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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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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ne of my favorite nature quotations comes from the Japanese conservationist Tanaka Shozu who said, “The question of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart.”

I wanted to touch the hearts of my middle school students with the beauty of nature as well as inspire them to take care of the local environment. I found the perfect spot for a nature experience less than an hour away from our school campus in the Sierra Nevada.

First stop was a shady woodland nature trail. The path twisted and turned as it followed Rock Creek through the pines, oaks, and big leaf maples. I had the students spread out along the trail, leaving about 10-12 feet between one another. They sat in silence for 10 minutes (a long time for some 13-year-olds!) and then wrote a one sentence description of their surroundings. Some wrote about what they saw—green leaves, sparkling sunlight, giant trees reaching into the sky. Others wrote about what they heard—singing birds, and the bubbling creek rushing over rocks, while others focused on how they felt—peaceful, quiet, and calm.

I collected the papers, and we took a short hike to totally different part of the forest—an area that had been recently clearcut of all trees. Tree stumps dotted a barren hillside. Without a canopy of leaves providing shade, the sun blazed down on us. Once again I had the kids spread out, sit by themselves, and write one sentence about the area. Words like desolate, destroyed, dead, sad, emptiness filled their papers.

Gathering in a circle, I collected these papers and read them aloud as if each sentence was a line in a poem. Then I read aloud the “poem” they had written from the nature trail. What a stark contrast in words and feelings!

I didn’t need to give a lecture on the importance of taking care of the forest. The kids “got it” through their direct experience in nature. Their hearts were touched. Their minds were opened. Back in the classroom we explored the hows and whys of forest management, but nothing they learned from our studies came close to having the impact of their personal experience. Experience truly is the BEST teacher.

I was fortunate in that I was able to arrange an all-day field trip. But you can create a high-impact nature experience without traveling far—just step outside the classroom door and try out one of these ideas:

Suggestions from Earth Heroes: Champions of the Wilderness:

• Play “Ten Treasures” by going on a walk around the school grounds and finding ten different plants, insects, birds, or other critters. Use field guides to identify the treasures. This is a great team activity.
• Have each student choose a nearby tree and visit it weekly. Encourage the student to get to know “their” tree in a variety of ways: making bark rubbings, creating a collage of leaves, measuring their tree’s circumference, calculating it’s height, or writing a detailed description of their tree and asking someone find it.
• Place pieces of scrap wood on bare dirt or under bushes around the school. Wait two days and have students work in small groups to lift the boards and count the creatures they find hiding there. Use field guides to identify them.

Play the outdoor game “I am aware of…” from a Teacher’s Guide for How We Know What We Know about Our Changing Climate:

• Divide the class into small groups of 5-8 students. Go outside and have groups form into a circle.
• Going around the circle, each person completes the sentence “I am aware of…” by saying a word or phrase about something they see, hear, smell, or feel. For example, “I am aware of the sunlight sparkling on the pine needles of the tree.” “I am aware of the wind blowing across the grass.” “I am aware of how hot the sun is on my shoulders.” Students continue for several times around the circle. As each student takes a turn, the others pause for a moment to become more aware of what was just mentioned.
• Encourage students to stretch their powers of observation by using all of your senses. To keep everyone’s attention focused, students do not talk unless it’s their turn.
• After playing the game for several minutes, ask each student to choose one of the objects they observed and work independently to write 10 or more descriptive words or phrases about it. If there’s time, they can also sketch their object. When back in the classroom, have students share their descriptions and sketches.

Birds are everywhere. Just look up! Practice these birding tips from The BLUES Go Birding Across America:

• Use binoculars to help you see birds more clearly.
• Observe a bird’s size, shape, and color.
• A field guide’s pictures and descriptions can help you lean about the birds you see.
• The best time to see birds is when they are most active. That’s usually when they are eating.
• Listen to birds’ calls and songs.
• Male birds may be easier to identify than females because they are often brightly colored.
• Don’t disturb birds by getting too close, especially if they have babies.
• Attract birds to the area by putting up a bird feeder and birdbath.

Also I recommend that you look at Sharing Nature with Children and Sharing Nature with Children II by Joseph Cornell. Both of these pioneering books have well-proven activities designed to awaken the enthusiasm of children for nature, focus their attention on some aspect and to experience it directly, as well as to share their inspiration with others.

As an educator for more than 20 years, Carol L. Malnor taught elementary, junior high and high school. She helped found two alternative high schools and created specialty educational programs. She is now a writer. Her books include The BLUES Go Birding Series and Earth Heroes: Champions of the Wilderness and Earth Heroes: Champions of Wild Animals as well as numerous Teacher’s Guides to books published by Dawn Publications. She is also co-author of Molly’s Organic Farm available March, 2012.

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For the questioning mind, learning never concludes because it is an endless journey with an infinite number of destinations…

by Chris Helander
Head Instructor
Coyote’s Path Wilderness School
(reprinted from The Best of CLEARING)

There are many people who say our current model for learning is ineffectual. Parents and educators are asking “how do you reach young people who seem apathetic and unmotivated to learn?” In old cultures before schools, books, and grades, people learned by being mentored. Using stories, ceremony, games, and survival skills everyone and everything was a teacher. In the modern model of education, learning is force fed, sitting in chairs, listening to an adult spouting out information to be memorized. Modern children learning this way are trained to get their knowledge by memorization of someone else’s knowledge. They do not learn how to develop the questioning mind or follow their hearts to learn from their own experiences.

