Barton Merrick has been an environmental educator
for really over 20 years.
He’s been working with teachers and students from Massachusetts
to Virginia promoting environmental literacy
and fostering understanding, awareness
and respect for the natural world.
He developed an appreciation
for the many opportunities to learn and explore
offered by Maryland’s diverse environments,
especially the Chesapeake Bay through his work
with both living classrooms and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
Now, when he received his master’s
in environmental science from Johns Hopkins University,
Bart went to work for the Maryland Department
of Natural Resources as the Education Coordinator
for the Chesapeake Bay National Estuary and Research Reserve.
But now he works for the NOAA Chesapeake Bay office
and coordinates its environmental science
training center in Oxford, Maryland.
This is a program that strives to connect regional educators
to NOAA and partners science and scientists.
And with that, Bart, it’s all yours.
Welcome.
All right, thank you, Bruce.
Yeah, thank you and thanks to everybody
that was able to call in
and I really appreciate your interest in this topic
and one of the models
for promoting environmental literacy that’s out there,
the Meaningful Watershed Education Experience.
So one of the things that Bruce didn’t mention in my bio
is that I am also a – well, not former.
I’m a current planet or climate steward.
I actually when I was working for the National Estuary
and Research Reserve program
was one of the first people to participate in that cohort.
And it’s a great program so I thank you, Bruce,
for the opportunity to talk to this group
and I look forward to just kind of sharing a model
that we’ve developed to support environment literacy _____
_____ [audio glitch].
So just kind of to get us oriented,
what I’m going to try and touch on
during the course of this evening
is just a quick little bit of background
on the programs that we do in the NOAA Chesapeake Bay office
and where the Meaningful Watershed Education
Experience or MWEE came from.
Then we’re going to dig into it a little bit
and kind of go over with as much detail
as I think is appropriate [Laughs]
to kind of just describe what the MWEE is
and why we’re doing it and provide a couple examples
of what a MWEE actually looks like
to hopefully round out the evening
and give you a picture of what some folks are doing
and implementing, that is, immediately.
So the first thing is, yeah, like Bruce mentioned
I work for the NOAA Chesapeake Bay office,
and like the rest of NOAA, we’re focused
and trying to support science, service and stewardship.
Our mission in the Chesapeake Bay office
is to focus NOAA’s resources in the Chesapeake Bay region.
And what that looks like _____ _____ _____ [audio glitch]
revolves a little bit around fisheries science.
We are a fisheries office
so we do a lot of work around oysters and blue crabs
and supporting management thereof.
We also have an observation system
called the Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System
or CBIBS,
which is in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay
taking observations right now.
In terms of service, a lot of our work
is around habitat restoration and, again, informing policy
and then, again, in terms of the stewardship piece.
We actually do quite a bit, I think,
to support the education communities out there
in the Chesapeake region through training,
through grant-making,
through supporting education-related policy
and even an internship program. And as Bruce mentioned also,
I work at and kind of run a program
called the NOAA Environmental Science Training Center.
And pretty simply, all we’re trying to do in this program
is to connect regional scientists
and their science to regional educators
and their programming with the _____
_____ _____ [audio glitch]. We develop a relationship
between those two communities and support the integration
of some of the more current science that’s available
and appropriate for an education audiences into that programming.
And the pictures are –
the picture of the building that I work out of.
And it’s actually in a little town
on the eastern shore of Maryland,
so you have what’s called the Delmarva Peninsula,
the eastern side of Maryland.
One side of the Delmarva is the ocean.
The other side is the Chesapeake Bay.
And the town that I work out of – it’s called Oxford,
which is a quaint little town kind of midway up that peninsula
just south of the Chesapeake Bay bridge
if you’re familiar with the area.
So I’m sure all of us live in a place
and around those places that we live
there is an abundance of both natural beauty
and human systems, cultures and all that sort of stuff.
And the Chesapeake Bay,
like so many of the places where you all are,
is also really rich in history and natural beauty.
Amazing place.
If you’ve never had the chance to check it out,
strongly suggest it.
The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary
in the United States
and it’s home to a vast number of plants, animals and people.
And that population of people especially is
growing all the time
and, as I’m sure many of us know,
that does come with its challenges.
So the health of the Chesapeake Bay has multiple threats
that it’s exposed to:
poor water quality, coastal wetland habitats
that are vulnerable to all kinds of change
that we’re experiencing:
sea level rise, land use changes among them.
