by editor | Jan 4, 2013 | Environmental Literacy, Questioning strategies, Schoolyard Classroom
Do It Yourself First: Leading Student-Directed Inquiry
by Jim Martin
CLEARING guest writer
f you’ve never taken your elementary, middle, or secondary students out of the classroom to learn, and can’t find a helpful mentor or workshop, it’s okay to learn to use the real world to generate curricula and teach for understanding rather than to pass tests just by doing it. Just make a plan and stick to it, and you’ll be okay. Try a place on your school grounds first, then move to a place in the community when you’re comfy.
There is a simple way to do a student-directed inquiry outside your classroom, involving observations on invertebrates. You can use it to discover whether this kind of work is comfortable for you to do, and if it generates curricular content that satisfies your anxieties about meeting mandated standards and benchmarks. You can start it on your school grounds, or if you’re not comfortable with that, right in your classroom. The only caveat is that you have to let your students think and ask questions, and follow the parts of the project that capture their interest. That is, after you’ve first guided them (and yourself) through the process.
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The nice thing about the project we’ll be describing is that it begins with you facilitating a guided inquiry. It doesn’t matter what grade level you teach, the basic work applies to all of them. The vocabulary and complexity of conceptual content will vary with grade level and student experience, but the basics apply to all levels. The plan is this: We’ll make a small compost heap, then see what comes to live in it. Then we’ll have our students do the same. Simple, but loaded with potential.
First, do your own inservice, perhaps this summer. Start the compost in your own yard or somewhere on the school grounds as your source. Don’t place it where it will always be in direct sunlight, since it needs to stay moist. Put about 5-10 gallons worth of different kinds of plant material in it and turn it once a week with gloved (or ungloved) hands. Keep it moist, but not wet. It’s necessary to start outdoors to attract the invertebrates and microbes which will populate your students’ compost ‘piles.’ As you tend your compost heap, notice what is living there. (If you’ve already done this, I’ll bet you’ve gone to a book or the web about what you’ve found. That’s your brain doing what it’s designed to do.)
As you do your work, try out some learning activities. What is the temperature at the surface of the heap, and in its depths? How do you go about measuring the temperatures? Any glitches? Ask yourself how any temperature differences might have come to be. If it’s not directly explainable to you, who might you ask to find out? (This is a skill we all have to develop when we move out into the real world.) What mathematics activities can you use to make sense of the temperature data? What tells you more, the numbers themselves, or their graph, average, median, range? Would the data be different if the compost heap was larger or smaller? Let’s look at more of the things we can learn.
After your compost heap has been working awhile, you should be finding an increase in the numbers of invertebrates living there. If this isn’t the case, go to places where plant material is obviously decaying and bring samples back to your heap. Keep a record of how many species you find in your heap as you turn it, and how many of each you observe. This means you’ll have to be systematic about how you turn the heap. And about how you record the information you measure, count, and observe. You can pass these skills and understandings on to your students.
As you count species and their numbers, use that data to track species diversity in your compost heap. As a rule of thumb, the greater the species diversity, the healthier the system. Whether you work with kindergartners or high school seniors, you’ll need to know something about species diversity. You can google the term, find some sites which explain it in a way you can understand, and which detail some of the math used to make sense of the numbers. Here’s one you can use; a little esoteric at first glance, but ultimately doable; Simpson’s Index, D = Σ ni(ni-1)/ N(N-1), where D is Simpson’s Diversity Index, Σ stands for ‘the Sum of,’ ni is the number of organisms you counted in the ith species (so the number of organisms in the 3rd species you counted would be n3, and i goes from 1 to the total number of species you counted), and N is the total number of individuals counted among all species. This means that you take the sum of the numbers you get from multiplying the number you counted in each species times that number minus 1, then divide that sum by the total number of individuals you counted times that number minus 1.
Try it for 3 species: Species A, with 10 individuals; Species B, with 5 individuals; and Species C, with 20 individuals. The first ni set is 10(9), the second is 5(4), and the third 20(19), which totals to 490. There are 35 individuals all together, so the denominator is 35(34) = 890. Dividing 490 by 890 gives you about 0.56. What if the counts were 23, 51, and 36? Your numerator and denominator should be 4,316/11,990. If this is confusing, say so in a comment below, and I’ll get back to you with more details.
