by editor | Feb 1, 2010 | Place-based Education
Using the local community as a starting point for teaching interdisciplinary concepts and connecting students to the real world.
By Kim Stokely
Sixteen years ago, after attending a workshop on science teaching, I was driving home over a mountain pass when I stopped and looked out over the mountain valley. I thought, “Look at this science classroom! “Why isn’t this dynamic, inspiring world being used more for educating our children?” I went on to think, “Wouldn’t it be possible to connect our learning to something real, something tangible, something meaningful? What is the physical place that is common to all of us, defines a community, and binds us together? A watershed. Might we be able to connect learning to this? Could our watersheds be a container or focus for all our learning? Could we actually practice caring for a piece of land together?” Surprisingly, similar thinking, focusing on local landscapes and communities, was awakening or reawakening all over the globe, and from it emerged the practice of Place-Based Learning.
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“We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desks or schoolhouse, while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed, is absurd.” (Thoreau in Williams, 1998)
What is Place-Based Learning?
What is Place-Based Learning? It is simply using our place — where we live — as the context for learning. Place-Based Learning engages students in critical thinking and meaningful projects. It helps them connect to each other, their community, and the land.
David Sobel, in Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities (The Orion Society, 2004), defines Place-Based Education as, “The process of using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, and other subjects across the curriculum. Emphasizing hands-on, real-world learning experiences, this approach to education increases academic achievement; helps students develop stronger ties to their community; enhances students’ appreciation for the natural world; and creates a heightened commitment to serving as active, contributing citizens.”
Another way to think about this focus on place is to understand that a “grounded” or “rooted” learner stands within the world, acting on its many elements, rather than standing outside looking in, acting in large measure as an observer, which is the typical stance expected of students in schools. What is noticeable from our close observation of student work that has an embedded quality— meaning the student is in the community, researching aspects of its history, learning about local lore, researching and reconstructing aspects of a local watershed, etc.— is that the quality of the work deepens greatly, is more carefully attended to, assumes genuine meaning.
Students easily distinguish this rooted work from typical work in which they stand outside. A grounded, rooted learner understands that his/her actions matter, that they affect the community beyond the school. It is out of this particular formulation that the “student as resource to the community” takes shape — that understanding that students need to be thought of as productive assets to the health of a community. A pedagogy of place, then, recontextualizes education locally. It makes education a preparation for citizenship, both locally and in wider contexts, while also providing the basis for continuing scholarship (Rural Challenge Research and Evaluation Program, 1999).
The goals of Place-Based Learning commonly are to:
Enhance education. Place-Based Learning roots education in the community. Teaching practices and learning experiences encourage critical thinking, active engagement, high expectations, and meaningful experiences. It makes learning authentic and alive.
Encourage stewardship. The practice of getting to know a place and its people, of caring for that place, of monitoring its well-being over time, and of educating the community all encourages a deeper relationship with the place and a sense of caring and responsibility for it.
Inspire hope. When we come together for the good of our community and participate in maintaining and improving the well-being of our neighborhoods through civic action and environmental restoration, it inspires hope and helps us realize that we can make a difference.
Build community vitality. The hope, caring, and community spirit that develops from participating in things like “the simple act of planting a tree” helps a community appreciate its place and builds a sense of community spirit.
The following examples help tell the story of Place-Based Learning.
As a high school teacher of second language learners, I want students who feel disconnected from their homeland, their heritage, and culture to be able to reconnect here. I want them to acquire reading, writing, and speaking skills, and be able to use them proficiently. I want them to feel comfortable in our community and creative and competent in their skills. I want them to connect to their culture and place and be proud of who they are. Ultimately, I want them to love language, a diversity of cultures, and their environment. I want them to be able to work cooperatively with others, participate in our community, and develop a sense of profound citizenship and stewardship of the land.
You can imagine my delight in discovering the River of Words curricular model. When I first asked some of the students from the MHS Writer’s Club what they thought about the idea, they responded by asking, “We have a river?” I knew then how important it was to learn about our watershed together.
Our project focuses upon our specific community and watershed environment while using language acquisition methodologies that empower English Learner students. This model of connectivity reflects the focus of Paolo Friere’s critical pedagogy of place. He advocates “reading the world.” “Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world” (1987). Like Friere, I believe that when teachers and students engage in action and reflection to help them understand the world, they can change the world. It is this interaction with the world, the community, that is at the heart of Place-Based Learning. (Ocean Jones, Teacher, Merced, CA).