There’s many examples of aggressive invasive species
that present challenges in our region like blue catfish,
which came over from the Mississippi
and kind of has wreaked some havoc with the food chain,
food web that exists _____ _____ _____ [audio glitch]
So like other places great spot, beautiful,
lots of natural resources and human resources
but has its challenges.
So I wanted to ask a question and, Bruce,
if you could queue up Question 1.
I’m curious as to where other folks are from
so I phrase it
in terms of what watershed are you all coming from.
And we couldn’t capture every watershed
so I apologize for that,
but if you’re in one of these go ahead and tick it, please.
And if you’re in another watershed
and would like to mention what it is to Bart,
you can type it into your question box
and I’ll read off any that are particularly interesting.
[Laughs] Make it interesting, yeah.
Okay so we’ve also got San Francisco Bay,
Penobscot Bay, Maine, Great Lakes, Santa Cruz
Watershed.
Wow, they are just coming in, a bunch of Delaware Bay,
Carmel River Watershed, Great Lakes.
Oh, this is great so we’ve got a lot of folks
from the middle of the country up by the Great Lakes;
also a bunch on the West Coast,
Tennessee River, terrific, very good.
Let’s just take another moment or so
for anybody who’s voting, all right,
and we’ll close this up and we’ll see where people are.
All right so can you see this, Bart?
Yup, I got it, thank you.
Very good.
And then all those questions –
like thank you for chiming in on the question part.
That really – I love that geographic orientation
of being able to see where people are.
And though I spend a lot of my time on the Chesapeake Bay
with family out on the West Coast
and in the Great Lakes
so have a sense of what’s going on there
and I appreciate your hard work on those areas.
So, Bruce, do I just rest the control back here or hand it?
Oh, I apologize. Go right ahead now. You’re back.
All right, I’m back and let’s see, hold on.
There we are, thank you.
All right, so San Francisco Bay, Delaware Bay,
Great Lakes, because they all have challenges,
I’m sure they all have strategies and programming
that exists out there to try
and manage some of those challenges
and restore, protect, whatever the environment
might be for current and future generations.
In the Chesapeake Bay region,
the program that we have to help us
manage the Chesapeake Bay and it’s natural resources
is called the Chesapeake Bay Program.
And the program, Chesapeake Bay program,
started back in 1983 and it is make up of stakeholders
that hail from throughout the watershed
so all the states in the watershed
have representation in the Chesapeake Bay program _____
_____ _____ [audio glitch].
And so what that looks like is folks from New York,
Pennsylvania,
Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland,
the District all have gain
within the Chesapeake Bay program and representation.
And the whole point of that is this program allows us
to set goals and track progress towards those goals
and hold each other accountable for those things
we say we’re going to do to try and maintain, protect,
restore the Chesapeake Bay and the watershed.
So what do those things look like?
Well, the things that we’re focused on
are all called “goals” so like a top-level thing
that everybody works on are called goals.
The goals are the things in red on this slide
so things like clean water, habitat, healthy watersheds,
sustainable fisheries and engaged community.
And you can see on the bullet points
underneath there some of the things that folks work on.
This is not the full list,
but these are some of the things that folks work on
and people throughout the watershed have agreed to work on
and try to make some meaningful change around.
But I did want to call people’s attention
to that lowest one on the screen,
that engaged communities piece,
and one of the goals underneath that
is actually environmental literacy.
So within the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed a goal
has been established to promote,
foster and support environmental literacy
throughout the entire watershed,
and this is what that goal actually looks like
so there’s three parts to it.
One focuses on students and that goal is all about
increasing students’ understanding of the watershed
through participation and teacher-supported meaningful
watershed education experiences and inquiry-based instruction.
And the goal is, like the specifics of it
are that in elementary – once in elementary,
once in middle and _____ _____ _____ [audio glitch]
will have the opportunity to access
one of these meaningful watershed experiences
with the caveat
that if there’s not enough resources to do so,
we understand but that’s the goal.
The other two parts,
which I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on
because that’s not what this presentation is about
but are also pretty interesting so I’ll mention them quickly,
the second goal within that literacy goal
is the sustainable schools.
So that’s working directly with schools
to encourage building practices,
the use of the school grounds for learning
and thinking about how schools impact local watersheds
and doing what you can to make improvement in there.
And then the third goal is about actually the planning goal
so that’s what do you need.
What do you have in place to support environmental literacy
programming in your region or in whatever district
or what have you you might work in?
