Ryan+Tozier+Ecology+By+Inquiry

Focus here on //curriculum // that gets kids thinking about and researching ecology. This can build off of and feed into the Children's Forest design challenge we are working on.

Its two authors Kathryn Kelsey and Ashley Steel worked with the Waskowitz Outdoor School to test and modify the curriculum. It was published and funded by the NOAA Education Office. Steel, Ashley, and Kathryn Kelsey. "Economic by Inquiry." (n.d.): n. pag. //Ecology by Inquiry//. Northwest Fisheries Science Center. Web. 13 Dec. 2015. []

The mission of NOAA, who funded the curriculum is “Science, Service, and Stewardship. To understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts, To share that knowledge and information with others, and To conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources.” [] The mission of the authors of this curriculum is “to provide every student and teacher with the experience of conducting real science investigations.” In addition to, “to provide future citizens with scientific skills to enable better decision making in all aspects of their lives.” Found in the curriculum

NOAA’s educational mission is "To advance environmental literacy and promote a diverse workforce in ocean, coastal, Great Lakes, weather, and climate sciences, encouraging stewardship and increasing informed decision making for the nation." []

The goal of this curriculum is to teach ecology through an inquiry based approach, and incorporates local wildlife and habitats. This series of lessons covers a wide range of scientific skills and ecological concepts: quantitative versus qualitative, the four parts of a scientific report, invertebrates, Linnaean classification, food webs, predators and prey, mapping, habitats and adaptations, photosynthesis, decomposition, aquatic insects, scientific inference, and water quality.

This curriculum is definitely designed in a way that will produce the intended learning outcomes. This curriculum is meant to be taught over the course of 15, one-hour long classes and in that time each lesson allows students get hands on learning. In addition, this curriculum does a great job of fostering scientific inquiry and complex thinking by allowing students to design their own experiments, so that they can purse the part of ecology that is most interesting to them. The scientific concepts covering ecology are also designed in a way that teaches students through active involvement as opposed to a lecture.

This curriculum covers several of the EcoEd literacy goals and it help students to: have the capcity to conceptualize complex causation; have creative capacity to recognize the multitude of factors influencing what they are told about environmental problems; have creative info-seeking practices, animated analytic capabilities, and capacity to narrate complex chains of events.

This curriculum is very tight has a lot to do every single class and is meant to take a whole semester, for this reason layering in any EcoEd literacy goals would be fairly difficult time wise. That said in terms of material it would be fairly easy to add goals like: understanding of their own health and well being as shaped by an array of both proximate and far-off causes; understanding their how their own actions have proximate and far off effects; understanding history of disaster and decision making failures. Explaining how students’ actions affect the ecology of an area and how those actions propagate could do this. In addition simply explaining past ecological disasters would help them understand the history of decision making failures