After his students participated as docents along the San Joaquin River, collected water quality data, propagated and restored native plants, removed graffiti from rocks along the river, and presented in classrooms, Steve Starcher, of Fresno Central High School, had this to say, “My special education high school students can now write a good five paragraph essay because they have something interesting to write about. They have motivation to write. Students enrolled in the watershed education program are ascending to new heights and viewing their world from a new perspective. As students learn about their watershed, they learn about themselves and contribute to the community.”
In SLEWS (Student and Landowner Education and Watershed Stewardship), a program of the Center for Land Based Learning, local high schools adopt privately-owned farms and ranches where they perform habitat restoration projects for the length of the school year.
The Defining Features of Place-Based Learning
Although Place-Based Learning evolves out of each community, and is therefore flavored with the characteristics of that place, commonalities exist from community to community:
• Place (local environment and community) is the context and the classroom.
• Community is the textbook.
• Content is specific to the geography, ecology, sociology, politics, and other dynamics of place.
• Curriculum and activities arise from the individual qualities of specific communities and the creative impulses of particular teachers and students (and community members) (Smith, 2002).
• The process engages students in real work that meets a real community priority. It is inherently experiential.
• Community is the teacher.
The questions and interests of the students become the center of the curriculum.
Teachers act more as co-learners and facilitators of learning rather than as instructors.
Collaborative, reciprocal partnerships develop between students, teachers, and the community.
Place-Based Learning is rooted in teaching practices that hold common principles, including: service-learning, project-based learning, problem-based learning, school-to-work, and Using the Environment as an Integrating Concept. Taken together, the defining features of each of these approaches forms the common core of Place-Based Learning.
Different Reasons to Engage
In our work, we have found that people come to Place-Based Learning from three major directions— school improvement and academic achievement, preserving and restoring environmental quality, and creating vital communities by building social capital.
It is the overlap of all three of these areas where high quality place-based learning is found.
There is a dynamic tension between these three elements — that together form a three-legged stool that will not stand if any of the legs is missing. Try to improve a school without actively engaging the community and your efforts won’t garner the budget support and human capital necessary for success. Emphasize community development without the involvement of the school and you won’t have the youthful energy that makes projects work. Build thriving local economies with little concern for the environment and you’ll find that businesses will have trouble attracting workers because people aren’t willing to raise children amidst deteriorated air and water. “When schools focus only on how education benefits the individual, they become the enemy of the community. They educate young people to leave and so fulfill the prophecy that these places are doomed to poverty, decline, and despair. Instead, we intend to rally communities to reinvent their schools as engines of renewal for the public good.”
(Cushman, 1997; Sobel, 2004).
Points of Departure Into the Place-Based Learning Process:
• Student Identified Need.
• Students complete a mapping project and school environmental audit.
• Students define problem, need, potential solutions.
• Students lead implementation; teacher facilitates.
Example: Through community mapping and environmental audit, students find that there is little recycling done at the school and that there is a serious trash problem on the school grounds and in nearby streams. Students research, design, and implement a school recycling program. They design a play about not littering, based on the book The Warthog Wizard, that they share with younger students.
• Community Identified Priority.
• Community asks for assistance (agency, business, parent).
• Students, teachers, and community partner identify learning opportunities.
Example: The local public utility would like to educate students, and the community, about keeping the local creek clean, because it is a source for drinking water. The students complete a mapping project to find the community and cultural perspectives of the creek, and to identify the most serious water quality issues. They complete a creek clean-up, plant native vegetation along the stream banks, and write, illustrate, and distribute a brochure to their neighborhood about how to help keep their drinking water clean.
• Standards Curriculum, content skills
• Identify specific content and skill areas to be addressed
• Select an area that supports classroom learning
• Look for additional learning opportunities from other subject areas
Example: Study expository writing, the history of the different cultures in the community, their roots and historic relationship to the land. Students collaborate with the local parks department and develop projects to make the parks more accessible to the varied cultures of the community. Students collaborate on articles, artwork, and photo essays on their vision for the parks. Students translate articles into Spanish.
