by editor | Nov 20, 2014 | K-12 Classroom Resources
EE Research: Storytelling as a Tool for Young Learners
Using storytelling is the best way to engage very young students
from EE Research Bulletin
Nicole Ardoin, Editor
Research suggests that lasting attitudes toward nature and the environment form in the first few years of a child’s life; thus, instilling environmental awareness in very young children represents a key challenge and an exciting opportunity for environmental educators. Although firsthand experiences in nature in early childhood have been shown to contribute to environmental awareness, educators working in urban areas may find it difficult to arrange such experiences. In these circumstances, fictional or non-fictional narratives about nature and the environment may offer an alternate means of exposing young children to environmental subjects.
To investigate the effectiveness of storytelling as an environmental education tool, the authors of this study developed a short, fictional, preschool-level story about deforestation. The authors structured the story around the “binary opposite” concepts of security and insecurity (i.e., trees provide security, while deforestation leads to insecurity). Prior research has shown that this type of simple dichotomy, especially when paired with other narrative tools such as mystery, imagery, morals, and metaphor, can effectively capture the attention of very young children and help them construct meaning from new experiences.
In addition to the story, the authors designed a second lesson to present the same ideas in a more traditional expository format. Both the story and the expository lesson included information about important environmental regulation functions that trees perform, such as oxygen production, flood control, and air filtration.
The study took place in Southeastern Europe, a region heavily affected by deforestation. A total of 79 students from eight urban preschools with attendance from predominantly middle-class families, participated in the story-based lesson, while a control group of 80 students from the same schools received the expository lesson. Researchers assessed all students’ ideas about the importance of trees, and level of interest in tree planting as a free-time activity, prior to the lessons. A second assessment took place one week after the lessons, and a third followed about two months later.
In reviewing the assessment results, the authors found that students in the storytelling group demonstrated significantly better recall of key ideas from the lesson. One week after the lessons, when asked to explain why trees are important to humans, students in the story group focused almost exclusively on environmental regulation functions. Students in the expository group mentioned fewer regulation functions, and many students also mentioned raw material functions such as making furniture or paper. The differences between the two groups became even more pronounced eight weeks after the lesson, suggesting that the storytelling approach also improved long-term retention of the lesson material.
Both lessons increased students’ interest in tree planting as a free-time activity. Prior to the lessons, only a few students in each group chose planting trees in their hometown when asked to select two free-time activities from a list of seven options. In post-lesson assessments, over half of the students in the storytelling group and about one-third of those in the expository group selected tree planting. The authors surmise that the students gained new interest in planting trees as a result of learning about trees’ ecosystem functions and role in supporting human life. Students in the story group, who demonstrated a more significant knowledge benefit from the lesson, also exhibited a greater awareness of deforestation as a problem and a stronger motivation to act.
Despite the effectiveness of the storytelling approach, presenting very young children with vivid narratives about environmental problems does raise ethical issues.
As the authors note, stories that evoke powerful anxiety are usually inappropriate for young children. Children exposed to these narratives could develop negative feelings about the environment in general, and a desire to disengage from the natural world.
However, shielding children from environmental problems is both inappropriate and impractical. Societies will need long-term engagement from their youngest members to address these issues. And in many parts of the world, even the youngest children already have firsthand experience with the consequences of environmental degradation.
Given these observations, the authors conclude that stories designed to communicate both knowledge and hope can give young children a healthy awareness of environmental problems and help them contribute to long-term solutions.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Presenting information about an environmental problem in the form of narrative (fiction or non-fiction) may help raise environmental awareness among very young students. In this empirical study, students who participated in a story-based lesson about deforestation retained more key ideas about the problem, and demonstrated higher motivation to contribute to solutions, than did students who participated in a content-equivalent expository lesson. Stories aimed at young students should be structured around “binary opposite” concepts (such as security in a healthy environment versus insecurity in an unhealthy environment) and should include vivid imagery as well as elements of mystery and wonder. For young students in particular stories abut environmental problems should emphasize solutions and hope.
by editor | Nov 20, 2014 | K-12 Classroom Resources
Reviewed by Mike Weilbacher
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
By Elizabeth Kolbert
Henry Holt. 319 pp. $28
We inhabit an extraordinary planet overflowing with an abundance of life: massive coral reefs built by billions of tiny invertebrates, rain forests teeming with uncountable plants and animals, frogs and toads singing in vernal ponds, bats flitting over summer meadows.
