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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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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by Becs Boyd

Place and Community Based approach can be transformative for students and teachers, schools and communities. Making this approach work means taking a fresh look at the school community, the wider community and the environment, and working out how they can best support each other. Change takes time, and success, naturally, relies on a healthy physical and social learning environment, with good relationships between educators, administrators and students. Many schools will already be connecting students with their local place and helping them discover how to make their own Place in the world a positive one.

Here are some pointers drawn from the experiences of real schools, students and teachers to help plant the seeds of Place in new school communities.

1 – Learning and caring about Place

Connecting and engaging students by using the local environment and culture as the starting point for learning and caring about the wider world

• Develop an inclusive and caring school ethos and culture, encouraging the school community – parents, teachers and students – to feel listened to, cared for, involved, respected and valued.
• Ground the whole school vision in sustainability – starting with the local Place and community and extending to the wider world – sharing ownership for building the school’s identity with staff and students
• Leadership styles that involve shared planning, good communication and the active involvement of the school leader in teaching and school activities can help support a ‘culture of care’.
• Nurture students’ sense of Place by allowing plenty of opportunity for unstructured play or quiet time in a familiar natural ‘Place’.
• Give teachers adequate support, resources, planning time, training and flexibility to develop their own teaching practices around Place.

2 – Responsible citizens

Empowering students to make a difference in the local environment and community, creating caring local and global citizens

• Encourage the development of links between students and local representatives, charities and businesses to help identify manageable projects where students can have a real impact.
• Give students plenty of time and opportunity as part of school to experience and work in the wider community.
•  Encourage students to contribute to the development of community service provision, for example by encouraging markets for local food, helping disadvantaged groups etc.
•  Build links with schools and communities in contrasting localities at home or abroad to raise awareness of diversity and global issues.

3 – Active learners

‘Real-world’ problem-solving, so students create knowledge with teachers as guides and co-learners. Learning is often interdisciplinary.

• Use themes and action-based projects to make connections across subjects and issues, and link classwork into both the school community and into learning in the local environment and community.
•  Collaborative planning of the curriculum framework is needed, particularly at secondary level, to find the most effective synergies and projects and avoid duplication. Allow teachers to help design the curriculum.
•  Encourage ‘whole school’ learning that involves all students across all ages and classes. One way of doing this is to adopt an annual theme, like the forests, rivers and mountains themes at Sunnyside School.
• Encourage students to learn by doing and be ‘creators’ of knowledge, with the teacher as a guide and co-learner who may not have all the ‘answers’.
• Action-based and creative arts projects help with student participation and create more engagement and ‘ownership’, as well as developing skills in strategic and critical thinking and problem-solving.

4 – Effective contributors

Students’ questions and concerns play a central role in determining what is studied and how.

•  Make students’ concerns and questions central to the learning agenda, helping them to identify issues they wish to address.
•  Involve students in supporting the school community, including fundraising, and ensure that their contribution can make a real impact.

5 – School in community

Building two-way partnerships between the school and the wider community, including local organizations and business, and making the most of the ‘outdoor’ or ‘community’ classroom

•  Be ambitious and outward-looking – use the local environment and community as hands-on learning resources and encourage parents, community organisations and businesses to bring their issues to the school.
•  Take students out into local wild places and community venues as well as inviting community members into the school.
•  Make the school a model for a sustainable community that can act as a learning hub and role model for the wider community

6 – Relevant for the real world

Assessing school work not just on its competence, but also on its wider contribution to student growth, to the community and to sustainability

•  Make use of a range of assessment methods. Materials from The Rural School and Community Trust on documenting and assessing Place Based Learning are a helpful source.
•  Encourage community organisations and parents to contribute to assessment – what difference has the school made to them?

Becs Boyd explored place-based education programs throughout the Pacific Northwest through a Churchill fellowship. She resides in Scotland.

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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

e 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.

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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.

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By Joseph Cornell

Profound moments with nature foster a true and vital understanding of our place in the world. I remember an experience I had as a five-year-old boy that awakened in me a life-long fascination for marshes, birds, and for a life lived wild and free.

