Michigan's Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative

Exemplar Type: CASE STUDY
Title: Michigan's Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative - A Statewide Place-Based Education Effort to Connect Schools to Communities
Grades: 3-5, 6-8
Discipline: Interdisciplinary | Science, Social Studies, Literacy, Visual Arts
Submitted By: Greg Smith

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Summary: The Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative (GLSI) has for 10 years been engaged in the systematic introduction of place-based learning approaches with an environmental and ecojustice focus throughout the state of Michigan. It has sought to create strong partnerships between schools and local organizations and agencies with the intent of cultivating knowledgeable and active citizen stewards. By the 2015-2016 academic year, the GLSI had worked with teachers in 283 schools, engaging over 80,000 students in its projects, demonstrating how place-based approaches can be brought to scale in both rural and urban communities.

Big Ideas

• Humans are dependent on Earth's life-support systems

• Places are alive, unique and evolving. If humans want to flourish over time, our relationships with the places in which we live must be mutually beneficial

• Sustain-ability requires individual and social learning and community practice

• Individual Rights are upheld by Collective Responsibilities. We must reconcile them when they come into conflict with one another

• We must pay attention to the results of our thinking and behavior on the systems upon which we depend if we want to thrive over time. Read the Feedback

• We are all responsible for the difference we make. Everything we do and everything we don't do makes a difference

Higher Order Thinking Skills

• Complex: Critical Thinking

• Mindful: Questioning

• Applied Knowledge -

• Strong Sense of Place

• Responsible Local and Global Citizenship

Dispositions

• Curious

• Efficacious

• Motivated

• Caring

• Collaborative

• Place/Community Conscious

Applications and Actions

• Create Social Learning Communities

• Engage in Dialogue

• Design to optimize health and adaptability

• Ask different questions and actively listen for the answer

• Serve your community

Community Connections

• Students and teachers make authentic contributions to sustainable community development through service learning opportunities, project-based and place based learning opportunities for students that are laterally and vertically embedded in the core curriculum

• Provide Internships for students

• Provide Independent and Curriculum Based Learning Sites (case studies, learning journeys, research sites)

Greater Egleston Community High School

Exemplar Type: CASE STUDY
Title: Greater Egleston Community High School
Grades: High School (9-12)
Discipline: Interdisciplinary | Social Studies
Submitted By: Greg Smith

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Summary: For a number of years, students at the Greater Egleston Community High School in Boston were provided with similar opportunities to affect public policy on environmental and social issues in their own community. Although the school’s focus has shifted during the past six or seven years, for more than a decade, teachers there sought to prepare its primarily Black and Latino students to become community leaders committed to enhancing the health and livability of Roxbury, one of Boston’s less affluent neighborhoods.

Big Ideas

• All systems have limits. Healthy systems live within their limits. Tap the power of limits

• The changes to the Earth's surface environments made by human activity are causing unintended consequences on the health and well-being of human and other life on Earth (proposed Anthropocene Epoch)

Higher Order Thinking Skills

• Emergent: Creative Thinking

• Complex: Critical Thinking

Dispositions

• Courageous

• Curious

• Efficacious

• Motivated

• Persevering

• Resilience

• Caring

• Collaborative

• Compassionate

• Ethical

• Place/Community Conscious

• Respectful

• Responsible

Applied Knowledge

• Inventing The Future

• Strong Sense of Place

• Healthy Commons

• System Dynamics and Change

• Responsible Local and Global Citizenship

Applications and Actions

• Engage in Dialogue

• Plan Scenarios

• Teach and Learn

• Contribute to the regenerative capacity of the systems upon which we depend

• Envision, strategize and plan

• Govern from the bottom up

• Lead by example

• Leave every place better than you found it

• Take responsibility for the effect you have on future generations

• Serve your community

Community Connections

• Students and teachers make authentic contributions to sustainable community development through service learning opportunities, project-based and place based learning opportunities for students that are laterally and vertically embedded in the core curriculum

• Provide Internships for students

STEAM and Environmental Education Case Study

Exemplar Type: CASE STUDY
Title: STEAM and Environmental Education
Grades: 3-5, 6-8
Discipline: Interdisciplinary
Submitted By: Susan Santone

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STEAM and Environmental Education Case Story

With each passing day, 21st century learning gets a little more obsolete. Don’t get left behind. Empower students and revolutionize learning with the hottest content around.