A Common Vision
In whatever community and form that Place-Based Learning takes, students are engaged in real learning. After reading a description of a project in which fifth graders created an elegant guidebook for an historic walking tour of the city of Antrum, New Hampshire, David Sobel creates a picture of the benefits of Place-Based Learning:
“As I finish reading this, my throat tightens and tears come to my eyes. This feels right to me — this is what school is supposed to be. Let me see if I can articulate the crucial elements. The students and teachers here were all involved in solving a real problem: the preserving of history and the publication of a useful document for the town. In the process, they became creators, not just consumers, of knowledge. The teachers fostered an atmosphere of shared commitment —each student had a distinct, important job, and many parent volunteers, discipline experts, local business people, and senior citizens got swept up in making the project happen. The students developed articulated skills, and the teachers knew how to scaffold activities so that practice made perfect. The students did numerous practice interviews before doing the real ones. No slapdash efforts here —each piece of work was refined. There was an attentive nearness to beauty in many of the details of the process —the white tablecloths and Sunday best the interviews, followers and photos for the community participants, the elegance of the final publication. And finally, there was a community audience, at the Presbyterian Church and among all the users of the tour guide. The guides are so popular; they’ve already had to do a second printing. And the impact on the community? As Barbara and Anne commented in their description of the project, “Townspeople are overwhelmed! People are amazed that fifth graders can do this.”
I believe we will see this form of education take hold. People crave getting reconnected with their community and the land. People crave meaningful education. Sixteen years ago it was difficult to find a community that was practicing Place-Based Learning — water quality testing with students, removing graffiti along stream banks, teaching writing through completing a project to reduce homelessness in the community. Now, it is hard to find a community that isn’t doing something in this regard. If our vision is a better world for our children’s children, I think we are on our way.
References
Williams, B. (1998). The genius of place. In V. Perrone (Ed.), Toward place and community. Granby, CO: Annenberg Rural Challenge.
Fontaine, C. L. (2000, June). School and community partnerships: A model for environmental education. A report to the Community-based Environmental Education Program, Antioch New England Graduate School.
Sobel, D. (2004). Place-based education: Connecting classrooms and communities. Great Barrington, ME: The Orion Society.
Rural Challenge Research and Evaluation Program. (1999). Living and learning in rural schools and communities: A report to the Annenberg Rural Challenge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Smith, G. (2002). Going home. Educational Leadership, September, 2002, 30-33.
Cushman, K. (1997). What rural schools can teach urban systems. Challenge Journal, 1(2). (The Journal of the Annenberg Challenge.)
Senge, P. (1994). The fifth discipline: Strategies and tools for building a learning organization. New York: Doubleday.
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Kim Stokely is the Education Director for Adopt-a-Watershed in Hayfork, California. She can be reached at (530) 628-5334 or via e-mail at kim@adopt-a-watershed.org.
by editor | Jul 8, 2009 | Environmental Literacy, Outstanding Programs in EE, Place-based Education, Schoolyard Classroom, STEM, Sustainability, Teaching Science
by Mike Weilbacher
With the new wave of interest in the environment, will we finally give students the tools they need to become environmentally literate citizens?
In just a few weeks, high school seniors all around the United States will walk proudly across stages, hoisting their diplomas as they graduate from formal K–12 education. As their teachers, we’ll look on with some wistfulness, for the world into which they are graduating—one of spiraling financial crises coupled with huge international challenges—is vastly different from the one in which they started their senior year only 10 months ago.
But wait, it gets worse. If you place your finger on the pulse of the planet, this is what you’ll discover: global surface temperatures rising, glaciers melting, oceans warming, sea levels rising, rain forests burning, coral reefs dying, old-growth forests disappearing, deserts spreading, the world’s population increasing, and species vanishing at the highest rates since the extinction of the dinosaurs.
In short, the ecology that underpins our economy is also collapsing. And the solutions to this challenge elude not only most of our graduates, but also us—their teachers, administrators, and parents.
Will our graduates be ready for these new realities? Will they confidently stride into this world as college students, workers, voters, consumers—in short, as competent, caring adults capable of making good decisions on the pressing issues of the day?
(more…)
by editor | Jun 26, 2009 | K-12 Classroom Resources, Place-based Education, Service learning
Citizens for a Healthy Bay’s Junior Bay Ranger Program
By Katrina Landau
In 2003, the Washington State Legislature passed ESHB 1466 that established the Natural Science, Wildlife and Environmental Education Partnership Grant program under the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). In the 2005-2006 inaugural year, Citizens for a Healthy Bay (CHB), a Tacoma based 501c3 organization, was one of the recipients.