I was playing outside on a cold, foggy morning when I suddenly heard a startling chorus of “whouks” coming toward me through the air. I peered intently at the thick fog, hoping for at least a glimpse of the geese. Seconds passed; the tempo of their cries increased. They were going to fly directly overhead! I could hear their wings slapping just yards above me. All of a sudden, bursting through a gap in the fog, came a large flock of pearl-white snow geese. It seemed as if the sky had given birth to them. For five or six wonderful seconds their sleek and graceful forms were visible, then they merged once again into the fog. Seeing the snow geese thrilled me deeply, and ever since then I have wanted to immerse myself in nature.

Being Fully Present

When outdoors, many people are so engrossed in their own private concerns that they spend little time noticing their surroundings. I once demonstrated this to a group of 25 teachers in Canberra, Australia. I asked them to look at a beautiful tree as long as they were able to, and to raise their hands when their attention wandered from the tree and drifted to other thoughts. In only six seconds, every hand was raised. They were amazed to discover how restless their minds were.

Exposure to nature isn’t always enough. A friend of mine discovered this when he took his eight-year-old son hiking in the Canadian Rockies. They hiked for several hours until they came to a spectacular overlook where they could see two glaciated valleys and several alpine lakes.

He said, “That view alone made our long trip from Iowa worthwhile.” He suggested to his son that they sit and enjoy the mountain scenery. But the boy, who’d been running exuberantly back and forth along the trail, sat for five seconds, then scrambled to his feet and started running up the trail again. My friend said he felt like screaming, “Stop! Look at this incredible view!”

How can we help others experience nature deeply when their minds and bodies are so restless? The secret I’ve discovered is to focus their attention with captivating nature activities that engage their senses.

For example, in the Camera Game, which is played with two people, the “photographer” taps the shoulder of the “camera” twice, and the camera-person opens his eyes on the scene before him. Because the camera-person looks for only three seconds, his mind doesn’t have time to daydream, so the impact of his “picture” is quite powerful. Players of the Camera Game have told me that they’ve retained a vivid memory of their pictures for five, even eight years afterwards. This activity helps people of all ages experience what it is like to truly see.

Other examples of simple, absorbing activities are mapping natural sounds, writing an acrostic poem about something captivating, drawing one’s “best nature view,” and interviewing nature, where you look  for a special rock, plant, or animal that has an interesting story to tell. Then you ask it questions like, “What events have you seen in your life? What is it like to live here? Is there something you would like to tell me?”

Superlative Moments

Abraham Maslow described peak experiences as especially joyous with “feelings of intense happiness and well-being” and which often involve “an awareness of transcendental unity.” Mountaineers commonly report having these kinds of experiences. John Muir, in the following passage, explains why:

In climbing where the danger is great, all attention has to be given the ground step by step, leaving nothing for beauty by the way. But this care, so keenly and nar- rowly concentrated, is not without advantages. One is thoroughly aroused. Compared with the alertness of the senses … on such occasions, one may be said to sleep all the rest of the year. —John of the Mountains

The intense focus required by wilderness pursuits such as climbing heightens one’s awareness, which is why so many people avidly enjoy them.

Leaders can encourage peak experiences on less wild walks by using experiential activities that focus people’s complete attention on nature. Concentration is concentration; people benefit from increased perception wherever they are. One educator who hikes the Appalachian or Pacific Crest Trail every summer practiced the Sharing Nature organization’s reflective “I Am the Mountain” exercise for just four minutes. Afterwards, he said enthusiastically, “I was able to experience a state of heightened awareness that usually takes me a month in the wilderness to feel.”

Meeting Nature Face to Face

Science can only describe a flowering cherry tree; it cannot help us experience the cherry tree in its totality. To develop love and concern for the earth, we need deep, absorbing nature experiences; otherwise, our relationship with nature will remain distant and abstract and never touch us deeply.

Rita Mendonca, Sharing Nature Brazil’s national coordinator, recently gave a training program in the Amazon for professional ecotourism guides, some of whom had worked in the area for 40 years. Their attitude at first was that she had little to teach them. But after participating in several experiential Sharing Nature® activities, a woman approached Rita and said with deep emotion, “You are helping me find the forest inside of me! We don’t know the forest in this way!”

Absorbing experiences bring us face-to-face with nature. The observer and the observed become united—and only then is true knowing and love awakened in the observer’s heart. John Muir said that the content of the human soul contains the whole world. The deeper purpose of experiential learning is to broaden our experience of life and include other realities as our own. When one is immersed in nature, Muir said, the “body vanishes and the freed soul goes abroad.” Only by expanding our sense of identity beyond our physical body and egoic self can we commune with distant horizons, brightly colored songbirds, and countless other delights.

