Recent additions:
• Solar panels in Seattle classroom
• CREST Farm-to-School Program
• Expeditionary Learning in Washington

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Part 10: Assimilation

When the world outside becomes the world inside

by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer

tarting in the world outside our skin, our personal tegumental boundary, I have claimed, is the best way to learn. By ‘learn,’ I mean integrate new material into old understandings so that they become a part of you. Part of you because they begin their synaptic lives with you by adding protein to the synapses they innervate, piles of stones along a new path, so they can find their way again. Becoming protein within you, they are you, a part of yourself that will travel with you wherever you go.

An enchanting thought, that, one that all teachers could give to their students in every class they teach. Learning for understanding, carried through each person’s life. I would think that thought would drive education, but it doesn’t. Even so, I’d like to talk about it for a bit.

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This is the tenth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, 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.

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Understanding Electricity Through Photovoltaics from green levine on Vimeo.

by Jessica Levine
Eckstein Middle School
Seattle, Washington

As a student of David Orr at Oberlin College I helped design the Adam Joseph Lewis Center (AJLC) for Environmental Studies. The building was designed to generate more energy than it consumed– a phenomenal concept for a building. It turned out it was also a pioneering concept for education.

Taking my Oberlin education into my own educational practice has been easy. I teach the science of sustainability in a year-long physical science curriculum for 6th graders at Eckstein Middle School in Seattle.  So, recently, I considered some of the same questions we had set out to explore for the AJLC. Was it possible to generate energy from solar—even in Seattle? Could I maintain a system as a demonstration, for students, families, and community, of what is possible with renewable energy? Could I go off the grid in a large urban public  middle school?

Solar energy has the power to help people become aware of their use of energy. The sun simply shines on. Everything is illuminated. In my classroom, that’s not just a metaphor. My classroom has a bank of south facing windows. On the window sill, a plastic solar plant flaps its two leaves much to the delight and mystery of my students. Early in the school year, they notice the plant and wonder how it works. I suggest that they pay attention, and that the answers will be revealed through the course of our study. By the end of the year they can describe the energy transformation taking place to produce the motion. “It’s solar powered,” they conclude. “Sure, all plants are solar powered,” I reply in my typical educational humor helping students see the truth in not just the small photovoltaic system, but also in the larger picture.

The south facing windows give us vision.  In the afternoon, returning from lunch, we rarely need to turn on the lights. If I could teach without the lights, I began to wonder; where else could we reduce our energy load? If we think of the school as a city, and the classroom like an individual home, is it possible to simulate an off-grid experience?

The Solar Roller Is Born

With funding from an Amgen Award for Science Teaching Excellence, and in partnership with Bonneville Environmental Foundation, the Solar Roller was created. The Solar Roller brings solar electricity into the classroom. The system is designed with a solar panel that can be deployed on the ground at any angle so the kids can see it, monitor the energy it creates and experiment with shading effects.  The remaining equipment can be situated in the classroom where 1500 watts of AC power can be supplied to a wide range of devices.  I use the system to run the classroom computer and document camera and I can monitor data points from the solar electric system on the computer. While I can’t control the electrical needs for the heating and lighting system in my classroom space I can take control of the devices in the room and run them on clean energy.  In this sense I am taking my classroom off –the-grid by reducing the need for utility energy for devices the class can manage.

Opportunity to Teach Tradeoffs and Systems

When electricity is flowing, we can project information on the walls in the classroom and even touch the screen to manipulate the projected information. This new wave of education has helped me create a limited paper classroom. Still the trail of resource consumption does not end with the paper stock. The energy we use also has an environmental impact and carbon footprint. We must be aware of the trade-offs of our educational  technological advances With a move to more renewable energy technologies we have an amazing opportunity to teach students about the deeper tradeoffs and systems thinking skills needed to create a more sustainable future…

[Note: Photo above is from Stanwood High School]

Jessica Levine can be reached at Ms.green.levine@gmail.com

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Interview by Chris Gertschen

CG: Is there one particular event or series of events that led you to a profession in conservation?