This innovative partnership was created to promote “proven and innovative natural science, wildlife and environmental education programs that include instruction about renewable resources, responsible use of resources and conservation.” (more…)
by editor | Jun 22, 2009 | Place-based Education, Questioning strategies, Service learning
Couple some basic curriculum organizers with focused questioning strategies to make your restoration projects coherent and effective environmental education experiences.
by Jim Martin
Environmental education should be a journey, one which captures our interest and imagination and leaves us with the tools to become effective stewards of the place where we live and work. Does it? Perhaps. Mike Weilbacher’s recent articles on environmental education (Weilbacher, 1996, 1997) express his concerns about the knowledge and skills which he believes environmental education should deliver, but doesn’t. He is concerned that we are aware and solicitous of our environments, but do not understand them. Somehow, environmental education hasn’t provided us with the knowledge and skills to think and plan effectively, at least where the environment is concerned.
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I think that developing effective questioning strategies around environmental phenomena is one way to ensure effective learning in environmental education. Asking questions about our environments, then seeking their answers, provides a meaningful context for our learnings, and assures that what is learned will be used and retained. Knowledgeably applied, this process informs us and provides us with a set of tools for effective stewardship.
A type of environmental education activity which is in vogue, and which I think speaks to Weilbacher’s concerns, is the extensive involvement of schools and agencies in restoration plantings. Restoration plantings are popular, done on a large scale, and require little training for their completion. They send a clear message: we, the people, made mistakes, have become aware of them, and are taking steps to make corrections. Plantings like these present a good opportunity for students to engage the environment, do constructive work, and discover the world as it exists, not as it appears on paper or videotape. As an added attraction, nothing is more impressive than a long stretch of restored stream bank fluttering with cuttings and colored flags. Do restoration plantings, in their attractiveness, ease the science out of environmental science? I think they might.
Restoration plantings are too massive. By their sheer volume, they don’t allow teachers and students to engage in a quality learning endeavor. Only one set of students get the hands-on outdoors experience; the classes which follow will never know about, nor will they benefit from them. In addition, most plantings don’t include a study of the site’s biology or soils up front, nor do they provide for longitudinal monitoring after the planting is completed. As currently practiced, restoration plantings are invigorating activities performed in the absence of a curricular context, and fit Weilbacher’s description of a piece of environmental education which needs to be addressed: we have designed an enormous amount of interesting, effective curricular pieces which have left us aware of the environment, but uninformed about it.
This is where the science in environmental science has value. Relevant and coherent environmental education organizers reside in the organisms, the environment, and the science which elucidates them. Couple these organizers with focused questioning strategies to modify your approach to restoration plantings in order to make them coherent and effective environmental education experiences. Start by asking a simple question, “in what soils do cottonwoods grow best?” (A good scientific question should suggest a way to answer it. Does this one?)
Biology as an Environmental Education Organizer
Organisms live in environments. Their biology, studied within the context of their environment, provides a coherent structure for developing environmental education curricula. In their habitats, plants and animals respond to the places where they live by employing discrete physiological mechanisms. For instance, roots employ osmotic mechanisms to move water into a plant’s vascular system; the nature of these mechanisms may determine how far from a stream a plant may live. Some plants use their physiological machinery to produce chemical compounds which inhibit other plants and animals, keeping them away from “their space.” Other industrious plants and their symbionts use their physiologies to mine nitrogen from the air and supply it to other plants. The sum of the employment of these plant (and animal and microbial) physiological mechanisms generates the ecosystemical phenomena we see before us. It is generally at their physiological levels that humans affect living things in their habitats.
To our question: we can query our restoration plant species about the suitability of the soils we expect that they will be planted in by asking questions of their cells. You can phrase your questions so that they examine this phenomenon at an appropriate level among several levels of difficulty, such as the increasingly complex set of activities listed in the next paragraph. First, your students must prepare soil from the site, upland, home, school, scratch, etc., or make up test soils of sand, loam, clay and varying amounts of water.