When people are quiet and receptive, fully immersed in nature, insights on the real purpose of life reveal themselves. David Blanchette is a teacher at the Punahou School on Oahu Island, Hawaii, where every year he leads his 13-year-old students on an inspirational nature walk along a remote and wild coastline. Below are some of his students’ thoughts about life and nature after playing reflective, experiential Sharing Nature activities like “Expanding Circles,” “Trail of Beauty,” and the “John Muir Game”:

•         It made me feel like I was actually a part of the sand and ocean.

•         I was a calm ocean wave gently rolling towards the shore. I was the reef, feeling the cool water roll over me.

•         I felt euphoria. I felt like I was one with everything around me.

•         It felt powerful, yet peaceful. Every part of me is moving and flowing in harmony.

•         Watching the turtle swim carefree reminded me that I have nothing to worry about.

•         You really live when you take time to notice your surroundings.

•         If you find beauty within the world you can find it within yourself.

Jessica, one of David’s students, wanted to express her appreciation for the ocean, so she gratefully wrote “thank you” in the sand—and let the ocean waves embrace her sentiment and take it into itself.

Fostering in others beautiful human qualities of humility, respect, love, and joyful harmony with one’s environment outside and inside of oneself—as expressed by the Hawaiian students—is what nature education is really about.

Becoming Good Stewards

A teacher in the Southwest once asked the children in his class to draw a picture of themselves. He recalled, “The American children completely covered the paper with a drawing of their body, but my Navajo students drew themselves differently. They made their bodies much smaller and included the nearby mountains, canyon walls, and dry desert washes. To the Navajo, the environment is as much a part of who they are as are their own arms and legs.” The understanding that we are a part of something larger than ourselves is nature’s greatest gift. With it, our sense of identity expands and, by extension, so does our compassion for all things.

In order to create a society that truly reveres the natural world, we must offer its citizens life-changing experiences in nature. Saint Teresa of Avila said, “The soul in its ecstatic state grasps in an instant more truth than can be arrived at by months, or even years, of painstaking thought and study.” One moment of deeply entering into nature can inspire in us new attitudes and priorities in life that would take years to develop.

When people feel immersed and absorbed in the natural world, they are learning the highest that nature has to offer—because nature herself is their teacher.

Joseph Cornell is the author of the highly acclaimed Sharing Nature book series and is the founder and president of Sharing Nature Worldwide. You are welcome to reprint this article with prior permission from Sharing Nature Worldwide. You can find out more about Sharing Nature activities and resources at www.sharingnature. com or 530-478-7650. Contact Joseph Cornell at info@sharingnature.com.
This article originally appeared in the May/June issue of Legacy, the publication of the National Association of Interpretation (NAI).

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Lessons From The Real World takes on negative perceptions about our schools, such as those featured in the recent documentary Waiting for Superman, and highlights successful practices conducted by Portland area teachers.   This documentary comes at a critical time when the national debate around education reform continues to be about how to raise test scores.   Lessons From The Real World contends that learning to read, do math, and other subjects happens when students care about what they are learning, rather than being drilled with subject matter largely divorced from their real lives.   The documentary provides a first hand look at K-12 schools and classes that weave community and societal problem solving through their curriculum – preparing students for active engagement in democratic society as well as motivating them to learn basic skills as part of a meaningful educational experience.

Schools featured in the film include: Atkinson Elementary, Sunnyside Environmental School, Jefferson high School, Marshall Campus, Roosevelt High School, Trillium Charter School, Sojourner in North Clackamas, Portland  YouthBuilders, and Portland State University.

Lessons From The Real World was produced by award winning California based documentary filmmaker Bob Gliner and is available for purchase from his website: DocMakerOnline.com.

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By Ryan Johnson

When I was ten years old, I was absolutely obsessed with the original Nintendo Entertainment System. My cousins had one, my best friend had one, it seemed like everyone I knew had a Nintendo. I would have done just about anything to have one as well, but my parents refused, despite my continuous complaints and numerous solicitations.

