Teacher in Development

I am not an environmentalist, but I live on this Earth and hope to never see it self-destruct. I read this article from Fast Company today: Resources: The Revolution Begins and just started thinking, I wonder what kind of impact the ESL industry has on the environment?

I started thinking about:

1. All the trees we destroy for the paper we use in our lovely course-books and their ever so important companion workbooks and teacher’s editions.

2. All the trees we destroy for TOEIC and TOEFL exams (the first two I could think of.) - and let’s not forget all the books we publish to hack - umm, prepare for these tests.

3. All the regular, paper based reports we dish out: student attendance, progress reports, tests etc.

4. All our publicity: brochures, posters, business cards etc.

5. I use, I admit, a fair amount of paper too. Most of my classes have gone bookless, but I still print lots of articles etc, from the net. While not as destructive as a course-book, I think I am still needlessly consuming.

So yeah, I’d say our industry has a pretty big contribution to environmental problems around the globe.

I read the Fast Company article and I thought…now this is interesting. It’s a bit scary. But I really enjoyed the FC spin. To begin solving the problem, we shouldn’t go “doomsday.” We should look for innovative ways to go green, and develop sustainable businesses in doing so.

“…a group of big thinkers has emerged in the past decade to put a newtwist on the green dream–people like William McDonough, MichaelBraungart, Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, and Paul Hawken. Rather thantaking ecological principles primarily as moral prohibitions, they suggest, why not see them as design challenges?” (Resources: The Revolution Begins. Giller, Roberts.)

The ESL design challenge. How about we adopt more technology friendly learning environments? Instead of course-books, use the net. Students could use bloglines and their own personal blog as their info catcher and notetaking tool. (No notebooks required.)

Reading, writing, and listening activities could also all be 100% digitally based by using blogs, online articles, and podcasts.

Instead of cds, why not help your students get ipods or inexpensive mp3 players as a part of your service. (I’m already planning how to do this when I get my company rolling.)

Companies could go for paperless reporting solutions with their clients, which would cut down paper waste, increase reporting speed and efficiency, and just make the whole process smoother. Sure there would be hurdles to jump, and adoption would likely be difficult at first, but going 100% green is very doable. I know the folks at www.english360.com are working on some pretty exciting stuff that could maybe open the road to this sort of thing at some point.

Doable aside, now that I’m in the middle of trying to get my own company off the ground, I am seeing this as a very possible USP. (Unique Selling Point.) I have never seen a Green English course. I have never seen an environmentally friendly language school either. But around here, in some places, there is a rising interest in going green. What if you could build a high quality, 100% green language development solution? What if, and more importantly, why not? There’s nothing stopping us but our own laziness and addiction to doing things the way they’ve always been done.

The Green language learning solution. Crazy ideas, or a possible niche? What do you think?