But we also live at an extraordinary moment when all of the creatures named above, and millions more, might disappear in our lifetime. And while climate change gets all the attention as an environmental game-changer, the loss of biological diversity, the burning of the Tree of Life, has too quietly slipped below the cultural radar screen.
Until now. Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the acclaimed Field Notes From a Catastrophe about climate change, has just published the definitive book on the biodiversity crisis. It is a must-read for every citizen of this planet.
As a science writer and reporter, Kolbert has few peers. Just as she did so effectively in Field Notes, Kolbert travels to the front lines of the issue, visiting the biodiversity hotspots you might expect, such as the Amazon rain forest and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. But she also mixes in a ton of surprises, and much of the joy of the book is discovering where she ends up next: an Icelandic museum to visit a stuffed great auk, the last of which vanished in the 1840s, or the “Frozen Zoo,” a California lab that cryogenically stores cells from nearly a thousand species of extinct and nearly extinct species.
Kolbert begins in Panama, where she walks alongside scientists frantically searching for vanishing frogs, too quickly succumbing to a little-understood fungus. Frogs are amphibians, a group that “enjoy[s] the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals.” While creatures have always vanished throughout geological history, the natural extinction rate is incredibly small; amphibians, Kolbert reports, are now disappearing at a rate 45,000 times higher than normal.
The book also travels through the human understanding of extinction; these early chapters alone are worth the price of admission. She traces the history of extinction itself, the title alluding to five previous, natural, very large extinction events. The last big extinction occurred when that now-famous asteroid smashed into the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, wiping out T. rex and maybe two-thirds of all life on Earth; she walks us through the science that painstakingly led to the theory, then covers the ensuing debate.
How bad is the sixth extinction? “It is estimated,” she observes, “that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of all sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.” That bad.
While extinction is natural, her book’s subtitle signals her impatience with anyone declaring the sixth extinction “natural.” Never before has one species so rearranged the planet, or so greatly altered the planet’s chemistry and biology, that so many creatures could die out. “This time,” one scientist says ominously, “we are the asteroid.”
The toughest part of the book is its last two chapters, where she visits not only the Frozen Zoo, but also the Neander Valley in Germany to see where fossils of our cave cousins – a separate human species that once lived alongside us – were discovered in 1856. Turns out that Homo sapiens likely killed off Neanderthals while, at the same time, intermingling with them (lots of us still carry Neanderthal genes). But “man the wise,” as our Latin name translates, seems to have been foolishly killing off life from Day 1. From Ice Age mastodons 10,000 years ago to flightless moas in New Zealand killed off in the 1400s, extinction has trailed in our wake for millennia.
We are burning tropical rain forests, poaching animals such as elephants and rhinos beyond their capacity to recover, and introducing invasive species everywhere (10,000 different species carried in ship ballast every single day worldwide). But the sixth extinction also has more subtle causes: Overheating the atmosphere with carbon dioxide changes land habitats, but also affects oceans, now acidifying from the excess carbon. Acidifying oceans are killing off coral – and possibly one-third of all ocean life as it does. The sixth extinction has multiple causes, but we are at the root of each.
Her last chapter, titled “The Thing with Feathers,” alludes to Emily Dickinson’s famous poem about hope, and she struggles to end on a hopeful note. “Though it might be nice to imagine there was once a time when man lived in harmony with nature,” she concludes “it’s not clear that he ever really did.”
Our “enduring legacy,” she ends, will be the sixth extinction.
The language of the Earth is losing nouns, names being plucked from the landscape: little brown bat, golden toad, Sumatran rhinoceros, Guam rail. While the book is not intended as a call to action, I hope its readers will rally around the burning Tree of Life, and agree that the preservation of this language is our highest calling, the necessary work of our time.
Mike Weilbacher directs the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Roxborough, an island of biological diversity in Philadelphia. He can be reached at mike@schuylkillcenter.org.
by editor | Nov 20, 2014 | K-12 Classroom Resources
What is Outside of Outdoor Education? Becoming Responsive to Other Places
By David A. Greenwood
A review of Wattchow, B. & Brown, M.
(2011). A Pedagogy of Place: Outdoor Education for a Changing World.
Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Press.
As someone who follows the literature around place and education, and who is always curious to see how diverse educators and learners around the planet learn from diverse places, I was very interested to read Brian Wattchow (Australia) and Mike Brown’s (New Zealand) book, A Pedagogy of Place: Outdoor Education for a Changing World (2011). While it does not significantly address the local/global tensions inherent in contemporary place study (Heise, 2008; Nespor, 2008), this book represents a major contribution to the place-conscious educational literature. It is one of the first book-length inquiries in the genre that effectively blends theory and practice, cultural and ecological contexts, as well as personal and professional perspectives. Wattchow and Brown write with authority and affection about the places in Australia and New Zealand that they love and that they continue to learn from through their work as seasoned outdoor educators. Their stories of place should inspire people everywhere to pay attention to what nearby places have to teach. A Pedagogy of Place also raises significant questions about competing meanings of place, the value of adjectival educations and the complex ways in which learners might become more placeresponsive in the outdoors.
The kayak on the cover of Wattchow and Brown’s book is a good emblem for what one finds inside—an intellectual and embodied journey recounted in the voices of the two place-attached authors who have deep experience in outdoor learning. The journey begins with stories of how each author connected to outdoor places as children and adults and integrates these stories into descriptions of their experiences as outdoor educators. Next, the authors provide a convincing critique of the ironic absence of place-responsiveness in the field of outdoor education and offer a very insightful review of the meanings of place, which seem especially productive for continuing to build theory in place-responsive education. In the last part of the book, the authors narrate compelling case studies of place responsive outdoor education practice in Australia and New Zealand. The book ends with a discussion of “signposts to a place-responsive pedagogy.” These signposts provide an elegant framework for considering how educators and learners might become more responsive to the teachings of places everywhere, such as
1. being present in and with a place
2. the power of place-based stories and narratives
3. apprenticing ourselves to outdoor places
4. the representation of place experiences (p. 182)
It strikes me that any outdoor or environmental education theory or practice that fails to engage with any one of these powerful signposts is neglecting an opportunity to develop multivocal and multisensory relationships between learners and the places where they live.
The narrative writing style in A Pedagogy of Place (with the emphasis here on a pedagogy rather than the pedagogy or pedagogies) is very accessible and engaging, and the scholarship is also deep in its examination of outdoor education and its relation (or lack of relation) to the discourse of place and place-responsive learning. I find that the book would be an excellent introduction to place-responsive education for any group of educators interested in place. In its focus on getting outside for deep experiences that involve paying attention to place, the book offers an implicit critique of all indoor education, and also place-based experiences that are merely conceptual or too brief and disconnected to become storied place-responsive relationships that can only develop through a longer apprenticeship. This critique could be directed as well toward “cosmopolitan” views of learning that trade movement, speed or a “global” perspective for the presence and kinds of attention required to open to what places have to teach. In this regard, A Pedagogy of Place is a welcome reprieve from the deepening problematic trend that Aldo Leopold described over a half century ago: “[O]ur educational…system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land” (Leopold, 1949/1968, p. 223).
Inside and Outside of Outdoor Education
Wattchow and Brown’s main argument in A Pedagogy of Place is that it is important to critically review key assumptions of outdoor education and reconceptualise the field through attention and responsiveness to place. As someone who does not identify chiefly as working in the field of outdoor education, it was somewhat surprising to read how this subfield of education has often neglected local cultural and ecological contexts as it has become professionalized. On the other hand, lack of attention to place seems to be part of the professionalization of all branches of education and a problem with (post)modern culture at large. As professional fields and subfields evolve, the local social and ecological contexts where people actually live their lives are almost entirely forgotten while attention is placed on the established frameworks and routines that give a particular educational approach its identity (Gruenewald, 2005). As a result, Wattchow and Brown (2011) write of outdoor education: “The geographical locations where programs run can all too easily come to be seen as clinical sites, obstacle courses, testing grounds, venues or curriculum resources.” When places become clinical sites for outdoor education, activities, regimentation, standardization and even the implementation of models such as the experiential learning cycle can dominate curricula while unwittingly de-placing or de-contextualizing experience—all typical hallmarks of colonizing educational models. When this happens, according to Payne and Wattchow (2008), it is “increasingly difficult to confidently make the claim that outdoor education is an ‘alternative’ beyond the fact that some of it occurs in the outdoors” (cited in Wattchow and Brown, 2011, p. 50).