I thought I was the most neglected ten-year-old child in the world, while my parents, patiently suffering my pleas, would remind me that the Beartooth, Big Horn, and Pryor Mountains, the McCullough Peaks, and Shoshone River were just beyond my doorstep. These natural features were, in fact, truly magnificent and unavoidable constituents of the landscape, dominating every view with snow-capped peaks, granite cliff faces, rainbow-colored bluffs, and crystal clear riffles, containing everything from wild horses to Grizzly Bears to rattlesnakes. Now, perhaps needless to say, I prize every single second I am able to gaze upon the mountains and deserts of northern Wyoming, and I cherish every memory of running through alpine forests and mountain biking through tumbling sage brush. But a conscious acknowledgement of my privilege of being born into such natural wonder eluded me, and as a result I still found modern, escapist forms of entertainment media seductive. Even in a place completely dominated by mountains, peaks, rivers, valleys, prairie, and high desert, I still found a way to explore MTV far more often than Heart Mountain. Taking for granted what you are born with is obviously not unique to me. Nor is seeking out replacements for direct experience through television, the internet, gaming, etc., which have become pervasive in our society and, with the exception of the internet, were common ways to replace experience in my youth (I did a fair share of mountain biking, hiking, and kayaking in my middle and high school years, but not nearly as much as I could have or wish I would have).

It could be argued that human beings are genetically predisposed to seek entertainment, at least that which conveys a story; the ability to transport oneself to distant lands and imagine oneself in an infinite number of alternative settings has been a compelling part of human history via oral stories and the written word for thousands of years. Only relatively recently, however, has it become a nearly unavoidable aspect of our cultural landscape, available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week by means of innumerable glowing screens. Our society generally and our youth specifically spend an enormous amount of time “plugged in” to various types of entertainment media. The inexorable progression of technological innovation has led to the production of a multitude of gadgets that provide constant channels to maintain one’s connection to digital content; we’re voluntarily (and often involuntarily) inundating ourselves with images, videos, links, buttons, logos, and just about anything and everything else imaginable. And all too commonly, our youth are “discovering” their own backyard, its geography, cultural history, ecology and biodiversity, through pixels on a screen rather than boots in the mud, if they learn about it at all.

There are now so many ways to replace actual experience with virtual experience it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference. Video games, Second Life, GoogleEarth, Facebook, and many more electronic media all provide avenues for replacing physical reality with a digital substitute, abstracting relationships and, perhaps arguably, contributing to feelings of alienation and detachment in an age of unending connectivity. From a look around it is starting to seem as if digital devices that maintain that connectivity are viewed by their owners less as tools for productivity or communication than necessary prosthetics of the new digital self. We are, quite frankly, culturally enslaved to them. While this isnít necessarily problematic in itself, there is now unassailable evidence that we are living in an age of ecological crisis for which we will need to retool the ways in which we view technology and it’s social, economic, cultural and ecological significance. The days of driving technological innovation predominantly for entertainment media, unsustainable forms of energy production, or simply conspicuous consumption will need to come to a close. We need a new technology, or at least a new perspective on the role of technology in our lives, one that embraces ecological principles and aims to more effectively align human society with sustainable forms of living and working. To do this, we will need a new generation of technologically and environmentally literate citizens for whom technological innovation is viewed as a powerful way to collaborate, communicate, and democratically solve the ecological problems we now face. Technology must cease to be an end in itself and become a means to confront the enormous environmental problems future generations will face. We must find a way to direct our collective, and vast, technological literacy toward ecologically sustainable and socially equitable solutions to our environmental problems, while continuing to explore emerging technological innovations in promising and environmentally sound fields, such as green energy and biomimicry.

