Field Notes: Saturday Science, leaning toward a constructivist approach to teaching teachers how to teach science. A pilot involving thematic approaches to inquiry and participation of community youth as co-investigators.

Context: Pre-service teachers in training, focussed investigations and guided lesson plan development and implementation. My questions are tangential to the overall purpose of immersing pre-service teachers in an extened learning/teaching experience. My focus goal is to find out what teachers know about earth systems from an experiencial point of view, and whether they can easily integrate outdoor activities with in-class learning. Secondarily, I want to test some ideas for integrated activities and get their responses.

Location: College of Education Science Education laboratory, and nearby arboretum for in-field studies of „microbiology¾ as the lens of observation, and foundation for building knowledge about the interaction of life forms and their inanimate surroundings: to view a whole new world of interaction¾.
Day/time: Saturday November 9th, / 9am to noon
Participants: preservice teachers in training,
youngsters from the community (4th-6th grade),
Myself as participant/researcher

Goals: My focus: the appropriate use outdoor investigative activities as tools for extending understanding and providing real world associations for learning about the earth, its systems, and our place in local, regional, and global contexts. Beginning with local investigations and „tours¾ of our own communities, and extending into surrounding landscapes/ecosystems and bioregions.

Activities: A morning group/cooperative teaching-learning opportunity involving 6 pre-service teachers and 3 students. The theme for our investigations is „microbiology¾ or little life. Where is it? What does it do? How are we related to it, and or dependant on its role in the overall ecosystem?

Theoretical Framework/assumptions: social constructivist, naturalistic, interpretive.

Methods: Participant observation, researcher as instrument, interview, video.
I participated in the Saturday morning instruction and activities and watched and interacted with the teachers during their turns at leading the inquiry. After the session I conducted an interview in which I asked some fairly open-ended questions about how they have used or not used wilderness experiences in the framing of their personal environmental ethic, and whether this had any bearing on the subjects they might teach, how they might structure their lessons, and weave a common thread through the various disciplines that they will be teaching. I also asked them to consider the value of experiencial learning, and science inquiry within a locally relevant context of community-mapping. In other words, consider a suite of integrated activities that can take place outdoors and in the community that tie together issues addressed in the classroom.

Specifically, I asked about activities that can be thematically interconnected and grounded in spacial context of actual communities. A good example would be mapping activities in which each individual discipline, biology, geology, chemistry, physics, social studies, arts and humanities, etc., can be sketched and then later filled in on a „canvas¾ (actual map) of the immediate area. The purpose of these activities is to integrate cross-disciplinary science inquiry skills with basic literacy and communication skills, spacial skills, and understanding all these in locally relevant context as in a map of their community with overlapping layers indicating spacial and temporal distribution of natural and interactions.

The goals of this work are to instill critical thinking about the environment, natural and human-influenced processes that affect the quality of ecosystems, and to tie personal experience in investigating science in context, with theory covered in class. Further, through the use (construction) of maps and field notebooks, project posters and presentations, I hope to actually add to what is know about the local community and begin building a useful and informative database of teacher and student cooperatively produced articles, maps and reports.

Finally, I plan to test some of these new strategies for presenting student work, on the internet¼s world wide web. Future implications include collaboration in publishing a regionally interconnected virtual classroom where student-teacher teams can showcase their studies, compare methods, observations, and interpretations, and share their sketches, maps, video and images of their local perspective or „view from here¾.

Mapped areas could be: the local and surrounding landscape, parks, conservation and wilderness areas, etc.

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Observations:

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Interpretations:

Synthesis:

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Questions asked of pre-service teachers:

#1 What experiences have you/they (teachers) had that effect your beliefs about the state of the environment? How do you know/ don't know?

Paraphrased answers:

#2 Is all well and good with local and or regional/global ecosystems? What are the threats?

Paraphrased answers:

#3 What kind of experiences (field work, travel, etc.) have you had in learning about the environment? How much time have you spent studying local landscapes, ecosystems or processes, or just enjoying being out doors? Time in camps, mapping/investigation activities, retreats, recreation, research, etc...

Paraphrased answers:

#4 Are you interested in how the world works, how other cultures live and cope? What places have you visited outside of your home community that wave contributed to your understanding of other ecosystems, and cultures?

Paraphrased answers:

#5 How far away from home are your favorite places?

Paraphrased answers:

#6 If you could "retire" (I don't suggest anyone do so. Besides what fun is their in non-involvement?), where would you go, if you could go anywhere in the world?

Paraphrased answers:

#7 How can the sharing of local stories, science and culture help us all understand the value of working together to reduce resource consumption, waste production and equity in wealth distribution so that we can have the greatest chance of preserving the most of a diminishing global environment and diversity?

Paraphrased answers:

#8 How can the newly realized global information infrastructure (internet and www) be best used to ensure that indigenous peoples perspectives and history of stewardship be shared so that we all can gain an appreciation for global diversity?

Paraphrased answers:

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I've got some very specific ideas and projects in mind! Local community and surrounding ecosystem/watershed mapping as an avenue to increasing local understanding and promoting a more proactive stewardship of local environmental resources. Local mapping, stories, local lore and ancient myths, documentaries of local expeditions, identifying indigenous and through-migrating species, comparing differences and noting similarities in local/regional animal and plant communities, showcasing local environmental restoration efforts, promoting indigenous culture self-sustainability through the sharing and marketing of locally derived, sustainably harvested products and knowledge. Through leadership education and promoting indigenous peoples through higher education systems, To promote and further develop (or preserve existing) local experts on indigenous biodiversity and culture through financial renumeration for their contributions. To promote these experts for the purpose of guiding tourists and international researchers and sustaining their own lifestyles with the proceeds of a „consultant¾. To use emerging "virtual reality" technologies for educational purposes employing all of the above strategies.

Imagine (and I do often) being able to dialup the local internet connection and then virtually travel to remote parts of the world. To use the www to visit 3 dimensional virtual environmental across the globe for research, exploration and the sharing of cultural information. To use these new communications technologies to hear from local peoples what their landscape is like, what local environmental and cultural assets they are working to preserve, what efforts are underway to ease environmental destruction or restore polluted systems and recover diversity.............