And that’s an important one because I think many of us
as educators know that without planning it makes things
really hard to implement down the road.
So it’s that kind of hat trick
or that three-legged stool of environmental literacy
that we’re trying to make happen.
But, again, that MWEE is the big thing
so we have this environmental literacy goal which promotes
and tries to foster students graduating from high school
with the knowledge skills to act responsibly to protect
and restore their local watershed.
So we talk about the Chesapeake Bay watershed as a whole,
but we’re very conscious that folks up
on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania
or in Cooperstown, New York,
at the head of the Chesapeake Bay
may not be so enamored with the Chesapeake Bay itself
but certainly with the Susquehanna
or the river that flows by them is more meaningful to them.
_____ _____ _____ [audio glitch]
is super-important. We recognize that.
We support it and we try to do what we can to foster that.
And it’s a recognition fundamentally
that there’s this education landscape out there
that consists of all kinds of educators.
And we’ve been having a lot of
– we’ve been spending a lot of time
working with primarily eel-based educators
and school-based educators.
And we think about formal education
so the K to 12 environment happening in many,
many environments whether it’s informal,
whether it’s in the classroom
or whether it’s outside in the field.
And we’re trying to capture
a lot of the interplay in education,
particularly amongst programming that’s happening in the field
and that stuff that’s happening in school.
So how do we accomplish this goal?
Well, that is the MWEE
or the meaningful watershed education experience.
So fundamentally and I think one of the points
that I like to make about the MWEE
is that it has parts, it has components to it,
it has partners working on thing,
but really the MWEE is an approach
that addresses the environmental literacy goal.
So we look at it as a way of learning,
teaching and learning that will support students ultimately
graduating and becoming and developing
– that’s probably the best word – environmental literacy.
And within the MWEE we thing about MWEEs
as being this seamlessly –
being able to seamlessly connect standards-based classroom
learning with outdoor field investigations
to provide a place-based deeper understanding
of both the content but also the place we live.
So the second part is students explore local environmental
issues through not just like field trips.
And one of the things that we’re trying to work with on the MWEEs
is that field experiences in general are really positive.
We want to encourage them as much as possible.
But when you have the opportunity to _____
_____ [audio glitch]
the programming around any field experience
for a greater amount of time and a greater amount of depth,
the power of that experience is increased.
And the MWEE did not just come out entirely out of the blue.
A lot of things went into it, and we like to think that it is
based on the best practices in environmental education
so things like the North American Association
of Environmental Education
has put out the guidelines for environmental ed
and teacher professional development.
That’s all stuff that’s brought into the MWEE as a whole
and we’re going to dig into that in a little bit.
But I just kind of wanted to do a quick timeline for the MWEE
and where it actually came from.
So I mentioned that the Chesapeake program,
the watershed agreement that guides the protection
and restoration of the Chesapeake Bay
was initiated in 1983.
It wasn’t until 1998 over 10 years,
15 years later that an education work group
was established in the bay program.
And the cool thing about that it’s the recognition
that it’s not just the current generation that’s going to have
manage the environment around them.
It’s also future generations.
And so that education work group was charged with thinking
about how do we support environmental literacy
in those future generations?
And it wasn’t just kind of feds or state government-type people.
It was really a partnership
like the rest of the bay program of state education folks,
local education agencies or district education folks,
the non-profit organizations that are out there
in the Chesapeake Bay watershed that provide programming,
natural resource folks
whether at parks or doing natural resource management.
All these folks were involved with that education work group
and ultimately coming together and defining in 2001
what a meaningful watershed education experience is.
And that’s – at this time it was like students
as part of their classwork getting outside
and conducting field investigations.
But it has evolved over time and we’ll get to that,
but just the next timeline piece is recognizing that MWEEs,
they don’t come for free.
There was a lot of interest in let’s find a way
to actually support the initial developmental models
for meaningful watershed education experience
and that’s one of the programs
that we run out of the Chesapeake Bay office
is called BWET or Bay Watershed Education
and Training program, which was initially developed
and put together to help fund and support meaningful
watershed education experiences and later partners of ours
and other funders within the region
like the Chesapeake Bay Trust
that get their funding through the license plates
with the pictures of the Chesapeake Bay on it.
And I’m sure a lot of other jurisdictions, I think,
have similar things and that money goes directly –
well, part of that money goes directly
to support environmental literacy programming.
And there’s been a lot of action lately because in 2014
periodically the Chesapeake Bay Agreement is updated.