RJ:  Yes, if you focus on the profession part.  I got into conservation as a volunteer for a lot of reasons wrapped around love of Idaho’s outdoors and a sense I could contribute, but I got into the profession because of a single event.

At the time—early 1980s—I lived in the Sun Valley area, had a construction business, and wrote a bit for the local newspaper.  As my business did better and wilderness issues heated up I devoted a lot of time as a volunteer with the Sierra Club and the Idaho Conservation League.  This led to a couple opportunities to be part of lobbying trips to Washington, DC, again, as a volunteer.

On one of those trips to DC, in the summer of 1984, I was part of a lobby effort in Congress and in the room for portions of the negotiations between the staffs of Sen. Jim McClure (R-ID) and Rep. John Seiberling (D-OH) over an Idaho wilderness bill.  They were chairman of their respective committees.

As the week ended I was both exhausted and exhilarated sitting in the conference room of the old Sierra Club office on Pennsylvania Avenue.  Late afternoon light was streaming in the window and I’d just heard stories of the then recent passage of the Alaska Lands Act and the conservation work revolving around the office.  The Club staffer I’d been working with gave me a can of cheap beer.  We talked about conservation as a job. I remember the moment like it was yesterday; right then I knew I needed to figure out how to do this work for a living, a sense of career goal I’d never experienced.

A little over a year later I’d gotten a job running the public lands program of ICL.  Two years later I was on the Sierra Club staff—a goal directly connected to that afternoon in their DC office.  For eight years I represented the Club on lands issues in the Pacific Northwest out of Seattle.  My work included Idaho wilderness and a really crazy eight years related to the spotted owl and the region’s ancient forests.  For a while I spent as much as 100 days a year in DC as a “frequent-flyer lobbyist.”

In 1995 I came home and for over 16 years I’ve been running the Idaho Conservation League.  Every time I’m in DC—as I was just last week—I think of that afternoon in the Club’s old office.  That staffer who gave me the beer became an important mentor and is still a close colleague.

And it is still great work I’m lucky to do.  It’s hard, wildly frustrating, and has exceeded every expectation I had for it.

CG:  I had a life-changing wilderness lobbying trip as well.  There is something about seeing the issues we are so passionate about from a broader, national perspective. I would imagine that throughout your many years in conservation you’ve seen some remarkable changes.  Can you tell us about some of the positive changes you’ve observed?

RJ:  Positive changes?

Two things jump out.

One is the change in how people communicate and how that empowers people to engage in new ways.  Our government processes are still unsettled on the impact of new tools, but even if the results are not yet known the world has fundamentally shifted.  Impact on social systems, media, government and all that is the big picture.  Closer to home, simply how I communicate with my colleagues has changed in no less revolutionary a manner, both in immediacy, but also in sharing of content. As a volunteer in the early 80s I had a leg up because of a few paragraphs of ‘insider’ news I got once a month in the mail.  Imagine how crazy that sounds in an era of Facebook and Twitter!

The second thing is how—on a good day—we’ve been able to reduce the partisan edge to conservation.  Some of our most impactful relationships today are with Republicans as well as with Democrats.  Commonsense conservation should not be a partisan issue, we all know that.  It was not always that way and, obviously, it often still is and often for good reason, but we are better at what we don’t actually push our work into a partisan corner by our own actions.

Other good things?  I’m super encouraged by the smart and energetic young people who want to get into this work.  There was a time when young folks were unplugging from the environment and what I see now is a resurgence of really capable young people.

An interesting change with that point about youth is their extreme confidence in technology.  Some of that is good, some of that is, well, I’m not so sure.

CG:  What are some of the challenges that ICL faces?

RJ:  The biggest challenge is big.  Our success is based on many factors, but ultimately we make progress by seeking closure in forums where policy gets made.  Often this means the legislative branch of our federal and state government.  To be generous, let’s just say Congress and the Legislature are not exactly great for anyone these days.  This means that our biggest challenge is one of America’s biggest challenges.  Our government—particularly our legislative forums—are not rising to the needs of the country today.