What, then, is outdoor education and what is its relation to place and to its cousin, environmental education? While reading Wattchow and Brown’s critique of outdoor education as a field, I continually found myself puzzling over the meaning of the label “outdoor.” I wonder about the limitations of any adjectival educational subfield (outdoor, environmental, placebased,land-based, culturally-responsive, experiential, Indigenous, sustainability, etc.) in relation to the larger goal of advocating for education that is responsive to places and how they are experienced by those who inhabit them. Does the proliferation of subfields (and strands within subfields) work for or against this larger goal? Can mutual interest in place provide a meeting ground for educators with a variety of complementary commitments and forms of knowledge? Or, does professional investment in, and politicized identification with, a particular group keep us focused on defending our turf, boundaries and vocabularies while screening out possibilities for building strategic alliances? In short, can the educational subfields with interests in the outdoors, places, environments, experiences, etc., develop better political strategy in the service of people and places rather than in the service of professional subfields? If the answer is yes, what might this suggest for how we manage the labels around which our professional work currently revolves? I think it might mean that we need to consider abandoning attachment to these labels, or at least work to de-centre them, as we learn to enact what Arjen Wals (September 22, 2011, personal communication) is calling “cross-hybrid learning.”
In their focus on place as a transformative construct, Wattchow and Brown demonstrate a welcome willingness to rethink the assumptions underlying a professional field of practice—though the focus remains on outdoor education as an insular subfield. As the authors note throughout their book, place and the outdoors are not the same. In the practice of outdoor education, the outdoors can simply become another decontextualized and colonized space for scripted learning outside of buildings; a place is where meaning is made through a reciprocal relationship of coming to know. While efforts are made in A Pedagogy of Place to expand the meaning of the outdoors in outdoor education to include multiple perspectives toward place, it is somewhat ironic that the case studies provided describe a placeresponsive pedagogy mainly through the traditional practices of tripping and journeying through the “natural” environment (albeit often to nearby, “mundane” or culturally complex places).
Clearly the authors share an interest in diverse meanings of place and in the educative potential of a wide variety of place-responsive experiences. Yet, in their stories of practice, the authors sometimes risk limiting the meaning of place to the conventional outdoors (mountains, deserts and rivers) and risk limiting the context of place-practice to hiking, camping and boating. Is this inevitable or desired in outdoor education? Inviting relationship through experience with the local and regional physical geography, and the cultural stories held in place there, is a vital component of educating for place-responsiveness. But what about other “outdoor places” and built-over lands and mindscapes—such as the streets people drive and walk on every day or commoditized and damaged places like mines, highways, strip malls, power plants, factories, schools—through which hums the global engine of neoliberal economic growth and development? What about all the regulated places, public and private, whereby we are constantly told to follow the rules? KEEP OUT! NO TRESPASSING! And what of the myriad other outdoor spaces, which, depending on one’s experience, may either invite belonging or enforce exclusion? In other words, the meanings of place or the outdoors and the possibilities for placeresponsive outdoor learning extend far beyond what the authors describe in their case studies, even as their work pushes on and extends conventional meanings of outdoor education.
Through their critique of outdoor education, their attention to place theory and the development of their case studies, Wattchow and Brown certainly gesture at making connections between embodied experience in outdoor, culturally significant places and the development of critical social conscience in everyday life (see Cameron, 2008). Yet the impact of these gestures seems somehow restricted by some of the more typical contexts of outdoor education they describe (hiking, camping, boating), journeys and trips signified by the gorgeous kayak emblazoned on the cover of the book. This observation is in no way meant to critique the power of experience in the pedagogically rich places the authors lead us to. I want to be in the kayak and on the campout and learn the ecological and cultural stories there with these authors and their mentors as guides. The only way to know the power of the journey or trip is to experience it fully. No doubt many of us facing lives of increasing boredom, incarceration, shut-in, medication and screen time (Louv, 2005) would benefit from outdoor experiences that offer much less than what Wattchow and Brown provide. The point is rather to rephrase a simple question the authors themselves pose with their important book: What constitutes the outdoors in outdoor education?
