by editor | Apr 2, 2009 | K-12 Classroom Resources
ISBN: 0-8403-9584-1
Copyright: 1994
Number of Pages: 400
Binding: Soft Cover
Author: Kathleen Hogan
Publisher: Kendal/Hunt Publishing Co.
Reviewed by Fletcher Brown
Over the last two decades the educational reform movement has been pitching a variety of methodologies to get educators to be more student-centered and inquiry minded. Curriculum and textbooks have been slowly adapting, most often offering supplements to existing materials that incorporate these methods and approaches. Eco-Inquiry: A Guide to Ecological Learning Experiences for Upper Elementary/Middle Grades is one of the few guides that truly incorporates these reform measures beautifully embedding inquiry teaching strategies and alternative assessment measures into the activities.
Eco-Inquiry in composed of three ecology modules for upper elementary or middle grades. The modules last from four to seven weeks and examine food webs, decomposition, and nutrient cycling. Important features in this guide include:
• Each module organizes students’ inquiries around a real-world problem or challenge.
• Students form research teams that do peer reviews, share ideas and findings.
• The focus of the activities are on the local schoolyard or neighborhood environment.
• Both the staff and students use a variety of alternative assessment measures.
• Units address student misconceptions about ecology through learning concepts using a learning cycle approach.
• The guide includes extensive background information for teachers about schoolyard habitats and the flora and fauna found in them.
Upon opening the book you will immediately identify that this is not like most other curriculum guides. The introduction sets the stage for things to come making sure the teachers understand that their role is one of a collaborator who will be involved in a classroom that they call a ìcollaboratoryî. To create this colaboratory learning environment they structure each module around an inquiry approach to learning. Each module has four sections; activating ideas, investigations, processing understanding, and applying/assessing. Embedded in these four sections lie seven to ten lessons which have embedded in them four central learning processes; building a framework, developing knowledge, inquiring, and applying.
Central to the guide is the current of building a community of inquiry minds. This is accomplished in the curriculum through the use of student writing that they hope will promote interaction and reflection. Most of the writing is accomplished through journaling, which is a major part of what students do on a daily basis while being involved in the modules. A variety of different types of journaling formats are used including reflections, quick writes, learning logs, and persuasive writing to name a few. One particularly interesting journal format that they implement which models current communication patterns in the science world is the use of what they term ìC-mailî. Here students are able to send notes to friends using set formats to quickly communicate ideas and thoughts. Be it C-mail or other journaling formats students are expected to be writing on a daily bases aimed at sharing their thoughts, ideas, and impressions about what they learn and observe.
There are two additional pieces to the guide that make it shine among other ecology curriculum guides. The first are the activities they have selected for the students to use. Each module has a variety of hands-on and minds-on activities that are based on studentsí misconceptions in ecology. A good example of this is a unit entitled, A Challenge to GROW. Here students begin by examining prior ideas about what plants need to grow. This is followed by students observing soil samples, talking about where soil nutrients come from, they receive a letter from a company that wants to know if dead plants can be used as fertilizer and end with the development of research questions that lead extended study projects. The modules are clearly multi-faceted keeping students engaged and busy. While they have given structure to the activities to help guide students and teachers, there is also flexibility for students to go their own direction with investigations.
The second area that is done exceptionally well is assessment. Throughout the guide students are asked to reflect on their learning and relate what they learn to the real world. The main vehicle for studentsí summative assessment is the portfolio. Here students select samples of their work after each module and turn in an end of the year final portfolio project that is formally graded. Individual assignments, whether they are part of the portfolio or not, are assessed using a set of proficiency standards.
Indicators used in the proficiency standards include; novice, proficient, proficient +, and advanced. Be it a journal product, concept map, or experimental write-up, one of the proficiency standards are applied to student work. For the teacher guidance and examples are given so first time user of alternative assessment measures feels more comfortable and confident in using them. Whether it is journaling, concept mapping or portfolios the assessment is an integral part of the modules. By choosing to do the modules you will have to use the assessment measures. They cannot be easily separated.
One thing that Eco-Inquiry is not is a complete curriculum for all content included in middle and high school ecology classes. The authors have chosen to take a few main ideas and go in-depth in these areas. If you are looking to cover all the major concepts in ecology using this guide you will not succeed. What this curriculum guide does is develop in-depth learning, communication skills, and inquiry learning skills through the science topics of food webs, cycles and decomposition. If you do not already have this guide on your bookshelf you should add it now. If for nothing what this guide provides is an outstanding example of how to embed science education reform methods effectively into your teaching of ecology.
