Environmental Stewardship Education in the Internet Age

The internet is not only transforming classrooms and the way students learn, its mass communication capabilities can bring about innovation in environmental stewardship. Appropriately designed websites can serve as a tool for connecting students with their communities and showcasing these community connections. Posting material on the web helps students appreciate the value of their work. Students recognize the authenticity of their assignments and feel empowered to be doing something which matters, that has application, and which can shape environmental policy and action. The unique design of a website can initiate dynamic relationships between people and environmental information, prompting individuals to engage in environmental stewardship behavior.

What is environmental stewardship and why involve students in environmental stewardship? All of our lives depend on clean air, land, and water. From neighborhood, to region, to world, our actions impact our environment and our environment impacts our quality of life. We continually need to raise awareness and understanding of issues affecting environmental quality. We will therefore always need leaders of environmental stewardship and educators who are willing to mentor young people, the next generation in environmental stewardship. Today’s youth are tomorrow’s leaders. The Iroquois Confederacy, or the Great Law of the Iroquois, urged that, ‘In every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.’ We would be wise to be guided by this principle that urges us to consider--and be responsible for--the consequences of our actions through the seventh generation to come.

Is environmental stewardship not influenced by environmental education? Environmental education in the past has been misunderstood and criticized for (Sanera, 1999; Selcraig, 1988; Motavalli, 1999):
     • turning young people into ecoterrorists;
     • ignoring economic considerations;
     • promoting what to think versus how to think,
     • securing corporate sponsorship for curriula, thereby raising      suspicions of bias.

Although environmental education differs from envionmental advocacy, it can lead to activisim and result in environmental stewardship.
The North American Association for Environmental Education has developed Excellence in Environmental Education Guidelines for Learning (Pre K-12) (revised 2004) to set a standard for high-quality environmental education in schools across the country, based on what an environmentally literate person should know and be able to do. The standards draw on the best thinking in the field to outline the core ingredients for environmental education and define the aims of environmental education. These standards inform and guide educators so they can avoid the pitfalls that have plagued environmental education in the past.

This article explains a project that involved finding the right niche and team to collectively envision, design and implement a stewardship education program with an internet component. The project has been recognized as an innovative, exemplary, 21st century learning experience for young people.

The Maine Lakes Conservancy Institute (MLCI), a nonprofit organization dedicated to understanding, preserving, and sustaining the health and values of Maine’s lakes and the communities that are dependent upon them, has developed an educational program emphasizing project, place-based, and environmental service learning, designed to teach environmental stewardship. The program offers a multi-disciplinary approach to lake education and engages students of different abilities and interests in the active stewardship of their freshwater natural resources. It involves classroom learning, an educational field trip and a website to prompt MLCI partner teachers and their students, to research, learn, and share information about their lakes. The Students’ Portal website focuses on community, stewardship, and discovery.

Launching the MLCI Students’ Portal was serendipitous with laptops arriving in Maine middle schools. By 2003 every seventh and eighth grader in a public school in the state had received a laptop for the year, putting approximately 33,000 computers in circulation. This represented the largest initiative of its kind in the world. Leaders of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI), known as the Maine laptop program, resisted many solicitations for adoption of canned programs and remained focused on their notion of quality learning. MLCI’s Students’ Portal program exemplified their view of how technology can transform education and build stronger communities and was the first educational program endorsed by MLTI. Since its inception, MLCI’s Students’ Portal has won state, regional, and national awards for: being a ‘jewel of educational ingenuity’; representing a ‘premier example of using laptop technology; providing ‘exceptional work and commitment to the environment’; and exemplifying ‘effective and creative’ public education and outreach. It is featured on the George Lucas Educational Foundations (GLEF) website, www.glef.org (‘The Maine Event’), and in their ‘Edutopia’ magazine. Apple has run a story on the program, http://ali.apple.com/ali_sites/glefli/, and MLCI was also the focus of a show by The YES! Media Team, http://www.yestoyouth.org/Webstreaming.ASP.

MLCI’s Students’ Portal currently involves nine partner schools throughout Maine representing the state’s geographic and cultural diversity. A partnership is established with a 7th grade teacher and his/her current classroom, and lasts for five years. This length of time allows MLCI to build a sustainable lake stewardship commitment in each community.