Using our question, “in what soils do cottonwoods grow best,” to guide your work, employ an activity from the following list to answer it. Modify the question to suit the activity. For instance, if your students will plant cottonwood seeds, their question might be, “In what soils do cottonwood seeds germinate most frequently?” (Test the question” does it suggest how to answer itself?) Here is the list: students can plant cottonwood seeds or cuttings in prepared soils, then observe for seed germination, plant vigor, height, or root length-, measure internodal lengths or rates of growth (nodes are the places where leaves attach, and intermodes are the spaces between nodes); stain and view longitudinal and radial internodal sections; grind and homogenize plant sections to free enzymes, then observe their activity on a substrate like starch or sucrose; do transpiration studies. Test yourself: how would you phrase each of these activities as questions to be answered? Do they suggest designs for their answers? How do they relate to our guiding question? Read through the list again, and find one that you would feel comfortable performing with your students. Do it. You’ll know when you’re ready to learn new materials or move on to more complex observations. Answers to your questions will guide you.
The ultimate organizer of biological phenomena is natural selection. It is one of the forces acting in each environment every day. For instance, those plants whose physiological mechanisms enable them to grow and reproduce in a riparian environment will be more likely to produce another generation like themselves, while those whose physiologies are not as effective in that environment may not be as likely to do so. How do we study natural selection in environmental education, which is generally “hard science” free? Natural selection is an engine which organizes plant, animal, and microbial assemblages. This means that restoration plantings are also potential experiments in natural selection.
You plant an assemblage; then ask how it will organize itself over time by cataloging the plants which live on your site from season to season and year to year. (What is your question now? Does it suggest an observation?) Do this by marking and mapping a large or small study plot at your site. Identify each tree and measure its height, diameter, and other parameters that you think appropriate. What happens to the relative frequency of each species? Do all plants grow at the same rate? Time of year? Does this raise further questions? Just monitoring a planting for a few years will give you and your students insights into how environments come to be, and why some organisms live in the riparian and not others.
We can’t understand the biology of organisms living in their environments without employing the critical thinking and doing processes which have evolved within the scientific community. Our understandings about environments come from applying these processes during our observations of organisms in the places where they live. You can organize the delivery of your restoration planting around them, and make it into a truly environmental education experience.
Process Science as an Environmental Education Organizer
Process science studies the world directly. This should make learning science by employing scientific process skills interesting to students, and to teachers. You employ these skills to focus your efforts and discover facts effectively by using behaviors like observe, question, measure, use numbers, and interpret data to answer the questions that you pose. These processes, which scientists use, are sets of behaviors or skills that all of us can learn; after being learned, they can be employed to learn some more. Acquired and used by teachers and students, they focus our minds on the work of understanding natural phenomena. In the case of restoration work, let these process skills drive your lessons; and let the plantings themselves become the vehicle which propels your students on their journey toward understanding.
By asking questions, then seeking their answers through inquiries which employ scientific process skills, the hundreds of environmental education activities and lessons which litter the landscape become vehicles for understanding the environment and asking the right questions when confronting environmental issues. If you engage your students in process science, you will provide them with the scientific insight necessary to develop meaningful concepts about how organisms live in their environments, and how we affect that living. A key piece in learning to use process science skills in environmental education is the development of effective questioning strategies (Questioning is a scientific process skill!). Posing an effective question entrains the rest of the scientific process skills, and you can address them as they are encountered by your students.
Organizing ourselves around process science, let’s modify our question to read, “What effect do different soils (riparian/upland/school/home/etc.) have on the growth of cottonwoods grown from cuttings?” (Don’t forget to probe: does the question suggest a way to answer it?) In Planning an Answer to the question, we modify soils or take them from different places, plant in them, then observe for an effect on growth. In so doing, we elicit information from the plants and soils; we suppose the information may answer our question. To further focus our work, we might use the scientific process skill of define operationally to define “growth” as the length, in centimeters, of new growth at some particular time interval and “soil” as x grams of Nitrogen, y grams of Potassium, z grams of sterile potting soil base, and so forth. Doing the work in this orderly, prescribed way, focuses your mind onto a single part of the plant and couples that part with an environmental parameter which might affect it. This helps you to target some curricular particulars to supplement your students’ environmental education.
You may be experiencing the dawning impression that teaching environmental education for coherence takes a long time. Especially if you start with pea or bean plants to develop the necessary process skills in relatively short order, then transiate.them to your restoration species. Time-consuming yes, but instead of a one-shot field trip, the planting itself becomes a part of a program of education ( a “course of instruction”), and you must modify the way you teach to accommodate this.
