by editor | May 1, 2012 | K-12 Classroom Resources
By Jana Dean
From a talk given at the United Nations.
was invited to speak here because I spend a lot of time with some of the funniest, most hopeful and energetic people on the planet: thirteen and fourteen year olds. While my official charge is to teach math and science concepts, my students learn best when I engage them with the forces that shape their lives.
One of the strongest forces confronting my students is ever increasing pressure to consume manufactured goods, in spite of a global environmental crisis. The U.S. advertising industry spends 150 times more a year marketing to children than it did when I was in high school. Rich or poor, the ads tell them, they have the freedom to buy: This comes in lots of forms: ipods; skateboards; shoes; game consoles; cell phones; purses; clothing. . . . and most recently, GREEN.
As though simply purchasing the right goods will solve our environmental problems. Granted, some consumer choices are far better than others. Better to drive a Prius than a Hummer, better a paper cup than Styrofoam, better fluorescent than incandescent. But to exercise stewardship only through consumer choices is an extremely limited stewardship indeed.
Finding solutions to climate change requires cultural transformation. The freedom to buy even if it’s green won’t get us out of this mess. We need a culture focused on collective decisions that remake our infrastructures and re-form the way we live and work together.
As a teacher, I have the power to lead youth to transform culture. Both climate change and systemic change are complex and can evoke paralyzing fear, making uniting across differences difficult. And yet uniting across socioeconomic, philosophical and political differences is just what needs to happen as humanity faces the global crisis. The public school classroom, with its forced diversity, can be a place to overcome fear and learn the power of collective action. As I tell you one teacher’s story of teaching about climate change, keep in mind that my classroom is a microcosm of the larger culture.
The first time I taught about global warming, I took my cue from my student’s textbook “Weather and Climate”. It was published by Prentice Hall in 2000 and devoted one page of its 175-page middle school science book to global warming. The language was vague:
“human activities MAY be warming the earth’s atmosphere
“if carbon dioxide traps more heat, the result COULD be global warming.”
The little bit that was there however presented an opportunity to make the connections necessary to plant some seeds for change.
I teach 8th grade in the small town of Tumwater, in Washington State. While mostly white, my students are socio-economically diverse. Our community – typical of small US towns — offers few private schools, and it has only two middle schools, both of which serve a similar mix of suburban and rural areas: Education is compulsory and I teach the wealthy students along with the poor.
This community is extremely dependent on carbon-releasing fuels. Housing prices and lack of public transit are to blame. Population growth in our county has been among the fastest in the nation and affordable housing has leapfrogged into the county’s rural areas while bus service has declined. Homes in the urban core have increased tremendously in value, farm and forest land in outlying areas provide for comparatively inexpensive new housing.
My middle school students are prisoners of an infrastructure that is not their invention. My students do not walk to school. Most of them cannot walk to school, nor can they ride bikes. Distances are too great and safe passage in crossing the interstate and busy boulevards is impossible given the constraints of daylight and the lack of sidewalks. Climate change demands that we transform fossil-fuel dependent infrastructures so that the next generation of Tumwater kids can get to school without driving.
Instead of using the single page devoted to climate change provided by our textbook, I presented my students the evidence about climate change: shrinking glaciers; increased wild fires; spread of malaria; more frequent flooding of coastal cities during storm events. We studied ocean currents, atmospheric convection and the volume of water at different temperatures and in different states. Scared by such drastic changes and the implication that their way of life was the problem, my students balked. Cody said, “What are you trying to tell me Ms. Dean? I can’t drive a truck?!” Just a generation ago Tumwater depended almost entirely on the woods for its economy. In Cody’s mind work means driving a truck, and thanks to the advertising industry, it means the freedom to drive the open roads of the West. He and his classmates expect to be able to drive a truck just like their fathers and grandfathers do. In learning about climate change, they felt scared and stuck and they didn’t like it.