Work on the Students’ Portal begins with MLCI staff visiting partner schools to excite and prepare students for the floating classroom part of the educational program and to help teachers make lake connections in the curriculum aligned with educational standards. The floating classroom involves taking the class, led by MLCI staff, on board a 30 foot pontoon boat outfitted with a host of limnological equipment for exploring a nearby lake. This way, students can learn to appreciate an aquatic ecosystem out their back door. Students cycle through stations, operating the equipment themselves, investigating their lake using a secchi disc, underwater camera, hydrophone, YSI probe to read temperature and dissolved oxygen levels at different depths, benthic dredge with sieves to temporarily capture and examine juvenile forms of macroinvertebrates, plankton haul net, and Ken-o-vision projector hooked to a computer monitor to examine microscopic life forms

brought up from the deep.

Before boarding the boat, most passengers typically identified their lake only as a source of recreational or aesthetic pleasure. They never considered invisible layers of the food web, or how lakes work, with physical, chemical and biological processes all influencing one another. They also are largely unaware of how human activity can negatively impact the health of lakes. MLCI’s goal is to have students leave with a new appreciation and understanding of the importance of stewarding these fresh water resources.

After the boat trip, students follow-up with research in the classroom to generate material to share via the MLCI Students’ Portal. The Portal has eight icons representing different sections or hooks for enticing students to explore their lakes (refer to diagram). One link provides access to the PEARL website (www.pearlmaine.com), which hosts local environmental data collected by professional scientists. This direct link to the PEARL website lends a solid lake research perspective to the students’ investigations. Each class of students can upload information, discoveries, and creative ideas related to lakes in their home community. Students choose the category or icon where they want to post the material they want to share. Providing autonomy and honoring decisions is a key motivational factor for students. They thrive on this ownership and respect. With the laptops, teachers are thrust into a new role, becoming facilitators rather than traditional disseminators of information. They validate students’ progress. The level of critical thinking increases as students become more independent. The fact that all middle level students have access to the laptops erases the digital divide and the design of the Students’ Portal with its representative schools across the state helps with the dissolution of geographic boundaries and distances.

Each academic year MLCI staff selects a curricular theme to provide focus and direction for the students in selecting lake topics to pursue to populate the Students’ Portal. In 2003-2004, the curricular theme focused on charting landscape changes around lakes through time. The culminating project was developing a mapquest, a creatively written treasure hunt with clues and riddles to be solved which teaches about the history of the lake. The mapquest is posted on the MLCI Students’ Portal and viewers learn about a significant natural or human-made feature or place on the lake.

The 2004-2005 winter visits to the partner schools focused on aquatic invasive species. Prior to the visits, teachers administer ‘pre’ surveys to assess students’ understanding of the important concepts related to the year’s theme. These questions prompt students on what’s to come and students written responses to these same questions on the post survey help staff evaluate their teaching strategies. Visits begin with a review of the questions and introductory information on the theme using state of the art software. Then reinforcing hands-on activities follow.

Activities for studying invasives species involved students making models of Eurasian milfoil so they can better learn to identify and distinguish the plant from beneficial, native look-alikes. Since milfoil growth is related to water depth, students color in bathymetric maps of their lakes to show the potential area an infestation of Eurasian milfoil could impact. The maps are posted on the Students’ Portal under their schools’ site for others to view. Students learn geography skills of map construction and interpretation and analysis of geographical patterns. Highlighting depth contours is a new skill to be learned, one that is not intuitive for most, so completing the task is an accomplishment. Because the curricular material centers on lakes in the students’ community, the subject has relevance to their lives, and students persevere.

Students also explore zebra mussels, another invasive species that fortunately has not yet populated Maine’s lakes. Students investigate if zebra mussels arrived at Maine’s borders, would they take over the lakes in their community? Studies indicate a pH greater than seven is one necessary criterion for zebra mussels so students use the PEARL website to look up the pH of their lake to determine if zebra mussels could reproduce in the lake. This exercise helps students to compare and contrast the means of dispersal and success in recruitment of various invasive plants and animals.

Students are also introduced to the problem of illegal stocking of fish species, which often results in non-native fish species out competing native trout and salmon. By matching colored images of warm and cold water fish species with their silhouettes showing fin placement and shape, students refine their fish identification skills. MLCI staff share diverse examples of how the ecology of a lake can change as a result of any of the above mentioned ‘invasive’ species.