The 21st century is defined by unprecedented, inter-connected challenges: climate change, water scarcity, food deserts, economic inequality—and on. Left unsolved, these problems will plague students of the 22nd century, the descendants of today’s students. Equity is truly intergenerational.

The Next Generation Science Standards support “scientific and technological literacy for an educated society,” and recognize that “economic innovation depends on a broad foundation of math and science learning.” But behind this “looms the larger question of what it takes to thrive in today’s society. Citizens now face problems from pandemics to energy shortages whose solutions require all the... genius we can muster.”

Changing the story requires wise applications of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math). But tomorrow’s careers demand something more: economic literacy and a commitment to equity.

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BENCHMARKS REPRESENTED IN THIS EXEMPLAR

Big Ideas

• Creativity (the generation of new forms) is a key property of all living systems and contributes to nature’s ability to sustain life

• Diversity makes complex life possible. It assures resilience in living systems

• Everything must go somewhere because there is no such place as “away”. Matter and energy do not appear or disappear. They cannot be created or destroyed. In a healthy community, one species’ waste is another species’ food

• All systems have limits. Healthy systems live within their limits. Tap the power of limits

• There is an appropriate rate and scale for every living thing and they may not be the same in every circumstance

• We are all in this together: We are interdependent on each other and on the natural systems

• Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities

• A small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything

• A sustainable solution solves more than one problem at a time and minimizes the creation of new problems

• Treating symptoms makes them worse over time, creates new problems and doesn’t address the fundamental problem. Create change at the source not the symptom

• Every system is perfectly formed to get the results it gets

• The significant problems we face can’t be solved with the same thinking we used to create them. Our prior experiences with the world create cognitive frameworks (also known as mental models/maps) that inform what we can perceive. They shape our behavior and our behavior causes results. If we want to produce different results, it all begins with a change in thinking

• There is no beginning or end in a system. Intervene where there are favorable conditions, i.e., where and when possible

• Fairness applies to all. To us, to them and to the “we” that binds us all together

• Sustain-ability requires individual and social learning and community practice

• We all depend on and are responsible for “the commons”, i.e., what we share and hold in trust for future generations. Recognize and Protect the Commons

• We must pay attention to the results of our thinking and behavior on the systems upon which we depend if we want to thrive over time. Read the Feedback

• We are all responsible for the difference we make. Everything we do and everything we don’t do makes a difference

Higher Order Thinking Skills

• Anticipatory: Futures Thinking

• Emergent: Creative Thinking

• Emergent: Design Thinking

• Emergent: Ecologically Design

• Complex: Critical Thinking

• Mindful: Questioning

• Mindful: Reflective Thinking

• Mindful: Transference

• Hands On Skills: Use and creation of appropriate technology to the place and culture in which you find yourself

• Hands On Skills: Building, Making, Tinkering, Crafting

• Hands On Skills: Computer Modeling

Applied Knowledge

• Inventing The Future

• Strong Sense of Place

• The Many Ways of Knowing

• Healthy Commons

• System Dynamics and Change

• Responsible Local and Global Citizenship

• Multiple Perspectives

• Sustainable Economics

Dispositions

• Curious

• Efficacious

• Imaginative

• Mindful

• Open Minded

• Persevering

• Collaborative

• Ethical

• Place/Community Conscious

• Respectful,

• Responsible

• Self Aware

Applications and Actions

• Create Social Learning Communities

• Engage in Dialogue

• Engage in Role-Playing, Learning Journeys, Simulations & Games

• Build from successes, Learn from mistakes, develop strategies to improve, and apply what is learned

• Plan Scenarios

• Teach and Learn

• Accept responsibility for the consequences of design

• Apply technology appropriately so that today’s solutions don’t become tomorrow’s problems

• Contribute to the regenerative capacity of the systems upon which we depend

• Count and value all the capital (natural, financial, human and social)

• Design for multiple pathways, resilience and reinforcement

• Design for whole systems integrity with ecological principles and physical laws in mind

• Design to optimize health and adaptability

• Design with efficiency and effectiveness for a no waste world that runs off of clean and renewable energy, contributes to diversity, recognizes inter-dependencies and taps the power of limits

