Greetings EDTHP 115

Hello all. I want to welcome you to join us for a journey. This journey is at once about who we are, what we do, why we do it, and how what we do individually and collectively matters.

As current and future teachers, you and I probably believe that we can positively impact the world by teaching children, with those less experienced than us, or those who have learned differently than we have. I think we also probably believe that we can learn a great deal from the children with whom we work, with their families, and with our whole communities.

But what about about the places - the natural environmental places where we live? What do they teach us? What do we give to them and they give to us? These are questions at the hear of who we, in 3E-COE ask?

We focus on three things in our club with the goal of fostering more environmentally and ecologically aware people.

• Our first pillar asks that we look at the natural environment and understand that it is a complex thing of which we are a part, a part that creates many side effects of which we can be both proud and ashamed. This leads to...
  
• Our second pillar, that we are part of a web of natural relationships that the science and practice of ecology shows us. That is, by systematically examining the world(s) around us - the political, economic, social, and natural worlds - we can come to ways of understanding how we look at the natural world and are a part of it. This naturally leads us to...
• Our third pillar, which is to bring our learning and doing into what John Dewey would call an "educative" mission that promotes "growth" toward a good end. In fact, many of our actions in 3E-COE create reflections on our experiences so that we can develop better practices as teachers and living people.

We focus on trying to integrate ecological thinking into the whole school system. Think about how many ways and at how many levels you could use a garden in any school.

Botany, biology, and organic and inorganic chemistry: Through the study of plants, fungus, animal, and microorganisms working in and through soil, air, water, and sunlight. We can learn about life cycles.

Meteorology and climatology: Think of the seasonality of the garden, its water and solar cycles.

English: Speaking of water. If you are a high school teacher interested in teaching Dune, you can incorporate its thoughts on water into the actual use of water where you live.

Math: From the simple arithmetic of the number of seeds you plant to fractions and proportions of how many mums we planted to how bloomed or differential equations of predator and prey relationships (that'd be a big garden and a pretty advanced class!) you can do it.

History, geography and anthropology: By growing sweet potatoes (if it's appropriate in your bioregion) you can investigate the natural evolutionary and cultural history of a kind of food used by the Incas and modern Africans.

Art and music: If you grow gourds, you can make musical instruments. Cooking. Poetry. The art of arranging the garden and its landscape.

Economics: If a garden works well, as it has at many schools from Vermont to northwest Washington state, children can sell the fruits and vegetables they grow and make a sustainable living.

Cooperative learning and team thinking: People work together and with something larger than themselves when they do this.

There is a reason that people remain lifetime gardeners. They always teach. They teach you about who and what you are in the place where you are.

This is only one petal on our "green school" flower. We have no shortage of media and natural sources to use for the development of formal and informal curriculum. From Edutopia's Climate Change Curricula to the Edible Schoolyard to the Center for Ecoliteracy to the Pennsylvania Center for Environmental Education, we have abundant resources.

As you can see, we are invested people. Our mission states, "We hope to create a way for students at Penn State to learn lessons about our natural environment, our ethical and ecological understanding of that environment, and how to create educational experiences that foster that understanding. Therefore, we strive for personal and communal sustainability defined as “the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on Earth forever.” Join us in this flourishing.

Please come to our meetings to learn and share more. First Thursday of every month at 7 pm in the Chambers PC Computer Lab. That means we have two more meetings this semester and then one more before Earth Day to shore things up for our plastic bottle greenhouse. More on that later.

April 1st @ 7 pm
April 15th @ 7 pm
Weekend of the 17-18th TBA

Please join us. Any questions or requests to be added to the mailing list, email Peter Buckland @ pdb118@psu.edu

The year wrapped up

I think that we have some things to really be pleased with this semester, a good deal to look forward to doing together, and some areas where we might be able to focus our attention as we move forward. In this post I hope to post a bit of a reflection on this semester, where I think we are as a group, and what we might do in the future. As always, I hope that others will contribute feedback in the comments section.