ICL has done very good work building bridges.  We have developed relationships with both sides of the political divide that few organizations can match.  That said, the actual stage where difficult problems are solved—Congress and the Legislature—are fail to act in the only way they ever successfully do their work: crafting compromise solutions.

Unfortunately, this leads folks to seek alternative venues.  The Courts. Ballot measures.  The streets, even, with things like Occupy Wall Street.  Failure to solve issues does not make them go away.  Our nation’s founders came up with a pretty amazing system of government.  It’s not working well for anyone right now because people on both sides care more about their side than solutions.

I’m pretty confident there are solutions—good ones—to lots of what we work on.  We can only do so much to set the stage.  Whether it’s the environment or anything else, ultimately decisions have to get made.  The places where decisions get made isn’t working very well right now, and that’s bad for everyone.

CG:   I find encouragement in citizen action and I wonder if it is most effective when it is closer to home, perhaps on the community and regional level – grassroots movement from the bottom up.  I am thinking of a shared dream of understanding the land and its inhabitants, a vision of a society that lives well within the limits of the natural world.  I am wondering if there isn’t a strong connection between conservation and environmental education that might be able to support that vision.  Collaboration is not easy, I know, but perhaps taking it to the local level would be more effective.  One example might be cooperative regional conservation centers where resources of many kinds could be housed.  What do you think about that idea?  Do you have other cooperative projects that you’d like to see happen?

RJ:  I don’t know about prospects for a regional conservation center or such a thing but do strongly support local collaboration and ICL has helped be a catalyst for and participant in several noteworthy examples.

As you note collaboration is not easy.  What’s also not easy is making actual forward progress without it.  Conservationists have made an art form out of stopping bad things, and that’s important and often necessary work.  But stopping bad is a lot different than advancing good.  Conservation, in my view, is a public interest movement and if it is to endure it must be built on public support and moving forward.  A ‘movement’ that only fights bad can too easily be reduced to being just a special interest.

I see the challenge of creating forward movement on wilderness, open space, public health, energy conservation and a whole host of other issues to be the most exciting part of my job.  It comes at various levels for us: local, regional, and statewide.

And it’s really hard.  Collaboration between a diverse set of players, when it’s working, is a fascinating process to watch and be part of.  I literally just returned from a meeting of a ‘collaborative’ table bringing elected leaders, the timber industry, conservation interests, mining, and more.  A key lesson from this and every other table we’re part of is that each one is different.  It’s an art, and not even close to a science.  The collaboration results from getting the right people together at the right time, often at the right moment, often after a lot of difficult history.  For this reason I don’t think it can be easily centralized or ‘cooked.’  There is no formula.  This makes me a suspicious about success of trying to institutionally create it through a ‘conservation center’ or such thing.

CG:  I was thinking of regional centers as “places” that house resources for those engaged in teaching and learning about the places where we live.  The Crown of the Continent Consortium for Ecosystems Education is a model for what I am describing.  Or, perhaps what I envision is a website that links many conservation resources with those who need them; and links those who want to be more active in conservation with those who can use a hand.  I am hopeful that these interviews will spawn a conversation that leads to more effective and widespread conservation. I’ve learned in the course of these interviews that most conservation organizations are short on funds and thus have staffs that are working way too hard.  If I could grant you a wish of funds to increase your efforts, what programs and projects would you be most interested in pursuing?

RJ:  There is no question that we’re short on funds, and all the more so now with the tough economy.  Part of it might be that it’s hard to say no to good work that might not be done by anyone else otherwise.  We do have a broad mission so we work on a broad portfolio and I’m certain that breadth of work makes us more effective and we certainly learn more and expose ICL to a broader set of policymakers and the public at large.  But it is expensive.