• Empower people and groups

• Envision, strategize and plan

• Facilitate a shared understanding of sustainability and regeneration

• Take responsibility for the difference you make

• Practice justice and equity for all

• Take responsibility for the effect you have on future generations

• Act wisely individually and collectively, with precaution and in context

• Create and maintain highly functional and successful teams

• Listen to one another

• Serve your community

Community Connections

• Develop sustainable community visions and re-visions over time

• Map community assets and conduct needs assessments

• Consider and prepare for a range of potential future scenarios, while charting a course toward the preferred future

• Develop, measure and monitor SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic & time bound) goals and sustainable community indicator sets. Schools data is embedded in social, ecological and economic indicator sets

• Co-Design and implement short and long term projects and programs that are mutually beneficial to partners, are inclusive of all stakeholders and are participatory in nature

• Evaluate progress (read the feedback), reflect, adjust, and continually improve performance

• Students and teachers make authentic contributions to sustainable community development through service learning opportunities, project-based and place based learning opportunities for students that are laterally and vertically embedded in the core curriculum

• Regularly and publicly recognize and celebrate individual and collective successes, and progress toward green schools and sustainable community goals at events and in the media

• Make time to reflect on where we are, how we got here, how far we have come, how close we are to where we are going, and what we are going to do next

PRISM - Aka'ula School

Exemplar Type: CASE STUDY
Title: PRISM: Aka'ula School
Grades: 3-5, 6-8
Discipline: Interdisciplinary | Math, Science, Social Studies, Literacy
Submitted By: Greg Smith

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Summary: Teachers Vicki Newberry and Dara Lukonen at the Aka’ula School on the island of Molokai in Hawaii have for more than a decade been involved in an effort to engage their upper elementary and middle school students in issues linked to the environmental and social health of their home place. Called Promoting Resolutions with Integrity for a Sustainable Molokai (PRISM), Newberry, Lukonen, and their students have investigated a range of issues including solid waste disposal at their school and on the island, the impact of ecotourism developments on habitat, bilge water releases, the effect of grazing ungulates on native species, the environmental consequences of disposable diapers, and the restoration of traditional Hawaiian fishponds.

Big Ideas

• Fairness applies to all. To us, to them and to the "we" that binds us all together

  Sustain-ability requires individual and social learning and community practice

• We all depend on and are responsible for "the commons", i.e., what we share and hold in trust for future generations. Recognize and Protect the Commons

• Individual Rights are upheld by Collective Responsibilities. We must reconcile them when they come into conflict with one another

• We must pay attention to the results of our thinking and behavior on the systems upon which we depend if we want to thrive over time. Read the Feedback.

• We are all responsible for the difference we make. Everything we do and everything we don't do makes a difference

Higher Order Thinking Skills

• Emergent: Creative Thinking

• Emergent: Design Thinking

• Complex: Critical Thinking

• Mindful: Questioning

• Mindful: Reflective Thinking

Dispositions

• Curious

• Efficacious

• Motivated

• Caring

• Collaborative

• Place/Community Conscious

Applied Knowledge

• Inventing The Future

• Laws and Principles that govern the physical and biological world

• Strong Sense of Place

• Cultures, Traditions, and Change

• Healthy Commons

• Responsible Local and Global Citizenship

• Multiple Perspectives

Applications and Actions

• Create Social Learning Communities

• Engage in Dialogue

• Lead by example

• Leave every place better than you found it

• Be inclusive

• Act wisely individually and collectively, with precaution and in context

• Listen to one another

• Serve your community

Community Connections

• Develop sustainable community visions and re-visions over time

• Students and teachers make authentic contributions to sustainable community development through service learning opportunities, project-based and place based learning opportunities for students that are laterally and vertically embedded in the core curriculum

• Provide Internships for students

• Make time to reflect on where we are, how we got here, how far we have come, how close we are to where we are going, and what we are going to do next

Recipe for a Forest

Exemplar Type: CASE STUDY
Title: Recipe for a Forest
Grades: Pre-K - 2
Discipline: Science, Math
Submitted By: David Sobel/Amy Butler

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Summary This learning experience was designed to educate students outdoors. It was adapted from Joseph Cornell's experiential treasury, "Sharing Nature With Children".

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BENCHMARKS REPRESENTED IN THIS EXEMPLAR

Big Ideas

• Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities

Applied Knowledge and Actions

• Strong Sense of Place

Higher Order Thinking Skills

• Mindful: Questioning

• Mindful: Transference

Dispositions

• Curious

• Imaginative

• Motivated

• Place/Community Conscious

Applications and Actions

• Learn from children and nature