My official charge as a public school teacher is to teach hundreds of isolated academic objectives, to be achieved, individually, by each of my students. Such schooling isolates subjects from one another and separates learning from the forces active in students’ lives. In the thirteen years since I became a teacher, this has gotten worse, much worse. Rather than creating an engaging, integrated, and rigorous context for learning, the current school reform effort charges teachers with tracking and assessing achievement of individuals. This focuses teachers on trying to make students better, without examining the dysfunctional system in which students find themselves. It’s kind of like buying a more energy efficient car and then moving 40 miles out of town for cheaper rent in order to make the car payments. When my students resisted learning about climate change, I could have dropped the subject right then and given a test. I didn’t.
Fear short-circuits critical thinking. I knew that we’d be more likely to be able to push through to more learning if we took the time to talk about how we feel: that way emotions and thoughts wouldn’t get so muddled up in each other. But in my experience, asking eighth graders to name their feelings can be like trying to get a stone to talk.
So I asked the class, “How many of you have ever had a time when things were going wrong and you felt there was nothing you could do about it?” Nearly every hand went up. In nearly every story they told, they were in trouble alone.
My students’ greatest asset in getting past their fear of climate change was right under their noses: They had each other. When my school was built about ten years ago, the state had promised smaller class sizes. I have room for about twenty-four students in my room. I usually have over thirty. From the first day of school I ask my students, “Why would you shoe-horn so many people into such a small space and not rely on each other?” Limited space and resources can force interdependence.
After students had shared their stories I reminded them “As we continue to learn about global warming, expect to be scared sometimes. In most of your stories you were alone. In the global warming story, we’ll have each other.”
I pressed my students to think past individual contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and consider what we could do together about global warming. We examined sources of CO2 and methane and the ways that the production of almost everything we consume relies on the burning of fossil fuels.
As students examined what it took to make the goods they consume, they chose to look at everything from apples to playing cards to computer consoles. Every item traced to carbon-releasing fuels. At one point Madeleine looked up at me from her study of apples and said, “But Ms. Dean, we have to eat.” Other students vowed to change their ways. Chandra smiled at me one afternoon and said “I’m going to plant a garden.” Ryan started limiting his family’s consumption of aluminum cans. At the same time, Katrina vowed that she still planned to drive a truck, with a carburetor and Luke announced, “Well you know Ms. Dean, I still want a car!”
I kept a list of climate change solutions sorted under the headings “I can . . .” “We can . . .” and “They can . . .” I wanted students to see what was within their power and control. They decided that the place where they had some power was in their school. And at that point, our school sent all of its waste to the landfill 150 miles away. They researched CO2 emissions from transportation and methane released from landfills and discovered that shifting the waste stream of our school from the landfill to recycling would make a difference. With help from the custodian my students designed a sustainable system and taught the rest of the school about the connection between waste and greenhouse gasses. They organized their community to behave differently. In the words of Cheryl, who is now a student at Tumwater High School, “Teaching everyone in our school about global warming was fun, but what was really cool was that we made change together. Even the other classes are into it.”
By itself, their collective action is not much, yet it represents the unification across socioeconomic, philosophical and political boundaries necessary to change our culture into one that can work together to remake infrastructures. My students experienced something revolutionary in a time of relentless emphasis of individualism. They learned that working together, and in spite of their fear, they could, in fact, create systemic change that meant more than individual choices alone. Since their initial effort, the system has sustained itself in spite of twice-over turnover in students and significant changes in staff. That is cultural change.
My hope is that the my students’ success as change agents will provide them with the mindset and tools to move their culture toward collective action. My hope is that their experience will support them in transcending the barriers, that keep us focused on individual choices rather than on the systemic changes needed to mitigate global warming.
Schooling needs to stop emphasizing individual achievement of isolated academic objectives and use the opportunity provided by shared time and space to transcend boundaries and work together to understand issues that deeply impact our communities. Teachers have the skills and students have the potential to make connections between what they learn in school and the rest of the world. As long as political forces continue to fragment academic subjects from each other and make talented teachers into managers of student progress, our schools will struggle to give us what that the world needs: citizens with the capacity to understand complex systems and unite with each other as agents of cultural change. Now, more than ever, we need less emphasis on individual achievement and the individual freedom to buy. Instead we need an ever deepening understanding of our interdependence and a renewed commitment to each other.