Fletcher Brown is on the faculty of the education department at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana.
by editor | Mar 15, 2009 | K-12 Classroom Resources
by Louis A. Iozzi, Professor/Director
Center for Science and Environmental Education
Cook College, Rutgers University
As I look at the world of K-12 education, I see far too many challenges to cover in this short presentation. Some have been with us for a very long time, while some are more recent, and few relate only to environmental education. My list of challenges is extensive, but because of time and space constraints I will discuss only a few of them of them here.
EDUCATION REFORM
During the past twenty years concern has grown across the country regarding the quality and relevance of education to the needs of society and the demands of a changing economy and world order. Reform efforts of varying types and degrees are evident in every state. Components of the reform movement include: constructivist thinking and conceptual understanding, cooperative learning strategies, interdisciplinary approaches, problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills and processes, the use of authentic assessment, and recognition of the value of multicultural education. In my judgment, these have been, for the most part, positive steps in the right direction.
But… the BIG national movements, initially imposed by state legislators and then seized upon by the education community itself, are for standards and statewide testing.
What does this mean for education in general, and specifically for EE? The activities of the past few years can be described as “frenzied” as state education agencies have been, with the help of teacher organizations, busy generating lengthy lists of what children
should know in the various disciplines and developing tests to determine how much of it they actually do know. Meanwhile, school districts have been scurrying to articulate their curricula with the new standards and statewide testing schedules. A lot of time, and
many education dollars, have gone into this movement, in the hope of demonstrating the effectiveness of the education we are providing for children.
I personally characterize this effort with the proverbial tale of the emperor’s new clothes; we keep trying to justify, via paper and pencil tests, that we really are educating our youth. I’ll have more to say about this later.
In any case, I see two challenges here. The first is that few of these statewide standards include EE, and fewer still have included EE in the tests– assuming that the tests are valid in the first place. But if EE is valuable it should, like other educational programs, be treated the same way. EE standards, and questions dealing with EE, should be– must be– included in the standards and testing programs across the nation.
Educators will also be challenged to teach children for “meaning and understanding”, and not simply coach them to pass the test. Many of the statewide tests are, in my judgment, generating a lot of needless anxiety on the part of children, their teachers, school administrators, and parents– for political, rather than sound educational, reasons. Thus, I see getting past teaching “to pass the test” as the second major challenge.
If historical patterns hold true, the pendulum will in a few years swing the other way and the push for standards will probably go away, to be replaced by some other scheme. What comes next? I believe that we will once again strive to put real meaning back into our educational processes. Perhaps this is only wishful thinking. But as my colleague and good friend Frank Gallagher likes to say, “It’s good to be able to read, it’s better to understand what you have read, but it’s best to know where the paper came from that made the page you have just read.”
ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING
We simply have to find better ways of determining if and when learning has taken place. We have made significant progress in assessing learning; authentic assessment has the potential for quite accurately measuring learning outcomes in very meaningful ways.
So the methodology for more meaningful and accurate assessment is already here, and to rely on simple paper-and-pencil tests is, in my judgment, pure folly. One challenge for K-12 educators is to supplement the older and more established methods of assessment with some of the newer techniques and strategies. The new Project Learning Tree has made significant progress in this area, but there remains a long way to go. The techniques are there, but (once again) we must strive to break our old habits.
A MATTER OF RESPECT
Another big challenge is to legitimize EE for K-12 education. Despite years of effort on the part of well-meaning environmental educators, despite all the research evidence regarding global deterioration, despite all the warnings, we have not been able to make EE a basic and important part of the curricula of our schools. To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, “EE just doesn’t get any respect.” We are still too often viewed as a bunch of “tree huggers” and our field is relegated to after-school activity status, or a club activity, or an elective course in high schools. We need to find ways to make EE an integral part of the K-12 curriculum, to be infused into every subject area K-12, and to be accepted as a legitimate area of inquiry, along with science, social studies, English, math, etc. I have been in this business for more than thirty years, and unfortunately am not particularly optimistic about this becoming a reality.
WHOSE JOB IS IT?
The interdisciplinary nature of EE presents a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” quandary. First of all, American education does not lend itself very well to interdisciplinary studies because everything in our schools is neatly compartmentalized.
