and see on the television. Before the trip to Costa Rica I had a very basic knowledge of the true issues of global warming, climate change, and sustainability. While seeing the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore, would have been a great introduction to these issues that we face I have not even acquired that knowledge.
I first started investigating these issues on a deeper level when I had to answer questions from Professor Tom Dunne on Sustainable Living Systems, Global Climate Change and its Implications, Water Resources Management, and Environmental Consequences of Land Use. The research and readings broke down the issues under the umbrella of sustainability. It made the different aspects of the issues clear to me. Due to the limited knowledge that I had about these issue I had to do a lot of research on the Internet to find the information that was being asked of me. I answered the questions feeling a bit more knowledgeable about the issues, but not like an expert in the topics.
The trip to Costa Rica and all the activities we did in country went hand in hand with the mission of Toyota and environmental conservation. While I was there, learning about the issues, I still felt like my strengths were in other areas that were not necessarily focused on during this trip. However, I know that each participant brought his or her own expertise and experience to the trip. Each person contributed with the knowledge that they had. For example, I could communicate with the people, translate, learn and teach idiomatic phrases, and learn and interpret about their livelihood in the country but I was at the basic stages of learning about the environment and environmental conservation.
As a result of the working knowledge that I had coming to the country, I learned an immense amount of information on this trip. I learned that even though I am just one person I can help the Earth in little ways, like bringing cloth bags to the grocery store, recycling all the materials that I can, using both sides of the paper in my classroom and at home, turning off electronic equipment and lights when they are not being used. This trip opened my eyes to the many different ways people are trying to help the Earth and slow down the negative affects that humans are causing on Earth. Although I don’t feel like an expert in any of these topics, I feel that with the help of all the notes I took on the trip I can work on better informing my students of materials we can recycle and ways we can help the Earth. With a little bit more research on the focus topics, I hope to do so with lessons and projects created from the information from the trip to Costa Rica.
After visiting rainforest, cloud forests, volcanoes, universities and secondary schools in Costa Rica I feel extremely fortunate to have had this experience. I got to see the rainforests before they disappeared, as was my desire as a child. I can only hope that they won’t disappear so that my students, my children, and many generations can have the same experience of seeing the rainforests, cloud forests, and natural beauty of Costa Rica like I did. During the two weeks I was on this journey, I met twenty-five incredible teachers from all over the United States, have grown as a person in new ways, and learned more about environmental conservation and sustainability. I hope to be able to teach this information with more passion then I learned it with. Costa Rica is a majestic country that the world can learn a lot from.