Gruenewald blends critical pedagogy and place-based education into a critical pedagogy of place. Critical pedagogies challenge the assumptions implicit in the dominant culture. Place-based education aims to educate citizens so they can influence their social and ecological spaces. Together, these perspectives provide a framework that enables citizens to act both locally and globally to protect their cultures and environments.
Mobile technology can be used to scaffold inquiry-based learning, enabling learners to work across settings and times, singly or in collaborative groups. It can expand learners’ opportunities to understand the nature of inquiry whilst they engage with the scientific content of a specific inquiry. This Sharples et al. paper reports on the use of the mobile computer-based inquiry toolkit nQuire. Teachers found the tool useful in helping students to make sense of data from varied settings.
Project Exploration’s week-long summer Environmental Adventurers program immersed eleven Chicago Public School middle and high school students into the world of urban bees and biodiversity research. We employed a place-based approach to ground learning experiences and exploration within uniquely urban spaces. Students used mobile technology to explore the environment, document native bees, and engage in authentic fieldwork research and data analysis. Students maximized the potential of the technology in ways that forced program leaders to rethink the potential of mobile technology as an
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Jameela JafriGabrielle LyonStephanie MadziarRebecca ToniettoProject ExplorationChicago Botanic GardenNorthwestern University
This article describes the Collectors' Corner Neighborhood Trading Places (CCNTP) program. CCNTP is a collaboration between the Science Museum of Minnesota, the R.H. Stanford Library branch of the Washington County Library, and the Highland Park Library branch of the Saint Paul Public Library. The CCNTP program invites children and visitors of all ages to bring natural objects to the location and share their knowledge about them, earning points which allow them to trade for other items.
Tokyo Institute of Technology (TokyoTech) has been developing a number of methodologies to teach graduate students the theory and practice of science communication since 2005. One of the tools used is the science cafe, where students are taught about the background based primarily on theoretical models developed in the UK. They then apply that knowledge and adapt it in the Japanese cultural context and plan, execute and review outcomes as part of their course. In this paper we review 4 years of experience in using science cafes in this educational context; we review the background to the
The purpose of this case study was to describe the nature of high school students’ experiences in the immersive four-day field experience at Stone Laboratory Biological Field Station including excursions to Kelley’s Island and South Bass Island. Six tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade students participated through interviews, photovoice, observations, and a survey. Pretrip semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand each participant student’s relationship with science. Participants were given cameras to record their field trip experiences to relate what they found interesting
The Ocean Project is pleased to present this latest update on our market research and outreach initiative. In this issue we highlight new insights about the public's interest and understanding of ocean acidification, as well as some very promising findings on the potential for online advertising as the proverbial rising tide that could lift all boats. We also take a look at some of the ways in which our zoo, aquarium, and museum (ZAM) partners are preparing to participate in our planet's biggest celebration of the ocean, World Oceans Day on June 8! We hope you find it all useful as you develop
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) have the potential to become a powerful political vision that can support the urgently needed global transition to a shared and lasting prosperity. In December 2014, the United Nations (UN) Secretary General published his report on the SDGs. However, the final goals and targets that will be adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 risk falling short of expectations because of what we call “cockpit-ism”: the illusion that top-down steering by governments and intergovernmental organizations alone can address global problems. In view of the
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Maarten HajerMans NilssonKate RaworthPeter BakkerFrans BerkhoutYvo de BoerJohan RockstromKathrin LudwigMarcel Kok
Urgent issues such as climate change, food scarcity, malnutrition, and loss of biodiversity are highly complex and contested in both science and society (1). To address them, environmental educators and science educators seek to engage people in what are commonly referred to as sustainability challenges. Regrettably, science education (SE), which focuses primarily on teaching knowledge and skills, and environmental education (EE), which also stresses the incorporation of values and changing behaviors, have become increasingly distant. The relationship between SE and EE has been characterized
Approaches to citizen science – an indispensable means of combining ecological research with environmental education and natural history observation – range from community-based monitoring to the use of the internet to “crowd-source” various scientific tasks, from data collection to discovery. With new tools and mechanisms for engaging learners, citizen science pushes the envelope of what ecologists can achieve, both in expanding the potential for spatial ecology research and in supplementing existing, but localized, research programs. The primary impacts of citizen science are seen in
Rockman et al (REA), in partnership with Marti Louw and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE) conducted a summative evaluation in Summer 2014 of an aquatic macroinvertebrate digital teaching collection (macroinvertebrates.org) containing voucher specimens from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) in Pittsburgh, PA. The digital teaching collection groups three orders of aquatic insects (stoneflies, caddisflies, and mayflies), and users can click on a specific insect and get information on its genus, habitat, behaviors, size, abundance
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University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School-Environments (UPCLOSE)Camellia Sanford-Dolly
The "places" of learners and practitioners of science from communities of color are increasingly a focus in analyses of science learning and education in the U.S. Typically, these places are defined through the discourse of equity that focuses on representation and the goal of creating learning environments that will allow students of color to perform as well as their white peers. More recently, this focus has shifted from performance to actual knowledge of and the ability to think critically about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) content. Although critical thinking and
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Megan BangDouglas MedinGregory Cajete