In an interesting section titled “Critical Outdoor Education,” Wattchow and Brown (2011) advocate for socio-ecological or critical place-based approaches over those focused on “social justice issues (gender, sexuality, race, equality of access and so on” (pp. 86–89). They rightly argue that critical social justice perspectives are often abstracted from a larger socio-ecological framing. However, many “social justice” issues have “outdoor” characteristics that are doubtless part of a larger ecology of place. One does not have to take a very long walk in most cities, for example, to witness many varieties of power, inequality, privilege and oppression, as well as the regimes of spatial exclusion. Additionally, since the start of the resistance movement to industrial capitalism (over 150 years ago), one does not have to look far for social or ecological conditions that need to be changed, or for local people calling for it. Today, worldwide, outside in the streets , people—including homeless people who live outside—are marching for local change in global contexts, raising critical social conscience through embodied and emplaced experiences. Does observing and participating in a street protest constitute place-responsive outdoor education? What about working with people who are homeless to change the local conditions that create homelessness? Or, should the meaning of place-responsiveness in the (sub)field of outdoor education remain concerned mainly with “natural environments” removed from the everyday street life of the crowd?
In other words, this book makes me wonder with the authors: What kind of places does the field of outdoor education privilege and which do they neglect? What is the potential range of places of practice for outdoor educators? Further, what is the relationship between outdoor education, geopolitical consciousness raising, and placemaking and re-making? The Occupy movement is only one example of the intersection between the outdoors and political experience and learning. In his remarkable book Blessed Unrest , Paul Hawken (2007) reports that there may be as many as two million organizations working to create localized change in communities all around the planet. Many efforts for local change have an outdoor dimension; the same can be said of activism around climate change. Community development and revitalization, including rural, urban and regional planning, happens outside in the interface Is this mundane political process of placemaking an appropriate context of outdoor education, or does the field prefer to privilege its traditional practices of tripping and journeying for the irreplaceable experiences that these practices deliver? Is it even possible to learn what a river trip by kayak has to teach without leaving the street protest behind (and vice versa)?
Such questions probably should not be posed as either/or dichotomies. But there is certainly a tension here for me, at this juncture in the evolution of place-responsive education, between the local, regional and geo-politics of placemaking and the aesthetics of nature-based place-experience (no matter how culturally responsive), which mirrors a more general tension between politicized and depoliticized environmental education. Neither is inherently better than the other and I believe we need both, as well as a more nuanced and inquisitive stance toward the tensions between them. Reading this book kindles my desire and my too-often denied need to connect with land and water for the experiences that only land and water can provide. Borrowing from Wattchow and Brown’s (2011) framework, I want to get outside onto the land or into the seat of the kayak. I want to become present in and with a place through deep immersion. I want to leave the street and Internet protests behind as I journey into another world—perhaps the real world—where the land is alive. I want to discover and be moved by the power of place-based stories and narratives, and learn with the people who hold these stories. I want to apprentice myself with others to outdoor places. And I want also to represent and communicate my experiences with places in meaningful, creative ways. Outdoor education that is responsive to place can be as worldwide protests for social, economic and environmental justice—protests which may lack the outdoorsy appeal of a paddle or a hike, but also represent a distinctly unique aesthetic and an embodied politics unlikely to be found on a river trip. Again, these musings are not a critique of A Pedagogy of Place , but an invitation to extend the critical question that is the thesis of the book: How might a consideration of place transform outdoor education?
References
Cameron, J. (2008). Learning country: A case study of Australian place-responsive education.In D. Gruenewald & G. Smith (Eds.), Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity (pp. 283–398). New York: Routledge.
Greenwood, D. (in press). A critical theory of place-conscious education. In R. B. Stevenson, M. Brody, J. Dillon, & A. Wals (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education research. New York: AERA/ Routledge.
by editor | Oct 23, 2014 | K-12 Classroom Resources
Using Inquiry-Based Activities to Teach Science
from EE Research Bulletin
THE RESEARCH: Tan, A.-L. & Wong, H.-M (2012) ‘Didn’t get expected answer, rectify it’ — Teaching science content in an elementary science classroom using hands-on activities. International Journal of Science Education, 34(2), 197-222.
A conflict inherent in teaching canonical science concepts in an inquiry-based framework exists. Can students be asked to explore for themselves, while also being taught testable scientific concepts? In this scenario, tension forms around how much guidance a teacher gives to foster authentic discovery and understanding of the scientific process, while still teaching important scientific information. This study asks: What happens when we use an inquiry-based model for teaching science?