If there was one place where I’d put new funds to work right now would be towards telling our story.  The business model of a typical conservation advocacy group—which is more or less what we are—is that we’re built around communicating to our members.  The fact is we represent everyone in Idaho who cares about the air they breathe, water they drink and lands they love.  That’s a lot more people than we can now talk to.  I am certain with greater resources to inform, inspire and empower citizens who care, we would build a much deeper and broader constituency for conservation who’d like what we do and how we do it.  We have some work in place today that has started this process, and while it’s enhanced our audience by thousands, we could do much more.

#  #  #  #

Chris Gertschen is the founder and former director of the Sawtooth Science Institute. She is conducting a series of talks with the leaders of conservation in the west to get their perspectives on the relationship between conservation and environmental education. Read her introduction here.

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by Harmony Roll, Taiga Teacher

ou don’t need to be an environmental educator, you don’t have to stray from traditional norms, or be on the cutting edge to incorporate place-based education into your daily practice as a teacher. The goal is to create connections, connections to what the learners already know about the world around them. Activate their prior knowledge.

One of my most effective teachers was in college. In fact for most of the courses we never left the dark art history classroom, where a huge screen usually displayed two slides at a time. All of his lectures and courses were about art created during the Baroque period or before. What Professor Grillo did do was make correlations to what was happening in the world during the time the art work was created with what was going on in the world as we sat in our chairs and took notes. He compared and contrasted the socioeconomics of the times, the technology, the relationships between the artists and the commissioners. We, the students, had a deeper understanding of history because we could use ourselves and our place in history as a reference point.

Using the creek that runs behind the school yard is a wonderful opportunity to teach so many things, but a teacher does not need to start there. Simply comparing your latitude on a map in relationship to the country you are studying is a way to make a simple connection and a reference point from which you can compare and contrast.

See more at Taiga Teacher

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Part 6: The Easy Part

by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer

e’ve been exploring science inquiry, starting with doing a casual observation in a natural area. In the last blog, I found an inquiry question. What did it tell me to do? I discovered how straightforward the Investigative Design is when it is built upon a clean inquiry question. The inquiry question I finally chose was, Where in trees do Fox Sparrows spend most time? That tells me what to do. Here are the steps it will take me to answer it.

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This is the sixth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, 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.

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At Abernethy Elementary, students enjoy freshly cooked breakfasts and lunches prepared on site by a trained chef. The meals are often prepared with local and seasonal ingredients, some of which are harvested from the school’s Garden of Wonders. The garden itself is entirely planted, tended and harvested by the students, who use it throughout their school day as a “learning laboratory. “

The garden program and scratch kitchen are parts of a unique wellness policy at Abernethy. A full-time physical education teacher encourages the students to enjoy physical activity. Enthusiastic parents walk and bike their kids to school rather then driving. Parents and staff organize a yearly bike-a-thon to raise money for the school that allows Abernethy students to ride bikes and scooters on car-free streets. Chef Nicole and Garden Coordinator Sarah Sullivan run five weeks of summer camps at the school, where they teach everything from pickling to pasta making, permaculture and organic bio-intensive gardening.

Founded in 2000 by a dedicated group of parents and teachers, the School Kitchen Garden program began as just a community garden plot. Teachers agreed to add garden class as an additional extracurricular class for students. In the past 11 years, the program has grown to include a rigorous garden curriculum aimed at supporting state standards in math, science, English, health and social studies. (Look for a free compendium of these teacher-friendly garden lessons for grades K-5 online this spring!)

Portland Public School’s Test Kitchen for Higher Quality Food
Abernethy serves as the “test kitchen” for Portland Public Schools and has created many recipes and menu items that have moved into schools across the district. Interestingly, though average percentage of students buying hot lunch daily at Portland schools is about 30 percent, over time lunches from the Abernethy kitchen attract at least 60 percent of the school’s children.

School Chef Nicole Hoffman is working closely with Nutrition Services (NS) to create interesting recipes that still meet USDA standards with only $1.07 per meal to work with. Together Hoffmann and NS have focused on sourcing better staple ingredients to institutionalize wide-sweeping change: All wheat used is Portland Public Schools, for example, is grown sustainable and locally by Shepherds Grain flour. All chicken is raised locally and hormone-free by Draper Valley farm. Beans and grains are grown by farmers in the Willamette Valley. Yogurt is made in Eugene, Oregon. At this point Portland Public Schools are serving about 40% locally-sourced food.