At the high school level that’s very obvious; we have separate classes for math, English, science– no, correction: we even have separate classes for each of the sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, geology, and even more separate classes for the special classes, like ecology, ornithology, physical chemistry, organic chemistry, etc. Even at the elementary school, in self-contained classrooms, the day is compartmentalized according to academic subjects. American education seems to like to take the world apart; EE likes to put the world back together. In most schools where it is believed that EE is truly interdisciplinary, the position is taken that all teachers should teach EE, no matter what subject they are assigned to teach. That sounds good. But in reality, when something is everybody’s job it turns out to be nobody’s job.
For EE to be successful at the elementary level, not only is teacher preparation crucial, but EE concepts, activities, etc., must be built into the curriculum itself. This is not a new idea; John Dewey in 1914 proposed a core curriculum that focused on the environment. In Dewey’s curriculum, reading was taught using books with environmental themes, science looked much like what we now call EE, math was taught using environmental problems, etc.
At the secondary level, REAL team teaching needs to be practiced. By real team teaching, I mean that various subject matter specialists need to be in the classroom together, each adding his/her perspective to the exploration of the environmental topic under discussion. This does NOT mean that the science teacher presents his point today, the social studies teacher tomorrow, etc. Rather, all are in the same classroom interacting with each other and with the students at the same time.
The EE curriculum must, moreover, be carefully designed and made available to all teachers so that each will know what the others are teaching at each grade level. It should be sequential, with each succeeding year’s EE concepts and experiences building on the previous year’s work, much like the “spiral curriculum” recommended by Jerome Bruner many years ago.
While the excellent national programs such as Project Learning Tree, Project WILD, Project WET, etc., are extremely valuable and important to our schools, they do not in themselves constitute a curriculum. They are activity guides that certainly can be used as parts of a well-designed curriculum.
However, they are not in and of themselves a curriculum as I would define the term.
CONCLUSION
The concerns discussed above are by no means an exhaustive set of challenges facing EE in the K-12 sector, nor does my discussion do full justice to any of them; this is a short presentation, not a full course, and not the dialog that must be part of serious attempts at resolution. Though not presented here, additional concerns that are very much on my mind include: teacher recruitment and education, curriculum, competition from technology, overcoming the opposition, developing partnerships, and urbanization.
There are many others, but these appear to me to be among the more prominent, some of the more difficult with which to deal.
The challenges are there, and it is our task, individually and organizationally, to meet them head on, to resolve them as best we can, and to move on from there. We will achieve more if we confront them together, as professionals working cooperatively in a professional organization.
by editor | Oct 22, 2008 | K-12 Classroom Resources
Edited by Michael K. Stone and Zenobia Barlow (2005; Sierra Club Books)
Review by Jaimie P. Cloud
This spectacular collection of essays by Fritjof Capra, Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, David Orr and Donella Meadows, to name just a few, is woven together with stories of the editors’ own journeys, over time, educating for sustainability. The book is organized into a system of four interdependent parts: Vision, Tradition/Place, Relationship, and Action. The reader can experience the book sequentially or can enter at any point and travel back and forth between the parts and between each essay and story. No matter where you enter, the book hangs together as a unified whole.
The editors have skillfully selected the authors and their essays to convey the essence of each of the four parts of book and have simultaneously used the essays to communicate the learning process in which they themselves have been engaged. Here’s just one of many examples:
“As we immersed ourselves in the life of communities and ecosystems, important strategies began to emerge. Through our collaboration with STRAW (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed) we became aware of a nationwide phenomenon: family farms on the urban edge were going out of business for want of a market. We also knew that city kids around the San Francisco Bay were going to school hungry. On a map of regional problems, we highlight urban fringe farms at risk, malnutrition, solid waste generated by students throwing away their lunches, underachievement, and vandalism. See these all together on the map, we recognized them not as isolated problems, but parts of one overarching problem of disconnection: of rural communities from urban life, of food from people’s understanding of its origins, of health from the environment — and of problems from the patterns that perpetuate them.”
Both living systems and learning develop over time, and witnessing the congruence between the two is stunning. This book is classic and timeless.
Ecological Literacy is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what we mean when we say, “Education for Sustainability.” The core content and the habits of mind that characterize Education for Sustainability are seamlessly and elegantly communicated by many of our most revered champions in the way that only learner-centered experiential educators can do.
Jaimie P. Cloud (jaimie@sustainabilityed.org) is president of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education in New York City. This review originally appeared in The Communicator, the newsletter of the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE).
A Guide to Ecological Learning Experiences for Upper Elementary/Middle Grades