Yet Another Busy Day

My brain is spent. Most of today was spent developing our personal pedagogy and working on an outline that will eventually become our pedagogical statement. Entering this process, I thought I was sitting pretty. Previously, we had been asked to brainstorm three "I believe..." statements that reflected our philosophy regarding environmental education. My three were:

1. I believe that environmental education can help individuals better understand the natural world.

2. I believe that environmental education is a means of helping others fall in love with nature, which may be the best way to protect it.

3. I believe that environmental education can help individuals make rational, informed decisions regarding the environment.

Not too shabby right? We were then asked to select which of these three was the most important to us. I chose No. 3 as I am of the opinion that once people have the proper information, more often than not, they will make the correct (a loaded term, I know) decision. We then went through, an occasionally painful, unpacking of our statements that really forced us to critically analyze what we meant by our statements and consequently what we really believe. This became confusing as some of us began to confuse our personal beliefs with what we believe the outcome of environmental education should be. What was surprising to me was that I was unsure of my personal beliefs until I blurted out that I believe environmental education is important because I find nature intrinsically beautiful and therefore worthy of being preserved. I am still concerned that this is a rather selfish goal for pursuing environmental education. Just because I think nature is incredible, should I really try to convince others to protect just so that I can have it around longer? Due to this realization, I chose Statement No. 2 as my core belief. Once that was in order, statements No. 1. and No. 3 fell neatly in line as supporting beliefs.

With that settled, I was able to proceed with my outline. What I have now is three pages of rambling internal dialogue put down on paper. Hopefully I will be able to refine this over the next few weeks.

After a lovely lunch with classmates at the Diary Bar, I was ready to lead my reading facilitation. The article we focused on was "Going Local" by Gregory Smith which detailed the author's investigations and observations of place-based education in Oregon. I found the article illuminating and I will certainly apply this method of education in the future. I was a little nervous about my facilitation but as most of my leading and teaching experience has been with children. I opened with a brief dialogue about the article and then divided our class into three group. Each was assigned a different school (rural, urban, suburban) and asked to select a student population with which to work. The groups then had to design their own place-based lesson based on available resources. I though it went very well, with each group putting a lot of thought into their proposals. Once they had finished, each group presented their project with an accompanying poster. Each poster was unique and delivered the relevant information in an interesting way (I've attached photos). I was very impressed. It's very nice to be a part of a class that is welcoming, respectful, takes issues seriously, and where participation is never an issue. So far, this has been a wonderful experience.

My day concluded with a meeting. Dr. Rock, Martha, Alicia and I sat down together to discuss our research proposal. I was slightly concerned that they might find fault with our idea, but they seemed supportive and thought that we might actually find some good results. Tonight I need to research why chemicals were dumped at the Superfund site adjacent to the property, ascertain their chemical composition, and find out the success and effect of phytoremediation. Most importantly, we now need to come up with a catchy title for our project. The Poop Patrol? Scatological Musings? I'm sure we can come up with something better than that. I'm now excited to actually get out into the field and start collecting data. Hopefully tomorrow that can begin!