Oak+Woodland+Activity+(Review)+(Mark+Rovereto)

Smart by Nature: Oak Woodland Activity []

This curriculum module, geared toward grade levels 6 and up, was developed by the Center for Ecoliteracy, an ecoliteracy group based out of Berkeley, California.
 * What organization developed the curriculum module you are evaluating?**

The goal of this group is to support and advance education for sustainable living.
 * What is the mission of the organization?**

It is the belief of the Center for Ecoliteracy that schools play a pivotal role in moving us beyond growing environmental crises and toward a sustainable society. Talking about their educational methods, they state, “…the best hope for learning to live sustainably lies in schooling that returns to the real basics: engaging with the natural world; understanding how nature sustains life; nurturing healthy communities; exploring the consequences of how we feed and provision ourselves; caring about the places where we live and the people and creatures in them (Center For Ecoliteracy, []).”
 * What is the educational mission and philosophy of the organization?**

For the Oak Woodland activity, the goal is to have students learn to look at an ecosystem as a system and become more aware of the relationships among living things, the processes and patterns that drive survival and evolution, and the importance of nonliving aspects of an ecosystem in sustaining life.
 * What does the curriculum module aim to teach? In other words: what are the learning outcomes supposed to be?**

I really like the way most of the activities provided on the Center for Ecoliteracy’s website include some sort of interesting material. This activity includes panels with original artwork that combine to make a large mural of an ecosystem based around an oak tree. This mural is used, along with information included in the module to allow children to investigate ecosystem relationships for themselves while also allowing for directed learning. Working in small groups, students focus on one of the panels per group and discuss what is on their panel. When the panels are combined to form the mural, the interconnectivity between the subjects of each panel is elucidated. This activity accomplishes the goal it was created to reach quite well. The material is utilized in a fairly comprehensive manner.
 * Do you think the curriculum is appropriately designed to produce the intended learning outcomes?**

As it is, the activity falls short of the kind of literacy the research group advocates. The message of the base activity only goes as far as the stated goal of showing the interconnectivity of different aspects of an ecosystem. This works for raising awareness of ecosystems, but not for advancing any of the more intricate literacies the research group advocates. With additions to the discussion portion of the activity, it can be made to work toward showing the impacts of various human activities on ecosystems.
 * Does this curriculum teach the kind of literacies the EcoEd Research Group advocates?**

The message of this activity is very similar to the ecological portion of the Sustainability Photography module from last semester. With this in mind, the inclusion of this module in a future iteration of the photography activity would work very well. Doing this activity before going out to take pictures might work best, but it may have a comparable effectiveness if performed directly afterward while photos are being printed. To improve this module and the photography activity as a whole, the material could be used with minor modification of content to include how ecosystems are affected by human activity both directly and indirectly. Teaching complex causation is only helped by the photography aspect of the activity, with the main focus being on approaching scenes and problems from a different perspective.
 * What could be layered into this curriculum so that it addresses more of the learning outcomes that the EcoEd Group advocates?**