Jana Dean is an eighth grade teacher in Tumwater, Washington. She is the author of the article “Living Planet, Living Imaginations” that appeared in Clearing way back in 1993.
by editor | Apr 24, 2012 | K-12 Classroom Resources
1. YardMap
YardMap is a free, interactive, citizen science mapping project about habitat creation and low-impact land use from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, designed to cultivate a richer understanding of bird habitat for both professional scientists and people concerned with their local environments. YardMap uses web technology to let users construct landscape maps using real satellite images of their own backyard. Map your yard, track birds, and measure your impact.
http://content.yardmap.org/
2. World Environment Day Contest
Students, teachers, classes, or schools across the globe participating in an environmental activity that involves students in grades K-12 are invited to enter their project into the Project Earth 2012 World Environment Day Contest. The deadline for entry is June 5, 2012.
http://www.projectearth.net/Competition/Details/0b755bf6-7839-488d-a414-562465c18af9
3. Endangered Species Day
National Endangered Species Day is May 18, 2012. The Endangered Species Day website features a Teacher Resource Center with sample science and art lesson plans, and more.
http://www.stopextinction.org/esd.html
4. Greening STEM Planning Toolkits
This five-volume set of planning toolkits is being offered free to educators in honor of this year’s EE week theme, Greening STEM: The Environment as Inspiration for 21st Century Learning. The toolkits feature STEM activities and resources for all grade levels on Gardens & Schoolyards, Energy Efficiency, Geography Connections, Water Resources, and Climate & Weather. The kits highlight opportunities for project-based learning, service-learning, and citizen science.
http://eeweek.org/greening_stem/toolkits
5. Journey North
Journey North has launched for 2012; explore the interrelated aspects of seasonal change. Check out the free app for mobile phones and report your own observations.
http://www.learner.org/jnorth/season/
http://www.learner.org/jnorth/mobile/index.html
by editor | Apr 22, 2012 | K-12 Classroom Resources
By Mary Quattlebaum
“We have a garden! With flowers and butterflies!” The third graders beam as they describe their wildlife garden during my author visit to St. John the Baptist (SJB) School in Maryland.
I thought about their enthusiasm and the dedicated teachers and parent volunteer, Mary Phillips, I met that day as I researched and wrote Jo MacDonald Had a Garden (Dawn Publications 2012 – http://www.dawnpub.com/our-books/jo-macdonald-had-a-garden/). How best to convey a child’s joy in digging and planting while offering teachers and parents helpful information on starting and/or teaching with a school or backyard garden?
These days, schools, such as SJB, can be the venues best positioned for nurturing a child’s wonder in the natural world. I grew up with a dad who shared his curiosity about nature with his seven kids and umpteen grandkids and showed us how to garden. (He’s the model for Old MacDonald, Jo’s grandfather, in my book, which is an eco-friendly riff on the popular song “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”)
But in today’s fast-paced, busy world and with diminishing green spaces, these “growing experiences” and “life lessons” may be missing from childhood.
Happily, SJB seems to be part of a national trend, with an increasing number of schools adding an “outdoor classroom” to the traditional learning environment. At the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), Senior Coordinator Nicole Rousmaniere, who manages school programs, shared recent statistics. More than 4200 schools have started schoolyard habitats that help sustain regional wildlife, she says, with an additional 300 to 400 being added yearly.
Rousmaniere emphasizes that commitment rather than size is the key to an effective “green education” from school gardens. Small can be powerful. Having children plant and care for native plants in containers or in a little patch beside a school can foster lessons in biology and stewardship. Indoor “green” activities pique youngsters’ interest in learning and doing even more. (Dawn has such activities online and in the back of all its children’s books, including Jo MacDonald Had a Garden.)
“Kids love a garden, but you’ve got to start them young,” says William Moss, a master gardener and horticultural educator. Advocating for school and small-space gardening, Moss writes the popular “Moss in the City” blog for the National Gardening Association, hosts HGTV’s “Dig In” and is a greening contributor to “The Early Show” on CBS.
Just about any subject can be taught through a garden, says Moss, including science, math, natural history, geography, nutrition, reading and writing.