In order to direct our technological prowess to address our environmental problems, we must have an environmentally literate society, one that understands the consequences of failing to address the tremendous environmental challenges that confront us globally. To that end, media has been instrumental in communicating the issues, from the likely repercussions of global climate change, as portrayed in the films “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The 11th Hour”, to media-heavy, environmentally focused expeditions, such as “Summit on the Summit” and “The Plastiki”. These latter so-called “eco-adventure” spectacles have attempted to leverage the profound pedagogical opportunities of media technology to bring awareness to environmental issues, in this case clean and accessible water and plastics in the ocean respectively. But is environmental literacy as delivered through a screen enough to cultivate a new generation of environmental stewards? Does there not need to be a second movement, one of direct connection with our biological neighbors and our geological phenomenon? Furthermore, these often smart, creative, and important media projects meant to attract attention to an environmental cause tend to focus overwhelmingly on the potential calamities that could result from our currently precarious global environmental state. While this awareness is vital to a 21st Century environmental literacy, it can all too often result in a feeling of hopelessness in the audience, particularly for young people who may have never seen a spawning Pacific Northwest salmon in their home watershed but know all to well of their declining numbers, just to offer up one example. Recently, this despair among young people regarding the state of the natural world has been given a name: ecophobia. If the only exposure our youth have to ecosystems comes from YouTube or Google Earth, regardless of how charismatic that exposure may be, their sense of what the natural world is, and the environmental issues that threaten it, will not only be abstract but often times lead to resignation or detachment. While the knowledge, or even environmental literacy, gained from these media may be perfectly relevant and the amount of information prodigious, what is lost in translation? Unsurprisingly, if our youth are only consuming information about the environment by way of their television or laptop screen, it isn’t hard to imagine a certain level of ambivalence or even dread dominating their perspective of the natural world. Consequently, there is evidence that our next generation of environmental stewards may be giving up before they even start.

Is there a union of technological and environmental literacy to be found, one that uses technology to encourage our youth to experience the natural world for themselves? One that uses technology as a bridge to outdoors? One that adds that unquantifiable experience of being surrounded by nature and feeling part of it? It is just such a union that can help us forge a new era of environmental stewardship while encouraging the use and creation of new tools to confront environmental degradation.

Technology as a “Bridge” to the Outdoors
The educational possibilities that modern, web-based technology provides are startling in both number and content. Combined with the fact that we now have an entire generation that cannot imagine life without an iPod and a cell phone (and are rarely seen without both), the opportunities to employ technology in the classroom are limitless. As outlined above, the problem isn’t technology itself, but our propensity to let it take us outside of ourselves and replace actual experience with virtual experience, while promoting detachment and even hopelessness regarding the state of the environment. So how do we utilize the manifold educational applications of emerging technology without compromising the vital, irreplaceable, and less quantifiable educational and ecological benefits of hands- on, authentic, experiential learning? Today’s students are so comfortable with technology, its use to supplement authentic, place-based investigations seems both timely and necessary to reconnect students to the outdoors and support their role as active, lifelong environmental stewards.

There are now multiple web-based tools, rich internet applications, and geo-RSS mapping interfaces that educators and students can use to find place-based venues for study, create dynamic research projects, and share the product of their study online. Moreover, the open source movement, one of the most promising and unapologetically democratic developments in the short but extremely prolific evolution of the web, is offering up professional tools, from blogging to video editing to GIS mapping, that are beginning to change the landscape of content creation and dissemination on the web. No longer are the tools needed to create dynamic media projects or sophisticated geographic models only for those with high budgets for the latest plastic-wrapped software package. The open source movement, essentially an organic network of software and website developers working collectively to create new and revolutionary ways to use the web, is churning out free, accessible, and innovative alternatives to the software applications that have been the (expensive) status quo for at least two decades. In addition, there are now numerous ways to access and post local information geographically on the web. Several mapping application program interfaces, the most popular of which is provided by Google, allow users to convey their own content and geographically relevant information directly onto a dynamically generated map. These tools were almost unthinkable just a decade ago. Now they are both changing the way we think about place while offering incredible opportunities for educators.

Now that so much information is available online using these dynamic tools, especially if that information can be customized locally, how do we avoid replacing the authentic experience of place with such tools? For example, there are now online mapping tools that allow for such sophisticated hydrologic and land-use modeling, it can be tempting (and, for the first time in history, less expensive) to use them as a replacement for field investigations, providing as they do access to so much information in one place. Despite this temptation, and with the realization that there is no replacement for field research,  these sophisticated web-based tools are valuable supplements to field study, helping to draw connections between concepts and contextualize data sets. To use an example of the how these connections can be made using emerging technology, the United States Geological Survey automatically updates streamflow measurements throughout the country,  allowing students to compare stream discharge in multiple locations with ease. In Oregon’s  Tualatin River basin, students collecting water quality data in the field can compare their data with that being continuously updated thanks to an Oregon USGS map that syndicates real-time water quality data from numerous locations in the watershed.

