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. …..Click here to read more

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By Gregory Smith, Associate Professor of Education
Lewis and Clark College, Portland OR

June 10, 2010

As conditions globally and in the Pacific Northwest worsen, it seems increasingly imperative that individuals and organizations concerned about environmental and social health find ways to achieve a higher level of collaboration than they have so far been able to demonstrate. The difficulties faced by British Petroleum and the federal government as they attempt to deal with the Gulf oil spill foreshadow the inability of large, centralized institutions to deal with the crises of climate change and the peaking of oil production. In addition, the long period of economic growth humankind has enjoyed for the previous century could well be coming to an end—in fact may need to come to an end if we hope to lay the foundation for more sustainable societies. …..Click here to read more

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by Rob Sandelin

My primary goal as an educator at the Environmental Science School is to create connections between students and nature. I do this because I believe once students have a deep connection to nature, they become advocates, often for the rest of their life. We have lots of time and experiences with nature as part of our program.

An example. We spent several trips a few years ago along a certain creek watching, counting and learning about salmon. We watched a female dig a redd (her nest) and the whole cycle. Every time we went back the kids looked for red girl, as they had named her. During one rainy day the kids noticed a pipe dumping gunky water into OUR stream onto OUR fish. They were outraged. We followed the pipe back and discovered it was a street drain, full of crud and oil from cars off the road. I did not tell them how to feel or act, they did that on their own, based on their connection to that place. After school they  ALL met and cleaned up that whole street, then, unknown to me, a bunch of them went to an evening political debate between a couple of candidates for mayor. They stood up in a room full of adults, and demanded to know what the candidates were going to do about the street drains in our town which dump oil and gunk onto OUR salmon stream. They were articulate, bright and passionate advocates.

As far as I am concerned, this is why I teach.

Rob Sandelin is a naturalist and environmental educator who has since childhood spent much of his life observing and studying nature in the mountains of the Northwest. He has served as a park naturalist at Yosemite National Park, Olympic National Park, and Denali National Park. Currently he teaches field skills to student naturalists at the Environmental Education School of the Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe, Washington. He is the author of This Week in the Woods, a series of natural history essays; the Cohousing Resource Guide; and the Intentional Communities Resource Pages website. He lives with family and friends in the Sharingwood Cohousing Community in Snohomish County.

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by Becca Deysach

“I’ve always wanted to write but never gave myself permission.”

This sentiment is the one I have heard most frequently since I began teaching creative writing several years ago.  I’ve heard it from my college students, patients at a mental health clinic, and empty-nesters who are finally letting themselves do whatever the heck they want.

The more I inquire about my students’ inhibitions about writing, the more I discover that people are afraid they have nothing to say, or, worse,  that they will fail terribly at saying what they want. I hear horror stories of returned papers that might as well have been dipped in red ink, and the resulting belief that they were, indeed, better off not trying.

But it’s not true: they are storytellers.  We all are. Some creative impulse lives in each of us—it’s part of being human, after all—and for some, the urge to paint or dance or write becomes so great that eventually it overpowers the limitations imposed by well intentioned teachers when they were young.  But then it shouldn’t get to that point.

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Becca Deysach teaches creative writing and environmental studies for Prescott College and Ibex Studios: Adventures in Creative Writing (www.ibexstudios.com).  She is excited to work with teachers in all disciplines to integrate creative writing into their curricula and can be reached at becca@ibexstudios.com.

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By Greg Smith

In my home state of Oregon it’s impossible to pick up the daily paper and not encounter some article that deals with concerns about environmental or social sustainability.  With climate change, dramatically increasing energy costs, economic instability, and growing worries about the availability and cost of food, journalists and the public are at last paying attention to issues that for decades were pushed to the margins of the nation’s collective consciousness.

This shift in public awareness has yet to have much impact on American schools where a preoccupation with testing remains the central concern of the day.  This should not surprise us.  Education tends to follow social trends rather than initiate them.  Given the rapidity with which changes are occurring in the environment and the economy, however, schools may need to take a more active role in preparing young people to address challenges posed by a warmer and oil-strapped world.  All of our futures could well depend on their capacity to respond to these new conditions with intelligence and a spirit of generosity and compassion.

Fortunately, some educators are now adopting teaching approaches that promise to help young people grapple with the dilemmas of civic involvement and problem solving.  Few teachers explicitly address climate change, rising fuel prices, or food shortages head-on; what they do instead is create learning experiences that engage students in community issues while preparing them to become actors more than consumers or victims.  I believe that these educators are laying the foundations of an education for sustainability and equity.

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This article was reprinted in its entirety from the website of the Journal of Sustainability Education http://www.journalofsustainabilityeducation.org/

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by Brian “Fox” Ellis

I learned early on that storytelling is one of the most important tools for teaching science. If you think about it . . . what is science? Science is an attempt to understand the universe.

A well-told science story does three important jobs: It brings facts to life; it makes abstract concepts concrete; and through the virtual reality of storytelling, it walks listeners through the process of scientific inquiry.

Children are curious about information and science facts if they’re presented in an intriguing way. Historically, teaching science education meant spending an inordinate amount of time memorizing facts. Facts are important, and storytelling is one of the most effective ways of delivering them. But if you stop with facts you are not teaching science. Science is a verb, an activity, not simply a body of knowledge.

Ideas such as the food web, evolution, the water cycle, and animal adaptation are examples of the “big picture” ideas that are critical to understanding modern science. But if you stop with concepts, you still are not teaching science. You are building a necessary conceptual framework for ordering and understanding facts. Again, science is something you do, a way of asking questions and seeking answers.