Another scientific process skill which is overlooked in environmental education curricula is that of Communication. In order to deliver their educational potential, restoration plantings should be monitored for many years, which presents problems in communication. What must your students do to communicate information about their project to subsequent classes? Which information should be communicated? How? Focus on this skill of communication; find out what it is, how it works, what it contributes to understanding, and how it relates to other scientific process skills. Start by saving the posters, data sheets, and reports that your students produce. Introduce these to next year’s classes as a valuable resource which they can organize and use to enhance their own work. Ask them for feedback about what was useful, and what else would have been helpful to communicate, and how.
By using scientific process skills to develop understandings about organisms in their environments, we begin to find that there are patterns in their relationships. These patterns, when they are clearly described, resolve into organizers which make ecosystems understandable.
Ecosystem Organization as an Environmental Education Organizer
The main questions I hear at restoration plantings are, “Where are the Shovels” and “Do we plant our tree here?” How about you? When you’re out in the field, do you hear questions like, “What makes cottonwoods live here?” “What is the cottonwoods’ food web?” “Which microorganisms live in the cottonwoods’ soil?” “What kind of symbiotic relationships do cottonwoods engage in?” “How are cottonwood communities distributed in space?” Sometimes students do raise these questions, and sometimes they are passed over by their teachers or volunteer agency adults. Questions like these are germane to the process of discovering the ecology of the organisms who inhabit the environments we plant in. To study ecology, we mentally organize the components of ecosystems into a few basic constructs so that they make sense to us. Among these are nutrient cycles, energy flows, and food webs. They are our bag of tools, conceptions which we use to organize the components of ecosystems when we think about the environments we study. These cycles, flows, and webs are in place in all environments and have similar basic components, such as producers, consumers, and decomposers.
Models of ecosystemal components can be ground-truthed by engaging your students in question-based field and lab work. How do we phrase our question to incorporate an ecological focus? For instance, if your students begin to explore nutrient cycling by taking soil samples in the field and analyzing them for nutrients like the concentration of nitrogen as ammonia using simple soil test kits, then the question might be phrased as, “does the concentration of soil nitrogen as ammonia change from season to season, or year to year, where we plant cottonwoods?” (Check: does the question suggest an observation?) Your students might Plan an Answer to the question by starting a diagram of the nutrient cycle which maintains one of the nutrients at your site, and continuing to fill it in as they find more information. The blank spaces in your diagram create a need to know, which will motivate both you and your students to think about cycles and seek information. Turn each blank space into a question which can be answered by making careful observations. Do it one blank a year. Ask your students to use their actual field observations of plants and animals and library/resource research to find out who eats whom.
Document each element in your growing ecosystemal information base by year, class, students who found the information and other elements you or your students deem important. (You may notice that this amplifies the quality of the class’ longitudinal data.) Keep this information (and incipient food web) where students will have access to it all year. This project may take several years to reach some acceptable level of completion. This is how science is done, one piece of the puzzle at a time. It’s not instantaneous, but the process develops clear sets of connected facts. A novel concept.
Putting this Together to Make Sense
Did you notice that each curriculum organizer we ex
plored incorporates elements of the others? That’s because we study living things (biology) and their interactions (ecology) by observing their lives directly (process science); when we employ environmental education properly, we really study environmental science. You may also have noticed that it takes a long time to teach in this way. We need to think about how we are teaching the people who will be making the decisions that affect our world. Do we teach reams of disconnected facts, or do we teach a few encompassing concepts for understanding?
Give your kids a sense of continuity. All parts of your continuously developing, question-driven restoration planting curriculum don’t need to be in place yet. Just do one or two manageable pieces each year, but work on it each year. Organize your students’ work around simple, categorical questions like, “which organisms spend time on living cottonwood leaves?” Test each question by checking to see if it suggests an observation. Structure next year’s curriculum around the gaps left by this year’s work. Engage your students in the simple act of looking at a plot of ground for the information necessary to fill in a conceptual schema built by seeking answers to simple categorical questions, and you will develop an authentic environmental education curriculum of your own based on information that students at your school have discovered. Not only will you provide them with a relevant and coherent environmental education, but you will have made their world a little more consistent, and given them a concrete sense of their place within it. This is a gift today’s children dearly need. To top it off, you can now use those mountains of environmental education activities to good advantage in your coherent, meaningful, question-driven environmental education curriculum.