Slowly but surely Abernethy’s students are even fans of the more “creative” dishes from the kitchen like chef Nicole’s chicken Panang curry, falafel with riata, hummus and pita, and garden-harvest veggie soup.

Accolades from Across the Nation:
Oregon Green School status
First Oregon Wellness Award
Kiwi Magazine Crusaders Award
Health Magazine 2008 Healthiest Schools Report
Subject of 2007 NPR story on school food (LINK TO http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6515242)
KPTV feature “Food Revolution” Link to http://www.better.tv/videos/m/30671714/food-revolution.htm
Oregon Live

Check out Chef Nicole and Abernethy’s School Kitchen Garden Program on Facebook or on the website: www.gardenofwonders.org More information: gardenofwonders@yahoo.com

Written by Sarah Sullivan, Abernethy School Kitchen Garden Program Coordinator

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A data-collection program brings real science to school — and startles the professionals.

an’s work as a scientist began with a contradiction: “The scientists said that you can’t find any horny toads here. And I said, ‘My dad and I go out and catch them.’” The 13-year-old has now traveled to Idaho and California, where he and three classmates surprised working scientists by describing new discoveries about where the 3-inch-long lizards live and what they eat. “One man said that we presented better than most college students did,” says Ian.

Ian is one of more than a dozen of my students at Waterville Elementary School, in Waterville, Washington, who have spoken at scientific conferences throughout the country. Their subject: short-horned lizards (Phrynosoma douglasii), also called horny toads, which are native to our rural area and are a part of my students’ world. The creatures aren’t an obvious vehicle for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. But through their work on horny toads as part of a nationwide project called NatureMapping, my students honed those very skills and made a real contribution to science.

Before my fourth-grade class began collecting data in 1997, there were fewer than 100 documented lizard sightings, and most came from projects in the 1930s and ’40s. Those records showed that the elusive reptiles existed only on undeveloped land, but this data was wrong, probably because no one had sampled private property. In just a few years, my students have quadrupled the number of documented sightings and shown that the lizards thrive on farmland.

In addition, we have shaken up decades-old assumptions about the animals’ habitat and diet. For example, according to scientific literature, the lizards are specially adapted to eat ants, but in our observations they clearly preferred small grasshoppers. Besides, farmers say they see few ants in their fields for the lizards to eat. Those findings were presented at the Wildlife Society Pacific Northwest Regional Meeting, held in March 2000 in Post Falls, Idaho, where a grateful scientific community accepted the students and their data. (See also the presentation by Waterville Elementary School students at the 2003 NatureMapping National Meeting. (46.4 MB))

In just a few years, students have dramatically increased scientists’ understanding of the horny toad. Credit: J.R. Hughson

A Day in the Life of a Horny Toad

Even though our NatureMapping project is designed to fill gaps in existing information about where certain plant and animal species are located (see “How To: Start Counting Critters“), we didn’t set out to challenge accepted scientific wisdom. In fact, when NatureMapping first became part of my classroom, it was in a very different form.

Shortly after I began working at Waterville, I was handed a binder of lessons to get me started teaching elementary school science. I quickly realized that the curriculum was boring and shallow. We had to do something different. I signed up for a NatureMapping workshop, and that got me started incorporating the program into my curriculum, beginning with birds, because I knew a lot of bird-watchers. The kids would bring in their own sightings and team with birders by phone to record what species they saw, and where. We would write up the information and email it to Karen Dvornich, the NatureMapping coordinator at the University of Washington, who added it to a growing collection of data about sites where common Washington species are found.

One day, Dvornich visited our classroom, and the students were talking about the short-horned lizards they often saw. Dvornich got excited, because the lizards were considered an at-risk species, so we started making lizards the focus of our work. We’ve been expanding the program ever since.