This past semester, 3E-COE did some really cool things. Starting early I think that under Alex's leadership we gained some success in keeping the university's ear regarding plastic water bottle waste and our hope that we can get them banned at Penn State. Penn State does a much better job than most huge institutions and municipalities at recycling - 53% overall - but know that it simply isn't enough. Though the administrator's we have met with seem to eschew the idea of using "ban" language because it proscribes and chides instead of redirects, they listened and, to some degree, have worked with us. However, we know that in principle bans are possible. We've seen that other universities like Washington U. in St. Louis have already moved that way and that there is buzz at other state universities like SUNY Cortland. I was contacted by a student, Danny, at U. of Central Florida who, we hope, got some meetings with their Office of Physical Plant to move them towards less waste via a water bottle ban. If his figures are correct, their recycling rate was abominably low: under 20%.

As the semester wore on (and wore us down for sure) we came up with a teach-in plan that could have worked had we really been much more coordinated earlier. In retrospect, we might have done best by providing a bigger presence at Earth Day at Penn State and not tried to strike out on our own a litte later. That said, Jared's awesome pamphlets (see this earlier post) and the fliers (see this post) made for some good late-semester outreach that, at the very least, keeps some water bottle consciousness in the PSU zeitgeist. For sure next year we should join in with Eco-Action et al and make stronger and more concentrated pushes.

But at the meetings we had some really great opportunities this semester. We met some cool people who work with and for sustainability, ecological literacy, and the protection of our greatest resource - nature - in interesting ways. We met with the Social Justice Reading Group to discuss articles by David Orr, Anthony Weston, and Richard Kahn. By engaging them, we saw how far down the rabbit hole of sustainability we have yet to go and yet how committed we are to ecological justice as a sister to social justice. It is no small thing to realize that the economically and racially ghettoized people of the world - whether in the Tennessee Valley or along Love Canal or living adjacent to the Dow Chemical Plant in Bhopal, India - had their natural environments degraded by wealthy, powerful, and very "educated" people who operated with little or no conscience to all others' health or well-being.

Ali Turley from the Centre County Youth Service Bureau came to us and asked for our help maintaining a community and children's garden in some local Section 8 housing in Boalsburg. This is an effort to develop some communal sense in a place where families tend not to live for very long and where ethnic tensions can run high. Two of our members have been working on that and, we can hope, will provide us with some updates as the summer and fall move along.

We had Bob Burkholder come from the English department to talk to us about his various outdoor literature courses and show us how literature, history, forests, watersheds, rivers, shores, and oceans connect and interweave in one of the most noble of human endeavors - literature. For a view of his various adventure literature courses, go to his course website and take a peek. One of his stated goals is to "learn how wild places relate to literature, history, and philosophy." This seems much in line with what many of us want to do. He goes to Cape Cod, South Carolina, down the Chesapeake Watershed and into the Bay, and out into the wilderness (pictured at right). What can we do? What will you do with where you teach and live?

A couple of members of People Protecting Communities (PPC) who have been fighting the Rush Township landfill proposal for five years came and gave a fantastically detailed presentation on all of those goings on. It really brought home how understanding our bioregion and our governmental structure helps us to move forward. Civics teachers take note! And this, for me, led back to our discussion of social justice because the rich and well-connected people of Resource Recovery LLC have been able to continue a totally misguided and environmentally disastrous campaign to strong arm rural people without a lot of material wealth into accepting the uglification and poisoning of the land they live on, the air they breathe, and the water they drink. Luckily, the people at PPC are devoted, intelligent, diligent, and also very informed on governmental workings.