The study analyzed the speech between teachers and students to understand how this tension manifests in classrooms in Singapore. Video and audio recordings of 10 science teachers were taken in two phases, first as a baseline, and, second, after a teaching strategy intervention. During the baseline, classrooms typically used a traditional teaching model in which the teacher led the class.
The lesson examined by the study taught transfer of energy from elastic potential energy to kinetic energy, using rubber-band group experiments and class discussion of energy concepts. The intervention asked teachers to plan an inquiry-based lesson, which included the five features of inquiry: questions, evidence, explanation, connections, and communication. Also, the 5E model of inquiry was used by the teacher examined in the case study, with the goal of having students engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate. Both of these inquiry models aimed to teach students the scientific process by carrying it out themselves
The researchers transcribed and studied the lessons, specifically observing how teachers moved between a dialogic and authoritative role in the classroom. Dialogic conversation is where the talk moves between the teacher and students (two-way conversation), and authoritative is where the talk moves only from teacher to student (one-way conversation). The paper closely followed one case study, in which the teacher moved between dialogic and authoritarian communication strategies, successfully engaging students in discussion while maintaining authority on the subject. By keeping this control, she was able to meet content teaching goals. However, by emphasizing the correct results of the activity, she may have decreased the degree to which the students explored and discovered concepts on their own — a pillar of inquiry-based learning. Specifically, during class discussion, strong guidance from the teacher led students to give “correct” answers or passively wait for her to tell them the “correct” answer. This undermined exploration by the students and an authentic understanding of the scientific process, and may have given the students the impression that science is fixed.
The researchers concluded that teachers must “reexamine their roles in classroom discussion or talk and learn to promote learning by exploring ways to make their classroom discussion more participatory and learning-centered for students.” When teachers have greater awareness of learning goals and execution of their teaching strategy, they will be more effective in balancing inquiry and factual content in their lessons
THE BOTTOM LINE: This study examined the tension between inquiry-based science education and the pressure to teach the “right” answer when teaching scientific content. By following 10 science teachers and using one as an in-depth case study, the researchers closely observed the use of one-way conversation (teacher to students) versus two-way conversation (dialogue between teacher and students) in the classroom. They found that when too much guidance is given by the teacher, students are not free to explore authentically. Instead, the students simply seek out or wait for the correct answer, rather than gain experience in scientific inquiry. The authors suggested that using an inquiry-based method while maintaining authority may be an effective mix to meet teaching goals and still have students explore the scientific process.
by editor | Oct 7, 2014 | K-12 Classroom Resources
Re-thinking Trash with Students!
Getting youth—and anyone—to reconsider their trash can be difficult, but that’s what Trash for Peace, a Portland-based nonprofit, does.
The organization aims to help people reduce waste through functional art by using the items we consider trash to create recycling bins, planters, furniture and many other useful things. The group often partners with schools and works with students of all ages, and they’ve come up with plenty of unique lessons to engage the young and old alike.
by Laura Kutner
Reusing waste is often a better alternative to recycling; it uses less energy and costs less money. The first step to teaching students to make reuse a part of daily life is to demonstrate the impact the things we call waste have on the environment when they end up in landfills, as well as how those items might be useful. Some pretty staggering statistics about waste will certainly grab attention—for example, every week half a billion plastic water bottles are purchased in the United States, enough to circle the globe five times—and once students are paying attention they can learn practical ways to help reduce that waste.
Eternal Trash Activity
A fun introductory activity for waste reduction involves discussing how long it takes different types of “trash” to decompose. This discussion can cover how the decomposition process works, touching on the impacts of heat, moisture and microorganisms on how long it takes something to break down. Additionally, this is often a good time to discuss how the school handles trash and how students deal with trash and recycling at home.
Then students can go outside and make a list of trash found around the school. Afterward, the lists can be compiled into one large list and broken down into categories (like paper, plastic, etc.) on the chalkboard. Finally, the decomposition times of each type of trash can be listed next to the found items. A banana peel, for example, takes three weeks to decompose, while a plastic bag takes 10 to 20 years. (A more extensive list of decomposition times can be found in Trash for Peace’s lesson plans: http://media.wix.com/ugd/1d1c9e_9b56a28cebd44a118be3b783e14b8552.pdf).