Storytelling can be used to introduce or implement all of the science standards. Though it is obviously a prime example of language arts and science communication skills, I often include mathematics problems in the science stories to emphasize the importance of mathematics in science education.

Science-process skills are the methods or strategies that scientists employ to discover and understand the story of the universe. A good story involves the listener in many of the strategies of gathering the facts of the story, making predictions about the outcome, and checking their hypothesis against the unfolding details of the tale. Also, you can use a story to make abstract concepts personal and tangible. Important facts can be conveyed within a dynamic context so the facts stick; they have more meaning and impact

Let me share a short story that will show you what I mean.

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by Eric J. Fitch, Ph.D.

Abstract: In the contest of ideas, environmental educators put themselves at disadvantage  by not availing themselves of the tools of humor. From satire to ridicule to comedy, the  ability to connect through humor shouldn’t be overlooked. Humor has often been looked  down upon by environmental professionals. Many environmental scientists, advocates,  and educators view “Environment” so seriously that “having fun” with it would be  “inappropriate”. This puts educators of all stripes at a disadvantage. Opponents of  environmental education regularly use ridicule and satire to degrade the message and  demean the messengers. Environmental professionals are often portrayed as purveyors of  “gloom and doom” and their pronouncements the ranting of Cassandras. These comments  often come clothed in mean spirited jest. Willingness to take up the tools of humor  simply means leveling the playing field. This paper addresses how humor can inform;  approach serious subjects humorously, and can be incorporated into different  environmental education forums.

There’s a story that goes back at least until the early 1980s. It is a take off on the  biblical story of Creation. It is usually titled something like “God and the EPA” or “God  and the Environmentalists”. Instead of God being able to create the known universe at  will and on His timetable, He finds himself stymied at every turn by the requirements and  concerns of various Heavenly bureaucratic agencies and angelic environmental interest groups. When it becomes apparent that impact assessment, public comment and review,  and many of the other things we take for granted as normal in the environmental  community are going to stand in His way, God creates Hell. Although it is a funny piece  and sure to draw a laugh from a great range of audiences, environmental audiences often  miss the underlying message: that processes and protocols that lie near and dear to our  heart and are looked at as good, right, just and even dare I say Holy, are infuriating to  others in society. In subtle ways, environmental angelic surrogates in the Heavenly Host  are subtly mocked and presented as a bit “fuzzy”. The story brings to light a very  important point that is often overlooked; those who control the discourse most often  control the outcomes.

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by Bill Hanshumaker
Hatfield Marine Science Center

The Southern Ocean surrounds Antarctica and serves as a conduit between the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. Yet because of severe climatic conditions, much of this ocean basin remains unexplored. Polar regions play key roles in the global environment and one goal of our project is to document linkages between changes to the Antarctic ice sheet and the volcano-tectonic seafloor processes in the region. To meet the challenge for continuous monitoring in this extreme environment, researchers from the Hatfield Marine Science Center utilized the Russian icebreaker Yuzhmorgeologiya to deploy an array of Autonomous Underwater Hydrophones (AUH). This new ocean-sensor technology uses cold-water capable, deep-ocean hydrophones to record sounds generated by moving ice sheets, undersea earthquakes and volcanoes; even vocalizations from large baleen whales. When the AUH array is recovered in 2006, sounds that it has captured will enable accurate monitoring of global climate change, as well as identifying previously unknown volcanically active regions on the polar seafloor. …..Click here to read more

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The symbolic act of learning and living sustainability in the future should intermingle the fabric of natural systems and human made social systems

by Pramod Parajuli, Ph.D.
Doctoral Program in Sustainability Education
Prescott College

Introduction
The hundreds of thousands of initiatives of this blessed moment are not about the bread and butter, or just about the soil and water alone. Art and the things of beauty are emerging from the most ordinary—a permaculture household in El Salvador, a thread of garlic organically grown in the Chino Valley, Arizona, a solar cooker in the remote Nepalese Himalayas, a Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, a sustainable fishing regulation in British Columbia, or a bag of coffee produced under the canopy of agro-forestry in Chiapas, Mexico. One solar cooker at a time, one biogas at a time, there are millions of solutions, sprouting amidst crisis and seeming chaos.  The time has come as William Blake wrote:

To see a world in the grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower

What might all these imply as we prepare the future generations of learners, educators and leaders? The eight transitional insights I offer below testify that the symbolic act of learning and living sustainability in the future should intermingle the fabric of natural systems and human made social systems—two most complex systems on earth.  A new sustainable human trajectory will not be of humans alone shooting to Mars; it will require re-rooting ourselves with all our multiple senses, and working along with all more than human species.

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Pramod Parajuli is the Director of Program Development in Sustainabililty Education at Prescott College in Arizona. He has designed and developed various academic and community empowerment programs including the Learning Gardens and the Leadership in Ecology, Culture and Learning (LECL), a graduate program at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon (2002-2008). At Prescott College, he is incubating several new innovations that could build on its forty years of accomplishments and seek new heights and horizons.

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Innovative tools allow a teacher to extend class activities on stream ecology and forest history

Forest Grove Community School student taking a closer look at macroinvertebrates living in a stream near the school.

by Charles Graham

I have made an interesting observation about teaching recently.  Some of the best lessons are not necessarily the carefully planned and orchestrated units, but rather the ones that grew and took shape as the project progressed.  I have found that some of my best teaching has been when I didn’t know the exact outcome in advance and learned something new right along with my students. This has been my experience with environmental exploration into stream ecology and the “Leaf Pack” program. …..Click here to read more

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