Sounds complicated, but by the time you’ve done three or four sets of species, you’ll get it down. Just be sure that you sum all the individual counts times themselves minus 1 before you divide by the total counted times the total counted minus 1. The answer to all this, D, gives you a number you can compare with other counts you or your students make. Remember, the reason you need to try this diversity calculation is to get an idea of one way that diversity is described. With your students, you can just use the total number of species present to stand for the same thing. This is the simplest math which can be used to estimate species diversity, the total number of species, a number students can use to compare the number of species in different compost heaps, and which may correlate with other measures of diversity.
There is a spectrum of ways to name diversity: number of species, species richness, species evenness, or a calculation like Simpson’s Index. None do a perfect job, since diversity is a dynamic with many aspects. For now, you can only choose one and use it consistently until you have good reason to use another statistic. We’ll take another look at this in the next blog.
Use your counts of living things to graph a population curve. Choose one species and plot it with time on the x-axis, and number of individuals on the y-axis. This is a population growth curve, and they are an indirect way of determining how an environment treats a particular species residing within it. In setting up your compost heap, you’ve created a new environment, and populations living within it should increase during the initial exploitation phase. Soon enough, those curves will change, raising nice inquiry questions.
Use the heap itself for learning. How big is it? Is it always that big? Bigness can be derived from measurements that students make. How tall is it? How wide? How long? How can you determine its volume? Do any of those numbers correlate with the range of temperatures in the different compost heaps? Species diversity? Population curves? Temperature range and diversity?
What about the biology of the organisms living in the heaps? If you’re up to it, you can take a piece of liver, blend it with a little water or electrolyte like pedialyte, then introduce a drop of this to a container with 250 ml or more of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2 ). Take the temperature of the hydrogen peroxide before adding the liver extract, then periodically during the next 20 minutes. As simple carbohydrates are metabolized to produce useable energy in the form of ATP in nearly all organisms from microbes to Homo sapiens, the extra oxygen atom in one of the intermediary products, hydrogen peroxide, is released leaving water (H2O), an oxygen atom (O), and the energy which held the oxygen atom in place. That energy isn’t re-used, and goes off as heat. Compare the results of this experiment with your data on population and temperature. Is there something to be learned? Might your students understand the basics of what they observed?
What can you find out about four of the species in your compost that explains how they are able to live there? The organisms you find are living in a dynamic relationship which keeps the entire community alive, an economy which cycles materials and moves energy in a productive way. Can you build some elements of a food web from the information you have? What else can you find out about the biology and ecology of compost heaps?
If you teach or use language arts, how can you use the compost heap and its components as metaphors to drive a piece of writing? A piece of art? Music? If you teach science, and have never used these arts and humanities deliveries, try one. You might be surprised at what you’ll learn. I certainly have been.
When you’ve studied your compost heap long enough to feel comfortable with it, have your students learn some thing about them. Use the piece you have the best handle on. The first time through the process with your students, you demonstrate each step. Let students ask questions or make observations as you feel comfortable. You can use your own compost, and demonstrate how to turn it to expose the invertebrates living there. (If you’re up to it, you can find out how to plate out microbes that will be living there, and find out what they do and who eats them.)
When you’re ready for your students to do theirs, have each group start compost heaps somewhere in the schoolgrounds, one 5 gallons in size for each group of four or five students. You can also have students bring in their own mulch, etc., or place boards on the ground at home then collect what’s living on and under them including any molds they find. You might suggest they place the animals in a jar of moist compost, keeping the lid slightly ajar for air, and simply bring the board in and set in in their compost heap. Once compost heaps are doing well (outside the building), you can make ‘sand traps’ by filling plastic bucket lids with a layer of sand and placing them next to a compost heap. Any small mammals or birds who are attracted to the compost will leave footprints in the sand. These don’t always work, but are pretty neat when they do. This will raise questions they can begin to answer.
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This is the twenty third installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests, and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here, or search Categories for “Jim Martin.”
by editor | May 29, 2012 | Learning Theory, Questioning strategies, Schoolyard Classroom
“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.