A Charge to You:
Mike Weilbacher has presented us with a formidable challenge. I think we can meet it if we work hard, study hard, and become better teachers of environmental education in the process. Doable. Take one step at a time. I work every week with teachers who are teaching themselves and learning with their students. They’re busy, frustrated, and experiencing constant challenge. What more can a good teacher ask? Leaven your environmental education curriculum with environmental science, and you’ll go a long way toward correcting what Weilbacher perceives as weaknesses in environmental education as it is currently delivered. Infuse those ubiquitous environmental education activities with organizing questions and biology, ecology, and process science organizers. Let your search for truth be your curriculum. Choose a simple question to ask of your restoration site, then muster the myriad prepared environmental education activities as vehicles which transport you to the answers.
I’d like to know what you think about coupling simple, categorical questions with ecology, biology (or any scientific discipline), and process science to make environmental education relevant and effective. If you have ideas, experiences, criticisms, demands, get in touch via e-mail. I’ll post all commentaries on the CLEARING web site (http://www.teleport.com/~clearing) in a file named “planting.doc,” which is available to anyone interested. Better yet, write an article and publish it for all to read.
References
Weilbacher, Mike. 1996. “Don’t Know Much About Ecology: A special report on the class of’96.” Clearing. Issue 95:7-10. November/December 1996.
Weilbacher, Mike. 1997. “Confronting the Enemy Within: Why Our Students are Environmentally Illiterate.” Clearing. Issue 96:17-19. January/February 1997.
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Jim Martin conducts teacher-training workshops out of the Center for Science Education at Portland State University. He is the president-elect of the Environmental Education Association of Oregon and is a CLEARING advisory board member. He can be reached at (503) 725-4243.
by editor | Jun 22, 2009 | Outdoor education and Outdoor School, Place-based Education
Teachers consult a map during their place-based project in Colorado.
by Deanna Erickson
Learning from the Land
Anyone who has traveled through the Four Corners region of the Southwestern United States will remember it distinctly as a place like no other. Towns are scarce, rivers are legendary and rocks seem to bend and twist toward a sky filled with harsh clear light. This is the Colorado Plateau, a region as marked by its geography as by its inhabitants. The land of the Navajo, Ute, Pueblo and Hopi, colonized by the pioneers, now includes a disparate mix of ranchers, miners, river runners, and migrants who landed here out of a general longing for vast and wild places. Gifted (or some would say cursed) with more National Parks then anywhere else in the country, Bureau of Land Management wilderness study areas and vast tracts of National Forest, an inhabitant of the Colorado Plateau can hardly deny the significance of this unusual place.
In the middle of the Colorado Plateau, grappling with the wilderness and the human diversity, sits the Four Corners School of Outdoor Education. Since 1984, this small non-profit has quietly been connecting people with the land, fulfilling its’ mission of creating lifelong learning experiences for people of all ages and backgrounds through education, service, adventure, and conservation programs. Janet Ross, the Executive Director, founded the program after falling for the Plateau as an undergrad at Prescott College in Arizona. Originally, the school focused on programs dubbed “Southwest Edventures,” consisting of rollicking river trips, guided canyon hikes, and days spent tracing the rocky path of the Puebloan ancestors often referred to as the Anasazi.
Photo by Deanna Erickson
In the late 1990’s, the outdoor industry began to set up shop on the Plateau. Big tour operators, with their heavyweight marketing tactics, made it clear that Four Corners School and its non-profit budget would need an alternate means of accomplishing its mission. In 1997, Ross, with her decades of experience in outdoor education, went to public school districts and simply asked them what they needed. Was it field trips? Trainings? Guided tours? The feasibility study lasted a year and interviews were conducted with superintendents, principals and teachers representing every school on the Colorado Plateau.
This is what the schools said: Field trips are one-shot wonders. The kids have a positive experience, but the long-term effect is limited and the input of resources is draining. Bring us a program that trains our teachers in outdoor education so that we can learn where we live. Our backyards are a potential classroom. Let’s take our students there.
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by editor | May 20, 2009 | Forest Education, Outdoor education and Outdoor School, Place-based Education
by Victoria Lewis
Spawned out chinook salmon, brown , spotted and beak-nosed lie dead in the shallow water near the banks of the Salmon River in the Wildwood Recreation Area at the foot of Mount Hood.
The smell of rotting fish is sharp and pervasive, but Jill Semlick’s Pauling Academy ecology students ignore the odor. They are busy yanking off their shoes and snapping the clips of their chest waders. The bridge upstream is under construction and the high school students must ford the cold, fast-moving river to reach their research sites on the other side. (more…)
