WA+State+Curriculum

// What organization developed the curriculum module you are evaluating? // The State of Washington's education department has developed this program and made it available to the public via its website Access Washington.

// What is the overall mission of the organization? // The WEA, or Washington Education Association is, according to its website: "to advance the professional interests of its members in order to make public education the best it can be for students, staff, and communities."

// What is the educational mission and philosophy of the organization? // The WEA's goal and objectives can be found on its website as: Goal: "to build confidence in public education and increase support for Washington's public school system" Objectives:
 * 1) to increase its members professional status and job satisfaction
 * 2) to "improve the quality of and access to public education"
 * 3) to form partnerships with "parents, business, other unions, and community groups"

// What does the curriculum module aim to teach? What are the learning outcomes supposed to be? // The aim of this curriculum is to foster interest in the students for learning in general through field study, under the assumption that the experience reinforces topics taught in the classroom. It also seeks to foster appreciation and understanding of wetlands as a unique piece of nature.

// 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: While this is not built-in to the program for Washington, it is emphasized by making the experience, the cause and effect, of what students do the focus. The students we will work with will be developing a physical and mental connection to the wetlands in sight of their school grounds. This could be even more emphasized by incorporating its connection to their water processing system on campus.

EcoEd: //Understanding of how their actions have an array of proximate and far off effects.// Curriculum: In this curriculum, proximate effects will be directly experienced as students look for, track, and identify soil types, animals, and how they have been effected in their own wetlands. This can easily be applied by asking them how other wetlands all over the world are effected by the same problems or benefits as theirs.

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 gives the students a perfect way of seeing the scientific method of field research, but no medical specialization. It allows the students to experience the collection, analysis, and conclusion process of research. Since the activities rely on the senses, answers between students and groups will vary, showing how scientific practices and results vary from researcher to researcher.

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: This is not addressed in this module, but could be incorporated into the analysis portion, after students have done their field work, in-class observations and sensory analysis. Students could be asked what caused, let's say, the disappearance of salamanders from their wetlands. Then they could be asked who is in charge of making sure the salamanders come back, and work up the chain of environmental protection and policy from there.

EcoEd: //Understanding of potential for change, alternative ways of doing things and organizing society.// Curriculum: This is not addressed, but easily could be incorporated with exploring the chain of environmental protection and policy as described above, by asking the students what they would do to solve the problems they see or keep the benefits they found in their wetlands. For example, asking them if they would implement a Save the Salamanders program to bring the species back, instigating change, or a We Love Water Bugs club to celebrate and raise awareness for further protection of the insects to prevent unwanted change.

EcoEd: //Use empirical understanding of complex causation to identify specific points of intervention.// Curriculum: By creating, following and developing an understanding of the food webs within a wetland ecosystem students will understand the complex series of cause and effect that make up and change 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 does not explore outside of the wetlands that thoroughly, but this could be transitioned into once students have an understanding of who is in charge of their wetlands and who can change it.

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 curriculum breaks the general "one right answer" format of science by focusing on the web of systems and possible things to find in a wetland ecosystem. Everything is many senses, an array of possibilities to find, and many connections.

EcoEd: //Creative info-seeking practices, animated analytic capabilities, and a capacity to narrate complex chains of events.// Curriculum: This is the entire essence of this curriculum! Activities like scavenger hunts, observational field work, data collection in the form of physical samples, and the theoretical focus on food webs and the full ecosystem of a wetland fully encapsulates these three ideas.

EcoEd: //Understanding of the challenges and value of deliberation and cooperative action.// Curriculum: This module does not incorporate this explicitly but through cooperation in gathering samples, comparing others' work in order to create a whole picture of the wetlands ecosystem and classroom activities that require teamwork to model the ecosystem incorporate all of these.