Part 21: Where Brains Learn
Some cognitive particulars about learning in the real world
by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer
he crack, a river, flows from the upper left corner of the wall, spreads into branching riverlets as it nears the window. That sentence was written in metaphor. The next sentence has no metaphor, but carries the same information: There was a crack in the wall which branched as it neared the window. Which will you remember? Which brings recallable pictures to your mind? This is like engaging in science inquiry in the real world. Compared to reading about the results of science inquiry in the real world. Each gives a visual clue, but which will come most easily to mind?
This is like science made vs. science in the making. The place of Assimilation is learning for understanding. When you engage your students in the real world, it acts like a metaphor, clarifies concepts and rectifies them with experience.
When you use the conceptual structures which underlie learning, they act as metaphors to clarify what you and your students are doing and learning. These structures are like the mirrors in a kaleidoscope which always generate the underlying structure of the image you see, and the pieces, ordered by that structure, are what you respond to. Can I add a little more to this?
We’ve been examining the conceptual structures that underlie learning, and how concrete experience in the real world encourages our brains to engage those structures. They reside in the architecture and processes of the brain. A picture of how they work to build understanding began to clarify itself to me during my teaching years. The brain is the organ of learning, and its structure and function does facilitate learning, especially when the delivery of the learnings recognizes how the brain works. Just as knowing the structure of color facilitates painting with water colors. When you dip the brush and apply it to paper, you know and anticipate what will happen. The underlying structure determines, to a large extent, what emerges.
Many of us carry an image of the human mind as an entity disembodied from our brain, an ethereal thing that goes where we go, and does our thinking for us. And no wonder. We can’t see the brain work, even in our classrooms. It doesn’t move the way muscles do, and it makes no sound. The best we can do is to know what the work of the parts of the brain are, and look for evidence of what they do in the things our students do and think.
Take Assimilation. The concept of Assimilation has varied descriptions, depending on who’s doing the describing. They generally carry this piece: What the learner personally experiences in the world about is incorporated into the world within our mind or brain. Its strength lies in the interaction between our brain and objects in the world outside ourselves. These are concrete interactions, and they work perfectly with the way our brain is organized to learn. Our brain learned to learn in the real world, where engaging concrete objects led to the kinds of abstractions that emerged as spear throwers and paintings on rocks, sticks, and cave walls. That is what makes metaphor such a powerful writing and rhetorical vehicle. It clarifies a subject with visual, tactile, olfactory, aural, and taste details that engage our senses, and make complexities open to understanding. A brain which developed in a concrete world is able to soar. Marvelous!
I often mention concrete vs. abstract referents. You can do the following as an experiment if you teach the same thing to two classes. When we are presented with new material in an abstract form, like a paragraph of information, we can put it into long term memory by using the information several times. Think of the end-of-section questions, where students answer questions by reviewing what they have read about particulars. Like Procedural Memory, which helps us carry out actions, it may stay with us, but different but related pieces won’t be stored as one concept. When we actually engage concrete referents, a thermometer in a stream, we engage Declarative or Distributed Memory, episodes and facts that can be brought to mind consciously, where new learnings are incorporated into concepts already residing in the brain. Let’s look at some of the parts of the brain involved in these processes.
When a student holds a thermometer in her hand and immerses it into the cold waters of a glacier-fed stream, her eyes send visual information about this to the visual processing areas in the Occipital Lobe of her brain, at the very back of her head. The Parietal Lobe, between the Occipital Lobe and the middle of her head, processes the feeling and temperature of the water on her hand. It also keeps track of where her person ends and the rest of the world begins, then gathers the visual, tactile, and coolness information, and passes it to other parts of the brain which carry memories of all these things.
You can get a sense for how this functions when you sit down to enjoy your favorite beverage, say a latte. (Now, you have to tell yourself that you’re here to learn. That sets things up in your brain.) As your fingers move toward the cup’s handle, you become very aware of the shape of the handle just outside your skin, and the round shape of the cup. You may have brief perceptions of other cups, perhaps a favorite that is still in the dishwasher. You can see the foamy latte part of the beverage near the top of the cup, and anticipate its flavor. Certainly you’ll be aware of its texture, fine bubbles, color, pieces that your tongue loves to discover. And the coffee itself. You’ll know what kind it is, where it was grown, color, anticipated taste, texture, and the bouquet it always leaves in your mouth after you’ve sipped it. You may even be aware of the brands of the latte and coffee, and other facts of these ingredients of the beverage. You may have brief recollections of other places you’ve had this particular blend, who was there, and what you were doing.