A garden offers hands-on and experiential learning, says Phillips, the parent volunteer who helped SJB’s science teacher to create the school garden three years ago. Phillips has seen teachers use the garden to teach units on pollination, history, the food chain and the ozone. Her blog www.theabundantbackyard.com showcases student art inspired by the garden and by the art teacher’s lessons on Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings. An added bonus, says Phillips, is that the garden, in addition to enriching academic studies and creative expression, also stimulates the brain, enhances sensory awareness and gets kids outdoors for some exercise.
I thought of all these points so beautifully articulated by Moss, Phillips and Rousmaniere as I researched and wrote Jo MacDonald Had a Garden. My hope, along with illustrator Laura Bryant’s, was not only to playfully introduce youngsters to wiggling worms, fluttering birds and growing plants but to make it easy for teachers and parents to build on basic lessons.
School gardens can be the start of a learning experience that grows over a lifetime. As NWF’s Rousmaniere points out, just as schools teach the 3 R’s, so, too, they might provide a setting that connects children with and increases their knowledge about the natural world. One of the most important lessons to learn young is stewardship, says Rousmaniere, the idea that we are all caretakers of the earth and its wild inhabitants.
Resources for Starting and Learning from a School Garden
William Moss, horticultural educator www.wemoss.org
National Gardening Association www.kidsgardening.org
National Wildlife Federation www.nwf.org
Mary Phillips, school garden advocate www.theabundantbackyard.com
Mary Quattlebaum is the author of Jo MacDonald Had a Garden and numerous other children’s books. She and her family enjoy watching the birds, bugs and other wild creatures that visit their urban backyard habitat. www.maryquattlebaum.com
by editor | Apr 18, 2012 | K-12 Classroom Resources
Go back to main page
Butterfly Math (K-2 Science)
While teaching a unit on the butterfly lifecycle, have the students create original artwork showing floral scenes. Laminate and use these small butterfly gardens as fun work mats.
Unifix cubes or small counters can be used as butterflies. Challenge students to solve addition or subtraction problems, such as: If seven Yellow Sulpher butterflies flew into the garden and four Blue Azure Butterflies joined them, how many butterflies would be in the garden? If twelve caterpillars were eating leaves on the plant, four took a nap, how many were still eating? If there were fourteen eggs on one leaf and three hatched into larva, how many were left?
List and classify words on the board that students identify as the clues that helped them know whether to add or subtract.
— Rose Jewett, Ridgeview Elementary, Yakima WA
My Personal Symbol (K-2 Social Studies)
Have the class make a wall chart or “personal data sheet” that lists 10-15 categories which relate to the students’ lives. Examples of categories could include color of eyes or hair, whether they live in a city/town or in a rural area, whether they live next to a river, pond, etc… The students should then draw a small symbol which represents them, and then reproduce that symbol for every category they belong under. A discussion could follow about what it feels like to be part of a group, and if there are certain stereotypes that come from being within one group and why.
— Rusty Schumacher, Clague Middle School, Ann Arbor MI
Pond Journal (K-2 Language Arts)
Have the class go to a pond every few months to make observations of a fresh water managed habitat. When at the pond, discuss what the kids are seeing, observing wildlife, natural featues and changes in all of these things since their last trip. Photos or video tap can be taken of each trip. Back in the classroom, record observations in the student’s own words in their writing journals.
Use the photo journals as research data to determine what changes are happening at the pond. Have the student confference with the teacher to edit their writing to book spellings. As an extension to this activity, have the kids send their writings as e-mail to other first graders at another school. Together the classes at both schools learn about water habitats and practice their reading and writing skills. Students can also e-mail schools in other countries to learn about water habitats there.
Have the children generate questions based on the observations that they made, and give them a chance to ask these questions of a local community expert. The answers to their questions can become powerful lessons on the dynamics of life at managed pond habitats and the issues that come up about human and wildlife interactions. Have them e-mail their questions and responses to another school.
— Kristi Rennebohm-Franz, Sunnyside Elementary, Pullman WA
Wetland Animal Hats (K-2 Fine Arts)
Shape newspaper around the student’s head and secure the size of the hat by wrapping tape around the head and newspaper. Mold desired shape of hat by folding newspaper and stapling. Brush with half glue and half water mixture in order to mold the hat and then let itdry overnight.