With reference tools like these, perhaps the most profound educational possibilities with respect to technology, environmental literacy, and service-learning lie in “ground-truthing,” the process of confirming or disputing information derived from computer models and GIS applications by gathering data and observations on the ground. Today’s ground-truthing practitioners often make use of multiple technologies, from GPS units to geo-tagging digital cameras to sophisticated monitoring equipment. Educators can effectively employ both the process and tools of ground truthing, beginning with the study of aerial photos and online geographic and hydrologic models, as well as research conducted by NGOs, agencies, or other organizations.

This information helps introduce concepts and allows students to formulate guiding questions and draft hypotheses before moving on to field-based research to explore realities on the ground.

Students and educators can access multiple online databases to help them prioritize areas of investigation and make use of numerous web-based outlets to share the results of their findings, making available their work to the larger community via presentations, videos, photography, and other creative pursuits. Students can utilize social networking sites to organize events at which to share the results of their field work with the community and alert regulatory agencies to potential anomalies in their data sets. Also, students can use a variety of new so-called “cloud-based” tools to create presentations, spreadsheets, and other documents and easily embed them in virtually any social networking site, blog, or webpage using simple cut-and-paste HTML code. These exciting new networking possibilities are providing new avenues for students and educators to share their work and, in the process, helping to reestablish classrooms as central to thriving communities while cultivating a new generation of civic leaders and environmental stewards.

Perhaps human beings, and especially those among us who advocate for sustainability and environmental conservation, will always have a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward technology. As we know, technology has allowed human beings to extract the earth’s natural resources with increasing speed and efficiency, find and burn fossil fuels at an almost incomprehensible rate, and ultimately alter the very climate in which we (and everything else) live. For our youth to confront the ecological challenges they will undoubtedly face, they will need to re-tool their relationship to the technological “tools of the trade”. They will need to embrace a new view of technology that encourages innovation, creativity, and sustainability. In order for coming generations to feed an increasing world population while beginning to address natural resource limits and climatic disruption, they will need all of the tools of human ingenuity they can possibly muster.

Perhaps our most important role as educators is to try to prepare the next generation to face those challenges through new tools and a new perspective, simultaneously guiding them and ourselves to a future that embraces technology as a means to live more sustainably on this planet.

Ryan Johnson is the StreamWebs Coordinator for the Freshwater Trust in Portland, Oregon. To find out more, visit www.thefreshwatertrust.org/education/streamwebs

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The following is part of an on-line discussion between Greg Smith, Associate Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, and David Greenwood, Associate Professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario Canada.

Dear David,
I’ve been puzzling over an issue to raise with you for another blog entry, and I’ve found myself coming back to the impact that hierarchies of knowledge and skill have on the use of learning opportunities encountered in local communities and places.  I recall this issue coming up with a friend in Madison, Wisconsin, more than a decade ago when his daughter was junior at the city’s most academically competitive high school—probably the same one you went to.  She was interested in enrolling in a “chemistry in the community” course that would have allowed her to experience a more hands-on and problem-solving approach to science education.  Her counselor discouraged her from doing so on the grounds that the kinds of colleges she was interested in attending would see this as a deficit.  Jim, a biology professor committed to learning in the field, disagreed and wrote to academics at around a dozen colleges similar to those his daughter hoped to apply to and asked whether they agreed with the counselor.  None did.  His daughter enrolled in the course and ended up going to Earlham.  Most students and parents, however, seem unlikely to challenge the counselor’s advice because of the way it represents common understandings about prestigious (theoretical and text-based) knowledge and less prestigious (applied and practical) knowledge.  This seems like a fundamental issue we’ve got to address if we hope more educators begin to incorporate lived experience into the forms of instruction they share with students.

I remember reading a chapter from a book by G.H. Bantock (Education in Industrial Society) when I was in grad school that looks at the way early schools distinguished between the knowledge of the working-class and the knowledge of elites, and actively presented the latter as superior—even though this knowledge was the knowledge of people who didn’t have to work to support themselves.  The preceding story demonstrates the way this process is still playing out in contemporary schools.  And yet the knowledge that is often most meaningful to people of whatever age is knowledge that has direct applications to their own lives and experiences, knowledge that requires them to use both their hands and their heads.