At first, I thought the students could collect the information themselves near their homes over the summer. Unfortunately, they would often forget or would look at the wrong time. I’ve never been shy about asking for help, and I thought that the farmers in our community could make the observations we needed. So, in 1999, I asked my students to make a list of every farmer they knew, and we mailed out invitations to be part of our school project.

For six years now, my students have worked with farmers in the community who agree to collect data about where and when they see the lizards in their fields. We start by imagining a day in the life of a horny toad, and then a year in the life of a horny toad. Next, we work on our reading. When you try to read a field guide, just about every word is hard, and every sentence is difficult. So we put notes in the margins, look up new words, and turn what we read into lists and tables. We compare what we read to what we first imagined about the animals, and, after we collect data, we compare our data to what we read.

Later, students use their experience with the horny toads to practice various kinds of writing: instructions to capture a lizard, a persuasive paragraph on the same topic, a description of horny toads’ resemblance to a dirt clod, an explanation of how this appearance benefits the lizards.

Students practice using radio telemetry so they’ll be able to track short-horned lizards when the animals burrow underground for the winter. Credit: Edutopia

Trend Spotting

Each student works with one farmer. On a given day, the farmers come to the school with the data they’ve collected, help students find their fields on a series of maps, and arrange their data in tables. This information tells us where, when, and how many horny toads the farmers see. Then we see whether the data can answer questions: Where are the horny toads the most common? When are the horny toads most likely to be in their fields?

We plot each sighting on a computer map, then put all the associated information on a large spreadsheet. From the spreadsheet, students select data to answer a question they have and use the computer to make a graph of the information. They scrutinize graphs for clarity and then write an analysis of the results, thus demonstrating a state standard — analyzing data through graphing. This year, for the first time, we were able to overlay aerial photos of the farmers’ lands onto the maps. Several farmers worked with students to plot very exact horny toad sightings.

We also decide what information is useful and what isn’t, and we design the data sheet that farmers will use to collect data for next year’s class. We also talk about the value of collecting the same data year after year to capture trends. NatureMapping also finds researchers who can help us plan studies to answer new questions as we think of them.

Recent grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supplied the classroom with computers and computer support so the students can use geographic information systems (GIS) to look at data over time and space, and overlay it onto aerial photographs. But even without these tools, NatureMapping would be possible.

For example, one year, my students wanted to know what happened to our lizards during the winter. We started by consulting our field guide, which says they dig down about 2 inches and partially freeze. The soil-conservation agency, however, says that frost levels in our part of Washington reach an average of 18 inches below the surface. Do the lizards dig deeper than the field guide says? Or do they have something that keeps them warm? Do some end up freezing to death?

A lizard carries a radio transmitter on its back. Credit: Edutopia

To answer these questions, the kids made an 18-inch-high pen of chicken wire with a wood floor and sank it into the ground. In October, we placed two lizards inside the pen. They immediately burrowed underground. When spring came, the students carefully dug out the pen with teaspoons. One horny toad had disappeared, but the other was flattened on the floor of the pen, having dug far beyond 2 inches specified in the field guide; it looked like it had tried to go even lower, maybe beneath the frost layer. We learned we should have made the pen higher, and the students gained a better sense of what “average” really means. This year, we’re gluing radio transmitters onto a few lizards so we can track where they burrow for the winter. Then we’ll see how deep they go and how they survive.

This project continually strengthens ties between the school and the community. I don’t really teach my students mapping; the farmers do. For these people who work the land, anything connected with it is interesting; they’ll sometimes call one another to find out how many lizards other farmers have seen.

A highlight of the year comes when students present their findings to the farmers, who get to see an analysis of the data they’ve been collecting in their fields. This involvement makes the students take their work more seriously; they perform tasks considered beyond the abilities of children at their grade level, like mapping data to find trends over time, or going to scientific conferences, which has become so commonplace that we’ve developed a system to figure out who gets to go. In September, students often walk into the classroom asking, “Where are we going to present this year?” Not a bad way to begin a school term.

Diane Petersen is a teacher at Waterville Elementary School.

This article originally appeared on the website of Edutopia.

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