Stroud Educators at Work The Future of Education: Developing New Teaching Paradigms

When the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded three Stroud™ Water Research Center education programs last year: Cultivating an Ecosystem Esthetic, Watershed Citizenship Learning Community, and Model My Watershed, it effectively placed the Center's educational ideas on a national stage and underscored its leadership role in creating the kinds of innovative programming that will excite students of all ages in environmental sciences well into the 21st century.

"What we're trying to do," says Stroud Water Research Center's education director, Susan Gill of her team's efforts, "is to stretch the boundaries of what education can be." Her goal? To develop new teaching paradigms and programs that will catalyze interest in science, technology, engineering and math, and use them to cultivate both awareness about water issues and the skills to address them.

The programs are each grounded in the science of the Center, but they are further enriched by their intentional leverage of community and Web 2.0 technologies, aspects that appeal to a younger and more web savvy generation, and which enable accessibility and broad dissemination.

EMPOWERING CITIZENS TO SOLVE WATER MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS
The programs, which target a range of audiences from middle and high school aged children, to college students and adults, each incorporate an evaluation component — testing not just the student, but the curriculum itself, and providing valuable insights that will continue to shape the next generation of education ideas and curricula. For example, almost a year later, modifications are already being incorporated into Cabrini College's Watershed Citizenship Learning Community curricula. "We wanted to broaden its scope to study larger watersheds like the Delaware River basin, which includes four states," says Gill. "That single change will help us be more effective in conveying the real complexities of watershed management."  She explains that larger watersheds naturally pose a richer and more realistic set of challenges because political boundaries and differing priorities by region inevitably shape the decisions and tradeoffs of development and watershed management.

"We need to empower citizens to work collaboratively to solve water management problems," says Gill. "To do so, we're taking a multi-dimensional approach and creating a suite of tools that provide the facts and equip individuals for involvement at many levels." The Center's Leaf Pack Experiment Kit is being calibrated to enable so-called "citizen scientists" to easily and inexpensively conduct water quality assessments, Model My Watershed provides the platform to model land use planning options and project the consequential impact, and the Watershed Citizenship Learning Community curricula combines science with the social side of community responsibility and involvement; the idea is to give people what they need to start the dialogue and to coalesce around a viable plan for watershed stewardship and management.

EXPANDING OUR REACH THROUGH TECHNOLOGY
What does Gill see as the next step forward for education? "So much of what we do can benefit from technology," says Gill. Using the capability of the Internet to engage mass audiences, reinforce shared community interests, and disseminate water quality data and tools is key. "By continuing to build our programs around Web 2.0 technologies, we can expand our reach and bring our science home to people everywhere." In effect, expanding the classroom to the web ensures that the Center's influence has fewer boundaries, and citizens everywhere can be empowered to make more informed choices that affect the quality and availability of their water.

Links:
To learn more about the programs mentioned in this article, go to the following links:

Cabrini College's Watershed Citizenship Learning Community curricula http://www.stroudcenter.org/newsletters/2009Winter/cabrini.html

Cultivating an Ecosystem Esthetic, a joint program with Longwood Gardens
http://www.stroudcenter.org/newsletters/2010Spring/longwood.html

Leaf Pack Experiment Kit
http://www.stroudcenter.org/newsletters/2009Summer/forest_grove.html
http://www.lamotte.com/pages/edu/stroud.html

Model My Watershed
http://www.stroudcenter.org/newsletters/2009Fall/my_watershed.html

Back to Summer 2010 Upstream Newsletter

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