Some of the best place-based education I know of is happening at a school for seriously credit deficient students at a small school in Cottage Grove, Oregon.  There, students are creating school and community gardens to help supplement the diets of low-income families, they are writing a 100-year forestry plan for a local property owner to restore an oak savannah, they are mapping the location of invasive species in nearby forests and helping with their removal, they are conducting water quality studies on local streams and rivers, and they are making movies about topics like the Haiti earthquake in an effort to encourage their peers, families, and neighbors to make contributions to groups like Partners in Health.  I suspect that this kind of program is acceptable because of the school’s student clientele.  No one is worrying about which college they get into, just whether they graduate from high school.  Ironically, the program has become so dynamic that a growing number of students at the town’s conventional high school are seeking to transfer there.  The principal and faculty have decided that their primary purpose is to serve students who need an alternative, so they are capping their enrollment to make sure this continues to happen.  Fortunately, some teachers at the town’s regular high school are picking up on their educational practices.

I heard a presentation in December by a man from a sustainability education center also in Cottage Grove.  He and his organization have worked extensively with the school for credit-deficient students, but they have also begun to collaborate with teachers at the conventional high school in the development of learning experiences that marry application to theory.  He described a physics course that is open only to young women.  Building on his organization’s interest in alternative building methods, he worked with students and the teacher in this class to design experiments to test the flammability, structural strength, and resistance to moisture of different forms of insulation and plaster.  Students carefully documented their findings and then presented them to county agencies responsible for amending statutes that permit or prevent the use of innovative construction methods.  This kind of information is critical if more ecologically friendly and locally-based building practices are to become widely used.  This “physics in the community” course embodies what to my mind is an excellent example of place- and community-based education.  But this kind of teaching and learning is glaringly unusual, and when it does occur, tends to be in classes for students who are viewed as marginal (as women often are in advanced science and math classes) and less likely to be deserving of or make good use of elite knowledge (like the seriously credit-deficient students).  I’d like to figure out how to make it more common—both in K-12 and college settings.  Conversations with AP science teachers, however, confirm that the time required to do something like this is virtually non-existent because of the amount of material—focused on concepts, definitions, and theory–that must be covered if students are to be adequately prepared to pass AP exams toward which all instruction is geared.

So this preoccupation with elite knowledge places real constraints on the extent to which the kinds of teaching and learning we value can become widespread.  Any thoughts on how to address this dilemma?

Best wishes,

Greg

February 24, 2011

Hi Greg,

What you describe is a familiar challenge of legitimizing place-based approaches in a high school where college prep courses continues to privilege high status, abstract, and text-based knowledge. Kids being counseled out of a community-based chemistry course because it was seen as low status—the same thing is currently happening here in Thunder Bay in 2011. I’ve just learned of an excellent new Environmental Science course for grade 11 students, but few kids heading to university are taking this course, because it is viewed by the very science department that offers it as less rigorous and less of a preparation for university. This reminds me of Dewey’s warning that education is not preparation for life, it is life. High schools seldom embody this view, especially in “elite” science courses.

What is most interesting to me in the story you tell is how your friend Jim, a biology professor, took this issue of rigor on by doing some very important independent research. NONE OF THE TWELVE UNIVERSITIES AGREED WITH THE COUNSELOR’S ADVICE! NONE OF THE TWELVE UNIVERSITIES SHARED THE COUNSELOR’S ASSUMPTIONS! This, it seems to me, represents a strategic pathway for legitimizing more place pedagogies within high school. If high school faculty are devaluing and marginalizing place-based curricula because they assume such curricula will be seen as a deficit by universities, and if this assumption is false, then high school faculty need to hear this message from university faculty and admissions people. As I’ve mentioned to you, I am increasingly interested in place-based and sustainability education in higher education, and what I am observing corroborates Jim’s research. Many people in university faculties and within administration are extremely interested in making connections between the learning of disciplinary content and making such learning meaningful in the context of local communities. I am not saying that all professors are interested in this work, but a significant number of them (us) are.  How can we use this fact to support place-based approaches for the “college bound’ in high school? Or is the whole idea of “college bound” in need of redefinition?