When dry, paint with tempura paint and let dry again overnight. Decorate with feathers, plastic eyes, sequins to represent any wetland animal. Wear and enjoy!
— Maggie Meyer, Lakes Elementary, Lacey WA
Go back to main page
by editor | Apr 18, 2012 | K-12 Classroom Resources
Go back to main page
How Do Other Animals Deal with Garbage? (3-5 Science)
Students will discover how ants and other animals deal with waste materials they themselves have created. Split the students into groups that will each build an ant house, which will contain white sand and 2 cm3 of sugar solution. The houses should either be placed in a dark area or covered by black construction paper because ants prefer darkness. Each group will then add several dozen ants to the ant house. The students should add small amounts of food and garbage to the houses, and then wait to see which of the materials are eaten. A discussion could follow to try and discover why the ants ate what they did, and what they did with the garbage.
— Kent Wilkinson, West Valley Junior High School, Yakima WA
Salmon Life Cycle (3-5 Science)
Take a large rope and tie several smaller ropes to it. The larger rope represents the Columbia River and the smaller ropes represent its tributaries.
You will also need several small containers (baby food jars) containing scented cotton balls. We have used a variety of scents including cinnamon, lemon, almond pepper and others you can find in your spice cupboard. Color code clothes pins to match two differently scented jars smelled in a specific order. A scented jar is placed at the mouth of a tributary and another placed at the specific spawning site along the tributary. Group the students in pairs. Blindfold one student to represent the salmon swimming up the Columbia River to spawn. The second student represents a biologst. The biologist picks up a clothes pin and a card. The clothes pin and the card are attached to the student representing the salmon. The biologist will allow the salmon to smell the two scents indicated by the colors on the clothes pin.The card will mark the salmon a male or female.
As the salmon travels up the Columbia River the biologist will open scented jars along the way. The salmon searches for its spawning site based on the two scents the biologist presented at the beginning of this activity. When the salmon reach their spawning site, have students check clothes pins to identify male and female surviving salmon. This is a great life cycle activity. It also reinforces the percentages of survival in a real way that students can experience themselves.
— Randy Davis, East Valley School District, Yakima WA
Is Trash Really for the Birds? (3-5 Science)
Students will be able to discover how birds are affected by positive and negative waste. In groups, the students dismantle bird nests using forceps while separating the materials into natural and man-made piles. The students can discuss how they believe the birds find those materials, and if they believe the man-made materials are harmful or beneficial to the birds.
— Kent Wilkinson, West Valley Junior High School, Yakima WA
Cultural Taboos (3-5 Social Studies)
First the teacher explains that taboos are considered things one should not do in a specific culture. Students should then identify taboos that exist in their own culture. Then the students break up into groups of about 4-5 and create their own culture and the taboos that would govern their behavior. Without revealing these taboos, let the groups interact and see how the “foreigners” perform the host group’s taboos. Follow the activity with a discussion of how the groups felt when the foreigners performed the taboos and what they could have done to remedy the situation.
— Ruth Rigby, LeHigh Senior High School, LeHigh Acres FL
Pen Pals (3-5 Language Arts)
Have the students develop a partner group at another school, possibly in another country. This bridges gaps for kids and helps widen perceptions of other cultures. To write to students speaking another language, a translator will be needed. The teacher or students can locate an interpreter by contacting the local consulate member of the community, or local college or university. Other ideas may include exchanging materials which represent the classes and their watershed such as photographs, cultural artifacts or a collage of classroom activities. Discuss how perceptions of the other culture has changed and what the similarities and differences are.
— from GREEN Cross Cultural Partners Activities Manual
Salmon Mobile (3-5 Fine Arts)
First, have students learn to identify the body parts of a salmon. Then, provide the students an opportunity to draw salmon using an overhead, opaque projector or free hand. They can make the salmon three dimensional by stapling two salmon together around the outer edge, leaving a small opening to stuff with paper scraps. After the salmon is stuffed, finish stapling it together. Attach a fishing line to the center of the salmon. Hang the salmon at different heights in the classroom to give the room the appearance of being in the middle of a school of salmon on their way to the spawning grounds.
Have students write about where their salmon has been and where it is going.
— Randy Davis, East Valley School District, Yakima WA
Go back to main page
