Wonders+of+Wetlands

// What organization developed the curriculum module you are evaluating? // Environmental Concern Inc. has created this curriculum and made it available on their website wetland.org

// What is the overall mission of the organization? // Environmental Concern is a nonprofit that, according to their website, "is dedicated to working with all aspects of wetlands". They do not have a formal mission statement but they describe their work as "providing wetland services in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and beyond…significant progress in the ongoing effort to improve the water quality in the bay…protecting our wetlands".

// What is the educational mission and philosophy of the organization? // According to their website: "EC's education division works to increase understanding of, foster appreciation for, and encourage the stewardships of wetland systems. This is accomplished through materials/curriculum development, schoolyard habitat development and innovative outreach programs."

// What does the curriculum module aim to teach? What are the learning outcomes supposed to be? // The aim of this curriculum is to provide an in-depth, comprehensive, age-appropriate curriculum on everything from wetland wildlife, wetlands' socioeconomic functions and benefits, and their hydrological functions.

// Do you think the curriculum is appropriately designed to produce the intended learning outcomes? // Yes-- the curriculum contains many sections that all rely on experience, whether it is visiting the site, collecting things to study, or analyzing what was brought back for study using the senses, then connecting those sensory experiences to the underlying concepts. It puts experience first and allows the concepts to be discovered and directly connected to what the students experience.

Does the curriculum teach the kind of literacies advocated by EcoEd? What could be layered into this curriculum so that it addresses more of the learning outcomes advocated by EcoEd? EcoEd: //Understanding of their own health and well-being as shaped by an array of both proximate and far-off causes.// Curriculum: This program allows both macro and micro analysis of wetlands, including scenarios of chemical disaster or interference. With the wetlands beings part of our students' daily lives, this will be easily connectable to their own health and safety and how local and global causes affecting their wetlands will affect them.

EcoEd: //Understanding of how their actions have an array of proximate and far off effects.// Curriculum: The example activity given for this module demonstrates how students will understand their own cause and affect by modeling food chains. They will learn how actions at the base of a food chain, though far off, have a string of strong effects, and be able to apply that to their impact on wetland ecosystems.

EcoEd: //Understanding of different scientific disciplines and medical specializations, aware that they rely on diverse methods, produce many types of knowledge, and are ever evolving-- science as a crucial but far from straightforward social resource.// Curriculum: This curriculum covers topics from the biology field, to economics, to geographers and geologists, and industry in the U.S. By setting up this big picture they will get a comprehensible taste of the conflict and contrast of scientific knowledge and practice that converge on wetlands.

EcoEd: //Understanding of government at various scales, from the local to transnational made up of diverse agencies and types of experts, which rely on diverse decision-making processes.// Curriculum: Just as mentioned above, students will get a flavor of the many agencies, local and global, that come into play and the difficulty of decision making as they tour the many ways we use and interact with wetlands everywhere.

EcoEd: //Understanding of potential for change, alternative ways of doing things and organizing society.// Curriculum: This module includes ecosystem and food chain activities and analysis and applies it to the students' own food chain (the food in their lunches). While this is not explicitly stated they will be able to analyze how a change to their food system would affect them, and from there discuss what they might change.

EcoEd: //Use empirical understanding of complex causation to identify specific points of intervention.// Curriculum: This program opens the floor for students to understand causation and points of intervention via the provided programs linking food webs, human use of the wetlands, and government/agency involvement in wetlands.

EcoEd: //Recognize the multitude of factors influencing what they are told about environmental problems, including vested interests, disciplinary bias and blindness, and the sheer limits of knowledge.// Curriculum: This curriculum is extremely thorough, covering all the bases of wetland science and study throughout its chapters: "Wetlands and People", "Defining Wetlands" (including global distribution & its effects on wetland formation), "Wetland Functions" (chemical, biological, socioeconomic, hydrological), "Wetlands as a Home" (wetland animals, food, and energy webs), "How People Manage Wetlands" (management/stewardship, case studies), and "Action for Wetlands" (a description of actions for citizens to improve/protect wetlands, monitor them, and educate about them).

EcoEd: //Recognize and productively deal with diverse perspectives, avoiding the paralysis often produced by insistence on "balance" and "consensus" leveraging heterogeneous collectivity and epistemological pluralism.// Curriculum: This is not written into the module, but it is something the students will have to deal with internally as they absorb the many contrasting viewpoints and interests on wetland interaction. It is up to us to make the classroom a safe place to allow them to process and talk about it.

EcoEd: //Creative info-seeking practices, animated analytic capabilities, and a capacity to narrate complex chains of events.// Curriculum: All activities are based on inquiry and experience, inviting the students to ask questions and explore the possibilities before seeing the outcome. Meanwhile the involved, step-by-step process of each one makes it manageable to see the big picture at the end.

EcoEd: //Understanding of the challenges and value of deliberation and cooperative action.// Curriculum: This is not built in to the curriculum in its description. Making the activities collaborative will be part of executing them.