The problem, it seems to me, isn’t just about advocating for place-based education, but advocating against a school system that segregates students and tracks many away from opportunities in higher education, while denying “elites” depth experience with diverse communities. It’s interesting that Cottage Grove decided against a more heterogeneous enrollment in the exemplary place-based education course. I can think of some good reasons for this, such as deepening the community spirit of an otherwise marginalized group, but it is interesting that the outcome is more segregation and less integration between elites and credit-deficient students (and their teachers and families).

We’re talking here, I think, about the link between “high status knowledge” and social stratification, and the expectation that success in school will lead to an economically secure and high status life. And the recipe for this high status life, as far as I can tell, continues to be that if you take the high status courses in high school, you will have a competitive edge getting into a good college, and a competitive edge landing a desirable well-paying job afterwards. This recipe has been around for a long while and it has worked for many people. Because it has “worked” and continues to work, for some, it becomes self reinforcing. This is the political assumption of No Child Left Behind and the whole accountability movement—do well in school, take the right classes, have a good life. The counselor has internalized the message and many elite students here it loud and clear. The meritocracy is reinforced, and the socially-reproductive function of school is reinforced along with a philosophy of education that makes place and community an afterthought, not to mention any larger discussion about life’s goals and purposes.

It is possible, though, that the energy around place-based education is part of something new—a new social and educational movement—and that the old way is just going to be around with us for quite some time. For example, people are now talking seriously about peak oil and a post-carbon economic system—but still, most of us are still burning a lot of gas and coal just getting through the day! I think place-based education and community-based knowledge is to high status knowledge what renewable energy is to oil and coal. People know it works and that it is important, but we are just not able to let go of what we have depended on for so long. Our entire infrastructure—both institutionally and I believe epistemologically—is just too wrapped up in high status knowledge to allow for any quick changes to new ways of knowing and doing.  As Nathan Hensley says in the forthcoming book, Curriculum Studies Gone Wild, we need to de-carbonize the curriculum as well as our energy use. It is just going to take a lot of time, a lot of unlearning as we learn new ways. So I think that place-based education might be as much about unlearning or challenging old assumptions as it is about learning. Wherever place-based education is working, it needs to be supported so the movement can deepen and spread—much like the movement for renewable energy in the context of continued record profits for the oil industry! In fact, it might be best to keep the elites away from successes so that such successes are not co-opted and killed like the electric car was some years ago by the oil and auto industry!

David

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by Fay Mascher M.Ed., Cayley School
Jonas Cox Ph.D., Gonzaga University
Charles Salina Ph.D., Gonzaga University

On a visit to the coulee, a startled owl exploded off of a nest that we thought was empty. On the bus ride back to school, one boy reached for my hand, “Feel my heart,” he said. “It’s still going really fast.” –from the Cayley School action research project

Since the 1980’s, researchers in environmental education have explored this basic question: Why do some people care about the natural environment enough to protect it, while others do not?  Current environmental education, taught as a unit of instruction within the science curriculum, tends to assume that imparting information about the environment will inspire students to care for it. But a generation of young people educated in this way has not yielded a generation of adults committed to caring for the natural world.

The people of Cayley School, situated in a rural hamlet about one hour south Calgary, Alberta, struggled with a similar dynamic. In the spring of 2005, the teachers, parents, community members, and students of this small school (150 students in kindergarten through eighth grade) met with the Stewardship Centre of Canada to explore what their school could do to foster care of the natural environment.

The Youth Environmental Stewardship Program (YES) was born, sparking much activity at Cayley School.  The school maintains ten photovoltaic units and a small wind turbine to provide three kilowatts of power to the grid.  Students and staff participate in a thorough recycling program. An environment club meets weekly. Classroom instruction pursues cross-curricular inquiry into many environmental issues.  Recognized in the media, and given multiple awards for environmental projects, Cayley School has laid strong ground work for meeting the goals of the YES project.

However, in a meeting of YES stakeholders in the fall of 2007, consensus emerged that the specific vision of the program—shaping students toward lifelong leadership in environmental stewardship—was not being realized. Students did not display a general ethic of stewardship, nor were they eager to fill leadership roles in the YES program .

Thorough environmental instruction combined with exciting school-wide environmental projects had failed to translate into genuine environmental stewardship. Why? There it was again, that thirty-year-old question: Why do some people care about the natural environment enough to protect it, and others do not?

You can read the rest of this article in the online Clearing Magazine 2010 Compendium Issue, which you can open here.

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