These things happen very quickly, but they are perceptions perceived. Each piece of information came from specific parts of your brain, and these were processed together in your prefrontal cortex, at the front of you head, as what is currently called Working Memory. The prefrontal cortex is also the place where you engage critical thinking. Nice.
So, by doing something when you’ve told yourself that you’re doing it to learn, you suddenly have all of the things you’ll need to help you learn brought together in the part of the brain that can do the learning. Why shouldn’t we use the structure and function of the brain to enhance the delivery of our curricula? Let’s take this idea back to the young woman immersing her thermometer into the waters of a stream.
As she picks up the thermometer, positions it in her hand so she can see its graduations, she becomes very aware of its shape, its use, her expectations for what it will tell her, the particular reason she is picking it up, the memories she already has about streams, and thermometers, and, because she’s here to learn about salmon, some thoughts about how salmon like the temperature of their water.
She is on the first hour of a one week unit on watersheds, so doesn’t know a great deal about water temperature, salmon, and watersheds. None the less, what memories she does have of these things come together with all the rest in working memory, ready to learn.
So, she measures the temperature of the water, and it’s twelve degrees celcius. Her working memory doesn’t know where to fit this in, what I call a Need to Know. So she looks for the reference book that is part of the contents of the box she helped carry down to the streambank. Finding it, she looks for information about salmon and temperature, and finds they prefer waters with a range of temperatures between 4.4 and 14.0C. Then her prefrontal cortex, the site of critical thinking, begins to use the information she has gleaned and memories stored, to engage the prefrontal cortex’s functions of perseverance, self-monitoring and supervision, problem solving, orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals, compare and contrast, working toward a defined goal, expectation based on actions, extract and reconstruct sequences of meaning from ongoing experience.
That’s a long list, a partial one, of the functions of this site of human learning that current US curricula generally overlooks. Contrast this with the teacher telling students about salmon and water temperature, the student reading in the text about it then answering questions in the back of the chapter about these things. Compare and contrast (using your prefrontal cortex!) this with the rich texture of meaning in the young woman with the thermometer.
Next time we’ll look some more at this underlying structure of learning.
This is the twentyfirst installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests, and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here, or search Categories for “Jim Martin.”
by editor | Nov 23, 2011 | Environmental Literacy, Place-based Education, Schoolyard Classroom
“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.
Part 4: Inquiry
An Introduction to the World of Discovery….
by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer
“We carry with us the wonders we seek without us. There is all
Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous
part of Nature, which he that studies widely learns in a compendium
what others labor at in a divided piece and endless volume.”
– Sir Thomas Browne
Religio Medici
We are, indeed, the wonders that we seek. To discover them, we must look deep within ourselves, to that part which can reach out to the world and comprehend it. Then release ourselves to know.
Odd, that we must release what’s within us to know what is outside. Traveling within is a process, best taken a step at a time. Enough steps taken, and your teaching will change.
The change flows from a tack in perspective, a paradigm shift, if you will, that presents you with a new, very functional and accessible view of teaching: what it ought to be, what it can be. But, like discovering your inner self, you don’t get there by hearing about it; you have to make the journey yourself.
Start by going into the world. Reflect on the difference between how it looks and how school looks and how textbooks, handouts, and applications look. When you engage that change in perspective, school, textbooks, handouts, and applications will look like the real world, the extension of the world beyond the classroom that they ought to be.
If you spent some time in a place like those I described in my last blog, you may have had a moment when you wanted to know something; the name of a plant, what that stuff encrusting the branches of a tree was, etc. These ‘Needs to Know’ emerged from engagement with a place, and may have influenced your view of this place as classroom – your new perspective. They are the vehicle which makes publishers’ materials, and your classroom, relevant and useful extensions of the real world. The world outside drives you into the books and into learning.
How often do we give our students concepts to memorize, and then tear our hair out when they can’t think their way through them? Science is touted to be the subject which teaches critical thinking. Do we enable it to do that, or do we eschew this role of our discipline? Going into the Real world for curriculum gets you and your students into the larger community and environment where they can reach out, touch what they find, and incorporate it into what is already there in their brains. I call going into the world outside the classroom “Community and Environment Based Education,” CEBE for short.