Finally, paleontologist and climate change researcher came and provided us with a brilliant primer on climate change. As a researcher he studies the last ice age, specifically how rodent species have locally gone extinct on forested land islands as the climate changed. In short, he seems to expect that as the climate warms that we will see populations of these high altitude rodent species like Red Backed Voles, Heather Voles, American Pika, and Collared Lemmings diminish or disappear. If you are so inclined, you can join our group on Penn State's ANGEL and download his Power Point presentations. As a teacher he brought in fossils for us to handle and see. Touching the fossilized bones of animals dead for tens of thousands of years really brings home to the hand how much we use our bodies to learn. In an educational world so bent on developing the gray matter between our ears by using language, this reminded me once again of the simple joy of kinesthetic learning. In a small way, "teaching went wild" for a few minutes.

So looking ahead for the coming year I see a few things on our horizon. First, I suspect that from some contacts in the community that we will be able to arrange meetings/observations of local teachers using their school gardens. I have been working toward getting the College of Education to get a teaching/learning garden put in but it is an extensive process. But the dean seems to believe it's a good idea in principle but that implementing it could be good. I know for a fact, though, that the student's of Madhu Prakash's EDTHP 440 - Philosophy of Education all signed a letter to the dean requesting a teaching garden. Nearly 30 of them signed it! Between the lot of us we might just get somewhere.

Sadly (but also awesomely!), the plots at the Center for Sustainability filled up almost instantly and we were wait-listed. While I am really sad that 3E-COE doesn't have a plot, I am overjoyed to see so much interest in something that we didn't know could be so huge. But other local municipalities are joining in. In fact, last night I was at my friend Aaron's house in Boalsburg and he showed me his plot in the Harris Township community garden. This is brilliant news!

In the summer we will continue to learn more about all numbers of things on our own and, perhaps for those of us still here, we can take a couple of excursions into the beautiful Pennsylvania wilderness and watersheds. In the fall I think we will refine and carry out our water bottle teach-in/protest at a much more intense level. I'm even considering a real sort of big room lecture format that the lot of us can work together on.

I am really looking forward to what we will do. It's been a good first year.

Meeting this week!

Biophiles! This week we are going to have a cool meeting. We need to get on task and work out a quick hash of the teach-in on water bottles, paper cups, waste, and whatnot!

Then Bob Burkholder will be joining us to give a presentation on his outdoor literature class. You guys in English education are in for a sweet treat I think. It can open up avenues for you to cross disciplines and really bring nature, ecology, geography, and ecological justice into your current and future classrooms!

Print out a flier or pass on the message!

Meeting this Wednesday

Hi all. Meeting this Wednesday in 209 Chambers. Now that THON is coming to an end we might get some more members back into the fold.

Alex has some news for us on the water bottle issue and I think we should talk about a teach-in later in the semester that could be paired with a taste test (see the Penn & Teller taste test in the previous post).

Zach has suggested that we discuss the Environmental Education certification curriculum at Penn State. We can look at its components and maybe see what we can learn from it and see if it is something that some of you might want to consider doing. The head of the program, Dr. Murry Nelson, is someone with whom we might want to have some familiarity as well. Should I ask him to meet us sometime?

If you can put the flier at right to good use, print it out and post it. Also, invite your friends.
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NOTE AND UPDATE: I met with a woman today who works for the Centre County Youth Service Bureau who has a garden in a local Section 8 housing community. They need help. I think that we can use this as an opportunity for one or more of you looking to get your 80 hours of pre-service work in. Anyway, I invited Ali to come to tomorrow's meeting to talk to us. We can still do all of our other stuff.

First meeting of the semester

Come to this semester's first meeting of 3E-COE. Get all your friends together and come on down. We have plans for meetings with teachers who work with school gardens (see the State College Area's school gardens here), local farmers, professors from paleontology, hydrology, and English, and a meeting with the Social Justice Reading Group. We'll keep pushing for the water bottle ban at Penn State, do some activities for Earth Day, and more!

Meeting time and place: Wednesday January 28th, 2009 in 114 Chambers Building.

If you are so inclined and feel it would be productive, print out a copy of the flier jpeg above and post it around campus. Come and join the change. As some new addition to the White House has been saying, "Yes we can!"