Moving Parts: Redesigning Curriculum for Place-Based Education
Written by Alex Grindle, Director of Programs, and Amalie Sonneborn, Program Manager
Just over a year ago, as we were heading into our first season at Poland Spring Resort, The Ecology School’s Program Team had an opportunity on their hands. We needed to take a successful curriculum that had been honed over 20 years by staff, administrators, and with help from our client schools and teachers, and transform it to become a curriculum suited for a brand new place and space. We had long said that “ecology is everywhere” but were now faced with the task of proving it!
Students use scientific tools to investigate the properties of the field ecosystem during Living on the Edge.
So what did we do? We called in our troops. We reached out to a group of FOAMers (Ecology Educator alumni) that included recent or current Educators, classroom teachers, and alternative/informal education professionals, as well as colleagues to help us re-organize our curriculum to better fit our new interim location, and hopefully set us up for our later transition to River Bend Farm. Our initial instinct was that we might be in a place where we were going to need to start from scratch. How could we take a Salt Marsh Lesson and use any of that to inform a curriculum without easy access to a salt marsh?
Through our curriculum redesign process, we were pleased to reaffirm that our teaching methodology, style, and 20 years of dedicated curriculum work was going to transferable to any site. While we no longer have on-site access to beach and dunes or salt marsh, a curriculum founded on central scientific themes and taught by trained educators will be able to be executed anywhere.
As an example, one lesson that had long been a key part of most of our residential programs is Abiotic Adventures. The lesson focuses on collecting data to compare the beach, primary dune, secondary dune, and forest ecosystems. Through this process, students engaged in learning how geologic history has influenced the land around us and how abiotic factors shape ecosystems. Key to this lesson was also the opportunity for students to collect and analyze data in the field. We knew for sure that these underlying concepts of landscape ecology and comparison was a necessary part of our curriculum moving forward and so were tasked with finding a way to address the same ecological concepts with different landscapes to work with. So time to redesign!
Evaluating factors of disturbance helps students learn about each ecosystem.
After our curriculum design work with FOAMers, and various trial versions, we landed on our first iteration of Living on the Edge. In this lesson, students, rather than comparing the beach to the forest, compare the forest to the field. They then use the information and comparison to hypothesize what they might find in an edge (the transition zone between two ecosystems) and test that hypothesis. Over the Winter of 2018-19 we created a lesson plan without having a complete understanding of where it would be taking place, given that we had yet to fully explored the site and ground was covered in snow.
Our first version of Living on the Edge was implemented Spring 2019 as we began to get to know our interim site at Poland Spring Resort. After hours of delivery it became clear that while it was a lesson well on its way, it was in need of some fine tuning. With the benefit of our Educators’ dedicated and on the ground perspective along side the curriculum design knowledge of the Program Team, we spent the summer re-working Living on The Edge. Fall 2019 provided another opportunity to field test this new version and we were excited by the results.
For 2019, Program Team has been working through each of our lessons, just like we did with Abiotic Adventures turned Living on the Edge. Our curriculum design process is proving to be successful not only at our interim site, but will continue to be helpful in creating the bedrock of the curriculum for River Bend Farm.
We are so thankful to our staff current and past who have helped us do this work and are passionate about continuing to make our curriculum the best it can be.