This exercise can lead to further discussion about the implications of this trash: What types of trash are most common? What kinds will still be around a century from now? This lesson opens the door for many waste-reducing activities, too. Now that students have a better understanding of how much trash exists and how long it will exist, finding ways to reuse common types of trash can have a more significant impact on the way they think about waste.
Hands-On Reuse Exercises
Two activities that Trash for Peace often performs with younger students fit well into science classes, particularly when students are learning about biology and plants. The first is turning tin cans into planters, which is a fun project for at school or at home. Tin cans make ideal planters because it’s easy to poke holes in the bottoms of them for drainage and they block out sunlight, protecting plants’ roots. Plus, tin cans are easy to obtain since almost everyone buys canned goods. The second activity, also related to plants, is turning plastic clamshells into mini-terrariums. The clamshells—like the clear, plastic kind used to hold strawberries or other produce—effectively let in sun while also holding in moisture, allowing seeds to sprout. The clamshells can also easily be set on classroom windowsills without taking up too much space. Either of these activities lets students turn something they would normally throw in the trash or recycling bin into a useful item. Because the tin cans and clamshells are used to grow plants, they won’t quickly be forgotten about or throw away like other kinds of reuse craft projects that aren’t as practical.
For teachers and others interested in hands-on activities related to waste reduction, Trash for Peace offers a variety of lesson plans (http://media.wix.com/ugd/1d1c9e_9b56a28cebd44a118be3b783e14b8552.pdf) on their website. They also have a manual (http://media.wix.com/ugd/1d1c9e_90a54d1b25fd47ca963ae169d1da4090.pdf) for how to make a recycling bin from plastic bottles and other reused materials, and bin building kits are available through their website. Building a recycling bin can be especially effective for teaching about plastic waste reduction, since kids will be responsible for collecting the plastic bottles needed to construct the bin. Once constructed, the bin serves as a functional piece of art or educational tool for change, reminding everyone who uses it of the importance of thinking about trash—where it goes, and what it does to our environment—before it is tossed, and that just because a plastic bottle might look like trash, doesn’t mean it no longer has any value.
Trash for Peace’s History and Programming
Trash for Peace was established as a 501c3 nonprofit in Portland, Ore. in 2012. The organization’s founder, Laura Kutner, served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala where she learned firsthand the impact trash can have on communities. One rural community where she lived experienced flooding after a tropical storm, and trash carried to the town by a river exacerbated the flooding. In another community where Laura lived, there was a great deal of trash littering the village, and subsequently, Laura helped make some of that trash useful by organizing the construction of a school using plastic bottles as part of the walls. When she returned to the U.S., she wanted to continue educating about the importance of reducing and reusing waste, and found an incredible team of people to help create what Trash for Peace is today.
The nonprofit currently has three types of programming:
• programs for schools,
• programs for youth empowerment, and
• programs for businesses including audits and team-building exercises.
At elementary, middle and high schools, Trash for Peace leads recycle bin-building exercises and helps construct garden beds (and other reused garden-related items like those explained above), all out of repurposed materials, or “trash.” These programs serve to bring art and construction activities back into classrooms as well.
They also teach leadership, team-building, and vocational skills to youth by instructing them on how to build the recycle bins and other structures, all using repurposed materials. They recently started a zero-waste cooking class series to a local group of teenage boys. The classes help the participants learn to make healthy eating choices, gain cooking skills and understand how eating does not need to involve waste. Students learn about how the cooking process itself can involve less waste, as well as the impact of the packaging waste associated with many fast foods. Trash for Peace also helps coordinate a zero-waste, pop-up coffee shop where youth learn valuable business skills. The café raises awareness about the amount of waste typically associated with these types of businesses, too (and how it’s not always necessary waste). Finally, Trash for Peace performs waste audits for businesses, teaching them how to most effectively reduce waste, as well as leads events for businesses where they can have their employees do fun, hands-on team-building activities related to waste reduction.
Trash for Peace recycling bins have found their way into schools and workplaces across the country, as well as in Bulgaria and Costa Rica. The organization is always working on new bin designs that find new ways to make trash useful. Currently, they partner with over 30 schools and 20 business and nonprofit organizations, and have built over 55 recycle bins, in addition to many other piece of functional art.