If you’ve never experienced it, the thought of teaching a CEBE curriculum can be intimidating. We all experience a sense of uneasiness when we try something new. Taking simple, positive steps is how we overcome inertia in the face of what we perceive as difficult. You’ll find that doubt dissolves as soon as you engage a familiar content. If you made a casual observation, you probably noticed this.
How do you gain the confidence it takes to enjoy teaching CEBE learning? First, learn what it is. CEBE learning is an inquiry process that produces facts, but it is not the facts themselves. Inquiry, itself, is not a book of facts; it is a cognitive-kinesthetic process, a way of knowing, a way of organizing your thoughts and actions. Here are four basic pieces of the process: 1) ask a question in your environment or community, 2) decide how you might answer it, 3) follow through on this decision, and 4) compare the results of following through with the question that you asked. This is manageable, and, with a little support, you’ll find that you can do it. Let’s work our way through this, one step at a time. We have time.
We can’t ask a question until we know something about the topic of our inquiry. This is one of the critical problems with publishers’ inquiries. They start with a question or hypothesis about something you’ve never experienced. To ask a question, you have to know something about the thing you’re questioning. We don’t start right out with our magnifying glasses and a Burning Question. To begin, we’ll just go out and get a feel for how Inquiry works. A good place to start is to engage in finding something out. This is one of the most difficult pieces of inquiry, because it is tenuous, and where you go is up to you. You’ll be a little uncomfortable for awhile. Assume that you’ll find something of interest and develop a good inquiry. As you work, you’ll occasionally feel uncertain, and want to be advised by some authority. Be assured that this is your inquiry, and you have the capacity to make decisions about what to do.
Start with something to find out. Go to a place that interests you and walk through it. Let yourself relax in this place. Don’t focus on any particular thing, but let parts of the place come to you as you walk. They will, if you let them. For example, let’s say you notice plants seem to act as habitat for animals. Now you have something to think about. Look closely. Write notes about what you notice. Comment on anything that you find of interest. Spend at least 20 minutes doing this as you walk around. It may become quite involved. If it does, have faith that you can sort it out.
Keep track of how you feel about this, especially your sense of autonomy. Whenever we do something, we have a thing I call our ‘Locus of Control’ that goes with the doing. Bend your arm at a right angle and close your fist. Move your fist away from your body, keeping your elbow against your ribs and your lower arm parallel to the ground. If you’re comfortable with what you’re doing, and the authority for that comes from you, move your fist as close to the center of your abdomen, next to the spine, as your skin and muscles will allow. This indicates a locus of control which resides within a person; where the person is the authority for her thoughts and actions.
If you’re following directions, but aren’t comfortable enough to act on your own decisions about the work, move your fist into the air before you; move it to a distance which seems to reflect your comfort with being the authority for the work you are doing. Make sure you understand this idea of a locus of control. It’s importnt to move your locus of control from outside yourself to inside you. We’ll revisit the concept from time to time.
Later, look over your notes. What did you notice that was interesting to you? Were there any patterns? Anything unusual? Describe that, and what about it caught your interest. Of the things you described, which would you like to know more about? Later, you will use this to focus your inquiry question. Jot down any questions your observations, thoughts, or notes raised. Then think of how you might use this piece to start a lesson in the classroom, lab, schoolyard, neighborhood, some topic you will cover in the next two weeks.
Next, we’ll work on asking a clear, succinct inquiry question. This is a tough job, but not as personally difficult as going to a place and finding something to question. If you have children of your own, how might they grow with this kind of experience? Your students?
This is the fourth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that will explore how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests, and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here.
by editor | Jun 20, 2010 | Environmental Literacy, Learning Theory
Works in Progress: Making the most of your environmental education opportunities
Sneak up on them, and they’ll learn.
On their own.
By Jim Martin
How do you take care of all the background capacity building students need to make the most of environmental education field trips that they take during the school year? With tight school budgets and time that has to be reprogrammed to meet the demands of No Child Left Behind testing, place-based learning has become difficult for teachers to do. Here is a simple idea that saves valuable class time, engages students, and prepares them to understand the work they will do on field trips. (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.
