Wachstumshormone

Mar

30

Bringing Home the Data: The Jane Goodall Environmental Middle School

Filed Under Programs | 1 Comment

Goodall1

Students hike upstream to collect water quality samples as part of their research at the Jane Goodall Environmental Middle School. Photo by Mike Weddle.

by Mike Weddle

The Jane Goodall Environmental Middle School (JGEMS) is a public charter school located within Waldo Middle School in Salem, Oregon. The ten-year old school has an enrollment of 90 students in grades six to eight. JGEMS students have classes in all subject areas that are part of a regular middle school curriculum, but the overriding focus for all curriculum areas is the environment.

Introduction

Teachers are always looking for engaging and meaningful projects for their students. At the same time, government or non-government conservation organizations are seemingly always shorthanded when it comes to conducting all the research projects they would like to do. At the Jane Goodall Environmental Middle School (JGEMS) in Salem, Oregon we have been able to use student scientists to conduct these research projects, providing both the assistance needed by the organizations and the engaging and meaningful projects that students need. We have found that projects done in collaboration with non- school organizations provide an incentive and a relevance to research work that may be missing from research done in school. Additionally, collaborating with outside organizations can provide expertise, equipment and even funds that may not normally be available to the classroom teacher. Read more

Mar

28

Moving Backwards Into the Twenty-first Century

Filed Under Perspectives | Leave a Comment

by Charles Rubin
Duquesne University

I want to start with a central problem that I see facing environmental education efforts, that can be seen from two fact sheets provided by the EPA environmental education website.

The two fact sheets are “Environmental Education Advances Quality Education;” and “Environmental Education Improves Our Everyday Lives.” Now, the salient part of the first document is the following definition of environmental education:

Environmental education is a learning process that increases knowledge and awareness about the environment and develops skills that enable responsible decisions and actions that impact the environment. Environmental education encourages inquiry and investigation and it enables the learner to develop critical thinking, problem solving, and effective decision-making skills. Environmental education enables individuals to weigh various sides of an environmental issue. It does not advocate a particular viewpoint or course of action.

This definition may be problematic for a number of reasons, but my interest is in its unacknowledged tension with the second fact sheet which lays out the way in which environmental education improves our everyday lives, by protecting human health, advancing quality education, creating jobs in the environmental field — I like that one particularly myself — promoting environmental protection along with economic development and encouraging stewardship of natural resources. Read more

Mar

11

Developing Questioning Strategies: Learning to become a science teacher

Filed Under Jim Martin, Questioning strategies, Schoolyard Classroom, Science | Leave a Comment

“All anyone really needs is a coal bin and a friend.”


KidswithfungiBy 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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Mar

2

Reassessing the value of place-based learning: an online discussion

Filed Under David Greenwood, Gregory Smith, Perspectives, Place-based Education | Leave a Comment

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.

gregsmith

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. Read more