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By Jim Martin

A storm of children, shouts, swirling bodies, and dust swept me out of the yard. Up the street, neighborhood kids whirled around some coal bins between two wartime shipyard houses. I can see and hear them now, the kids, a bicycle, the coal bins, the houses and trees behind them, the noise. Propelled toward them by their intense energy, I became madly aware that they were riding a bicycle. I wanted to ride too. This was 1947; kids didn’t have bikes during the war, and few had them now, two years after the armistice.

Nor were there such things as training wheels. Getting onto a 26-inch bike with a running start was so intimidating that I had shrunk from attempting it. But this day was different. Kids were riding the bike by balancing themselves between two coal bins which were set about three feet apart, making a narrow chute. They would put the bike in the chute, climb onto a coal bin, lower themselves onto the pedals, scoot out to the edge of the bin, push off, and ride! This, I saw so clearly, I could do.

I ran up the street and begged for a turn, mounted, scooted out, pushed off and rode in a large circle in the driveway, lost my balance, fell sideways, caught myself and the bike before we both fell to the ground, stood up and wheeled it to the next kid in line. I had done it! You could, too, with a little help from a coal bin and encouragement from your friends.

The coal bin gave me just that bit of support and encouragement that I had lacked. With it, riding a 26-inch bicycle became something I could do. And I did.
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If you haven’t seen the advertising on this website, or seen reference to this document before, you should check it out… the best articles, activities, and reviews from past issues of Clearing compiled and published together on a CD-ROM. “The Best of Clearing, Volume VI” is a way to get the best of back issues of Clearing at a very low price (even less than the previous cost of a one-year subscription!).

And just so you know, we’ll soon be republishing an earlier B.O.C — Volume V — which gathers even more great articles from the recent past (think Mike Weilbacher, Jim Martin, and others) in one convenient reference volume for your resource library.

If you’re interested in helping to keep Clearing alive, this is one way to do it. Buy a copy of Volume VI in CD-ROM and keep an eye out for Volume V when it comes available. Click on the “Best of Clearing” link on the nav bar above to buy your copy!

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by Jude Curtain

The sun was shining. There was just a hint of fall in the September air. Twenty three fourth graders were hunched over their white dishpans, excitedly sorting through their samples of forest litter. So began a series of lessons designed to guide students in generating questions, creating investigations, and ultimately finding answers.

Lesson #1: Noticing Details
My experience has been that children need training to be good observers. My first lesson engaged students in examining a container of forest litter, sorting all the things they discovered in their samples, and recording each item in their science journals.

Lesson #2: Open vs. Closed Questions
We defined closed questions as those that had a simple “yes” or “no” answer. Open questions were those that required an explanatory answer. Examples of both types of questions were generated first by me, then by the students in a class discussion.

Lesson #3: Creating Questions About Our Forest Litter Samples
Applying what they had learned about open and closed questions, students began lists of forest litter questions for which they wanted to know the answer. After the lists were completed, students were asked to contribute their favorite question to the class. A partial list of favorite questions included the following:
• I wonder if roots of the same plant look the same when the plant grows in different areas?
• Do bugs prefer rotted wood?
• Why is rotted wood soft?
• Do worms prefer damp soil?
• How many different kinds of moss grow in our schoolyard?

Lesson #4:  Sorting Questions and Creating an Investigation
As a group, our class addressed each question, trying to determine how we could find the answer. It became apparent that there were basically three types of questions: questions you could answer by doing some book research; those you could answer by doing an experiment or investigation; and questions one could not easily answer. We discussed the point that, while all question were interesting, the ones we would focus on were questions answerable by investigation. Students thought that comparative questions would best suit our focus, while “why?” questions were least suited to being answered by investigation. As a class, students created an actual investigation designed to answer one of the favorite questions. Through the democratic process, we chose an investigation about whether earthworms prefer damp or dry soil.

Lesson #5: Conducting the Investigation
Working in six research teams, students devised a common method, conducted their investigation, then shared results for replication. Based on their results, students formed their own conclusions about their investigation.

Lesson #6: Expanding the Arena for Questioning
once the students had practice in the art of crafting an investigation on a given topic, the entire schoolyard was fair game for generating questions. Students went on a tour of the schoolyard, notebooks and pencils in hand, given the task of generating questions, emphasizing those questions which could be answered through investigation. Students were encouraged to vice their questions aloud, since that seemed to stimulate questions from other students.

Lesson #7: Creating a Second Investigation
Once again, students were asked to contribute their favorite questions. We discussed which ones could be answered by conducting an investigation and again, we selected one question and crafted another investigation as an entire class.

Lesson #8: Independent Practice: Creating an Investigation as an Assessment
As a way of assessing student achievement, students were asked to create their own investigation based on one of the questions that had been contributed. Their charge was to:
1. State the question
2. State the hypotheses, including the null hypothesis.
3. Make a prediction.
4. List the steps to their investigation.

The results were outstanding! Students definitely understood the process of creating an investigation. It was exciting to give students such an independent task and see them create appropriate questions on their own. The process of developing questioning techniques is a lengthy one, but my experience has been that this progression of lessons leads to students’ deeper understanding of the process of inquiry science.

Jude Curtain is a 4th grade teacher at Noxon Road School in Poughkeepsie, New York. This article first appeared in The Best of CLEARING, Volume V.

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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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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.

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