For more information about Trash for Peace’s programming, lesson plans and current events, visit their website (http://www.trashforpeace.org), like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter!
by editor | Jul 30, 2014 | K-12 Classroom Resources
Who’s a Better Role Model:
John Muir or Aldo Leopold?
From Environmental Research Bulletin
Nicole Ardoin and Jason Morris, Project Leaders
THE RESEARCH: Goralnik, L., & Nelson, M. P. (2011). Framing a philosophy of environmental action: Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and the importance of community. The Journal of Environmental Education, 42(3), 181–192.
In thinking about what motivates environmental behavior, the Michigan State University researchers who authored this paper acknowledge that the knowledge-attitudes-behavior link that so commonly guides environmental education programs often doesn’t work or is an overly simplistic representation. (What is commonly referred to as the knowledge-attitudes-behavior model rests on the assumption that knowledge about the environment spurs more positive attitudes, which in turn lead to more responsible environmental behavior.)
The authors of this paper argue that, before people can learn and care about a topic or issue, they must first be ethically engaged. They state that “the ethical framework we employ . . . assumes that students will neither care about nor retain the knowledge they gain unless they are first emotionally and ethically engaged by place, community, and content.” And, they argue, by focusing on developing an environmental ethic, educators can set students up for a lifetime of better choices, even as environmental issues and appropriate actions change.
But what kind of ethic is most appropriate? The authors compare the philosophies of John Muir and Aldo Leopold and argue that one is better than the other at spurring action.
John Muir, “the iconic leader of the preservation movement,” argued that the key to environmental preservation is in getting more people to see and experience wild places. Muir supported open immigration policies and road building as ways that more people could experience the places he wanted to protect. And he said, “If every citizen could take one walk through this reserve, there would be no more trouble about its care.” The authors believe this reflects the classic knowledge-attitudes-behavior model. If people experience the natural world, they’ll become emotionally attached and, as a result, work to preserve it.
But, the authors question “whether it is true that such exposure is a sufficient condition for environmental action. We question the assumption that all people, in spending time and learning about a place, will develop similar feelings of respect for that place.” The authors cite anecdotal evidence that each individual in a group who together experience a wild place do not each develop the same feelings of respect for the place, nor does each person agree on the actions that might best honor it. And the authors also cite empirical evidence that knowledge doesn’t lead to action. They point to a recent study that indicated that the more that people know about climate change, the less they seem to care about the issue.
Leopold, on the other hand, emphasizes people’s relationships to the land in his land ethic. The authors explain that “in Muir . . . the human is often looking in upon nature, not an integral participant within the larger community. Leopold’s philosophy of action, on the contrary, . . . includes humans as equal participants in a wider web of connection.”
Leopold argues that, over time, people’s social consciousness has widened. He gives as an example Odysseus, who hanged a dozen young slaves who he suspected had misbehaved. During Odysseus’s time, moral and ethical obligations simply didn’t extend to slaves. Today, obviously, the boundaries have changed. And Leopold argues that what’s needed now is another boundary shift that will also include the natural world within our sphere of moral obligations. The authors explain, “In effect, ecology serves to expand the previously perceived limits of our community, just as centuries of evolution expanded our human community to include all humans beyond Odysseus’s limited definition.”
The authors believe that the role of environmental educators, then, is “to educate for a changed perception of community” that includes the natural world. In conducting discussions, for example, they believe “we should talk about protecting ourselves, or our home, rather than brainstorming the ways we can work to protect or maintain our special places when we get ‘back to the real world.’” While the ultimate goal might be changing actions, the authors argue that the best path, and one that will lead to better choices over the long term, is in expanding moral boundaries.
THE BOTTOM LINE: John Muir and Aldo Leopold have inspired generations of people with concern about the environment. But the authors of this paper argue that Muir’s philosophy sets humans up as outside observers of nature. And Muir’s philosophy also rests on assumptions that nature experiences alone can be sufficiently powerful to move people to action. The researchers argue that this way of thinking is outdated in light of research that indicates that knowledge does not lead to action. The authors instead believe that environmental educators should embrace Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, helping extend students’ moral boundaries from human communities to include the natural world. This feeling of moral obligation to the wider natural communities to which we belong will guide a lifetime of environmental action.