Through these exercises students learn and share about the potential infestations of invasive aquatic species, like Eurasian milfoil and zebra mussels, and their variable impact in what are relatively still pristine lakes. Educating students to become ambassadors for their lakes is an essential part of the equation -- the students become another set of trained eyes patrolling the lake helping to prevent the spread of these problematic organisms. The students learn the consequences that result from the introduction of ‘invasive’ species - plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates.

Putting a timely curriculum, where no one has already come up with all of the solutions, into the hands of students is empowering for youth. Showcasing students’ work on the Students’ Portal to diverse audiences in-state and abroad raises the educational bar. Students are eager to pursue learning that involves creatively sharing the results of one’s research with others. Students develop a commitment and pride in their accomplishments when they know their work is significant. Educating young people to become environmentally literate means we’ll have future civic leaders with sound environmental foundations.

The motivated, professional educators involved in the program naturally customize the curriculum. For example, at one school the students created an invasives display to post at their town office, where residents go to register their vehicles. At another school a group of students plan to share their work at the annual lake association meeting. Still another class designed logos for t-shirts to educate the community about the problems of aquatic invasive species. Students planting a riparian buffer alongside the community lakeside park have been featured on the cover of their town report. Other partner school students joined the July summer loon count. One school developed an exhibit for the annual state ‘Milfoil Summit’. These are the stories of students becoming stewards for today and leaders for tomorrow.

In summary, what are the transferable lessons from implementing an environmental stewardship-oriented, place-based, educational technology initiative with students? Curricular activities need to:

     1. Be inquiry driven, focused on student-generated projects, and involve questions. Starting with key questions helps focus learning and “set the stage for further questioning to foster the development of critical thinking skills and higher order capabilities, such as problem solving and understanding complex systems. Good essential questions encourage collaboration amongst students, teachers, and the community, and integrate technology to support the learning process.” (http://mathstar.nmsu.edu/exploration1/unit/content_questions).
     2. Align with national and international educational standards in a number of disciplines, including: geography, economics, environmental literacy, science, and mathematics. (Refer to chart for examples.)
     3. Engage youth in citizen science to add to the local natural resource information base and promote local stewardship.
     4. Build multigenerational connections in the community.
     5. Create environmentally literate future leaders.
     6. Be multidisciplinary to attract students with diverse skills and interests, accommodating some of the multiple intelligences identified by Howard Gardner who said, ‘I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place.’ (Gardiner 1999, p. 180-181) Gardner’s philosophy mirrors MLCI’s goal of promoting environmental stewardship and his eight intelligences proved useful and expanded reflective thinking when designing an educational program and accompanying website that appeals to all learners. (Refer to chart for specific examples related to a lake education program.)
     7. Offer choices so students have autonomy and can build commitment and pride. Set high standards and then honor and respect students and let them lead with the technology.

Although this is the story of one award-winning case study in Maine, it is transferable to other regions and topics. The Center for the Environment (CFE) at Plymouth State University hopes to collaboratively develop similar projects that are equally unique and meaningful for New Hampshire youth and community members alike. For example, The Center and MLCI are co-sponsoring a Lake Science Academy for New England high school teachers in the summer of 2006. This and other projects fit the Center’s mission: to serve a diverse research, education, and public engagement role addressing the science, culture, and economics of the natural environment in northern New England. The Center for the Environment staff welcomes input and ideas. For more information visit the CFE website, www.plymouth.edu/cfe, for opportunities for involvement.

References:

Elder, James L. 2003. A Field Guide to Environmental Literacy: Making Strategic Investments in Environmental Education. Environmental Education Coalition Available from NAAEE, 2000 P St., NW, Ste. 540, Washington, DC 20036

Gardner, Howard. 1983; 1993, second edition. Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences, New York: Basic Books. Second edition published in Britain by Fontana Press.

Motavalli, Jim. 1999. ‘Green Education is Transforming America's Basic Environmental Illiteracy. So Why Isn't Everyone Smiling?, The Learning Tree (E Magazine, September/October 1999, pages 28-35)

Sanera, Michael and Jane S. Shaw, 1999, second edition. Facts not Fear: A Parents Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment. Regnery Publishing, Inc.

Selcraig, Bruce. 1988. "Reading, 'Riting, and Ravaging: The scandal of environmental education" Sierra, May/June 1988, pages 60-92

Smith, M. K. 2002, 'Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences', the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm.

Sobel, David. 2004, Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities. Orion Society, Nature Literacy Series Vol. 4.

Websites: http://www.7generations.org/ and http://www.freedom-here-and-now.com/7glt/