Rosedale teacher wins national energy award for second time
Carl Hnatyshyn
Jun 11, 2020 • Last Updated June 16, 2020 • 5 minute read
Rosedale Public School teacher Deborah Lumley won the 2020 Royal Canadian Geographic Society/Shell Energy Educator of the Year award (primary) for the second time in four years, for her outstanding commitment to environmental education. Handout/Sarnia This Week
Rosedale Public School teacher Deborah Lumley has done it again.
The ecologically-minded Grade 5/6 educator has again been named the Royal Canadian Geographic Society/Shell's 2020 Energy Educator of the Year (primary) for her ongoing commitment to creating environmental awareness and developing environmental literacy among her students. She last won the award in 2016.
Lumley and her class – along with nearly 40,000 students from across Canada – participated in the 2020 Shell/Canadian Geological Society's Classroom Energy Diet Challenge, a long-running, award-winning educational program that provides classes with 16 creative tasks to complete, activities focused on energy conservation.
As part of this year's competition, students were asked to complete a number of challenges – such as going an hour without power, calculating their own carbon footprint and finding ways in their own homes to use less water – activities designed to promote a greater understanding of energy conservation on a local, regional and global level.
This is the seventh consecutive year Lumley had her students involved with the Energy Diet Challenge. As in past years, for successfully completing challenges and achieving goals, the class won prize money, part of which went towards a local wildlife rehabilitation facility, with the balance placed in a fund Lumley created to build an outdoor classroom at Rosedale Public School.
Her efforts in motivating and inspiring her students and her commitment to environmental education were noted in the nominations she received from community members, parents as well as past and present students.
Monica Brown and her son Grayson were among those who recommended that Lumley win the Energy Educator of the Year award for a second time.
"The activities (Grayson) brought home highlighted questions and topics that we could address as a family," Monica Brown said. "We've made a lot of changes around the house, including watching our water and electricity consumption, and using reusable bags and food storage containers. This is really all thanks to Ms. Lumley. Her enthusiasm and commitment to these initiatives helping us do our part to protect the environment."
Lumley said she was happy to receive the award again, adding she thoroughly enjoyed helping empower her students.
"I was thrilled to be chosen again as the Energy Educator of the Year," she said. "Having my students' environment work recognized is rewarding. Improving energy literacy and geo literacy helps students to explore the global, regional and local perspectives of environmental issues we face in our world today."
The 16 challenges undertaken as part of this year's Energy Diet Challenge – along with some other supplementary activities – taught her students about the profound effect that their own actions can have in helping mitigate pressing environmental issues.
"Together we focused on taking action this year," she said. "We looked at things like what can we do at home with our families, what we can do within our community.
"We did a project on plastic migration and species migration using the Canadian Geographic tiling maps and the National Geographic program and combined the two to come up with this large project," Lumley added. "We also used 10,000 Changes program– another Canadian Geographic initiative – and combined them all together to create a video and complete the 16 energy conservation activities."
Since she introduced the Energy Diet Challenge into her classroom seven years ago, Lumley said the program has inspired numerous students through its hands-on challenges and through the friendly competition that takes place with other schools across the country, to take a closer look at environmental issues and help them understand they can make a tangible difference.
"(Seven years ago when I started with) the Energy Diet, that was the beginning of me focusing on environmental issues, trying to integrate environmental things into each of the topics that I teach," Lumley said. "Plus in grade five you teach energy conservation, so (the Energy Diet Challenge) was the perfect connection for teaching geo literacy and energy literacy. The concepts of sustainability and conservation can be implemented in all curriculum areas with the goal of inspiring students to become change-makers, to take that action."
In addition to completing challenges, winning prize money and Lumley receiving her latest award, her Grade 5/6 Rosedale class also won recognition (and more prizes) for their environmental activism and filmmaking from the Nova Scotia-based Ocean School, an organization founded by the National Film Board and Dalhousie University to engage youth in ocean science.
"We entered the Take Action competition for Ocean Schools," she said. "With that particular competition we entered the Evolving Ecosystems category, which looked at actions we can take to protect our marine ecosystems. So we created a video about marine species and plastic migration, focusing on what we could do because the students through their research realized that any piece of plastic thrown on the ground will migrate to any water system, to the Great Lakes and to the ocean, to anywhere in the world.
"We won a virtual reality headset, a 360 degree camera and once schools are back open, the Ocean School's people will come to Rosedale to teach us how to use those items to create films and they'll also make a presentation," Lumley added.
She also mentioned another brand new development in her aim of developing her students' environmental literacy on a global scale.
Next year, Lumley's Rosedale class will be partnering up virtually with a classroom in Uganda as part of an Africa youth and women community alliance program to complete the Energy Diet Challenge.
"This group in Uganda actually contacted me and the Canadian Geographic Society, so next year when the Energy Diet is happening, they want to connect to our classroom," she said. "It's just something that underlines global action … and it's really exciting."
While Lumley herself is modest about her significant achievements of this past year, adding that she gets her inspiration from Dr. Jane Goodall in helping promote a greener world, the Royal Canadian Geographic Society's director of education, Michelle Chaput, said that the Sarnia educator deserves all the plaudits coming her way.
"Ms. Lumley and her group of students, as well as all the other participating classrooms across the country, were able to overcome significant obstacles and complete the challenges in new and creative ways," Chaput said in a statement. "She is a local energy hero and I'm thrilled that she is getting national recognition for her trailblazing efforts."
To view the video submitted by Lumley's Rosedale class to Ocean School's Take Action competition, visit https://youtu.be/5gyf_rxC958.
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