It’s one of those adaptive management things,
so if things change or conditions on the ground change,
you need to be able to update things.
And one of those updates in 2014 actually formally that goal
that I was just talking about a couple slides back
established that environmental literacy goal.
And this really was a significant thing
because it was not just folks
that are engaged in the environmental literacy effort,
promoting environmental literacy as a goal for the bay program.
But it was actually the governors
and other resource in government and state,
political people all kind of agreeing
and signing onto environmental literacy
being a goal of _____ _____ _____ [audio glitch].
And there’s some nuances in there, which I won’t go into,
but still it’s a goal in the whole program.
And then just last year we released
what I’m going to call out at the end of this presentation,
the MWEE guide, which helps to –
it’s designed to help practitioners, teachers,
educators out there in the watershed implement MWEEs.
And I realize that we are on the phone right now.
We’re a national audience and so I’ll mention right now
that one of the things that we hope for the MWEE
that it is a model
for environmental literacy programming.
And so, although a lot of just what we call
the MWEE was generated in the Chesapeake Bay region,
it was really influenced by national efforts.
So it’s a model that comes out of a lot of really great
thinking throughout the country.
And one of those things is the National Resource Council’s
work about how people learn. And this document,
if you haven’t had a chance to look at it ever,
it’s totally worth pulling up and checking out
because there’s a lot of great information in there.
And it provides some really, I think, powerful insight
into what makes for really solid teaching
and what we can expect to get out of that.
And so research really tells us
that learning as it normally occurs
is a function of an activity, the context and the culture
in which that all occurs, so learning is situated.
It doesn’t really happen all the time from reading
or it doesn’t really happen all the time from videos,
but it’s about people and a place where it all happens.
And this kind of –
and this document calls this out,
right, how people learn.
And that kind of contrasts with a lot of _____ _____ _____
[audio glitch]
involve knowledge only is kind of abstract and out of context.
So like a lot of other education reform efforts,
a lot’s going on there, and MWEEs we actually consider
to be a mechanism for helping teachers shift
toward approaches to teaching and learning,
that situated learning in context in which learning
is actually immediately applicable and transferable.
So you’re actually doing something about
– so you’re trying to understand how watersheds work
and how water quality might change based
on what’s happening upstream in the watershed.
You see evidence of this,
whether it’s sediment or a bunch of dirty water coming down
and then you can apply some of that knowledge
in a meaningful way in thinking about
how can we address some of these issues down the road.
So essentially the MWEE supports this type
of learning through field-based
investigations into local and life-relevant issues.
And the MWEE aligns nicely, I think, with _____ _____ _____
[audio glitch]
such as next generation science standards
with the focus being learning for life more
so than learning for school.
And that’s a really powerful shift
that is happening throughout the education world,
and within the MWEE context we’re trying to capture that.
And so what does that actually look like?
For folks that are in states
that have adopted next generation science standards,
this might look relatively familiar.
For those that are someone on the continuum of adopting that,
it might look familiar.
And for those that are not necessarily in that wheelhouse,
these are great things to think about.
And so there’s a document out there called
“A New Vision for Science Education”
and basically, as you can see in the document
that I did a screenshot of,
you can see what science education
will involve less of and what is more.
And basically, like I was talking about
in that example of cloudy water and _____ _____ _____
[audio glitch] maybe calling it in that little stream,
you know, they're learn as needed.
So there’s not vocal lists that you need to pull out
and memorize but you learn the language
and the ability to communicate about that stuff as it’s needed.
Looking at systems as a whole as opposed to individual parts
pulled out of context
is also key within next gen and within the MWEE.
Answers with really – or questions with fixed answers
are shied away from a little bit more
and more open-ended questions
and offering the opportunity for discussion is key to next gen.
And multiple sources of information
so it’s not just a textbook that gives you the information,
but there’s so many different perspectives,
so many different values at play
and so many environmental discussion topics
that multiple sources of info are key.
And then some of the most powerful pieces in my mind
are the opportunity or the encouragement to the extent
possibly of student-driven
investigations not _____ _____ _____
[audio glitch] and that’s a pretty powerful thing,
especially in environmental context
and then the need and the ability to write.
So we’re looking at next gen,
the shifts that are happening in there
and really saying we can make this happen
within environmental context in the background.
So some colleagues a the Chesapeake Bay Foundation
came up with this graphic
that I think nicely describes what we’re looking at.
So we have these two and many more education
reform efforts out there,
but we have next generation science standards,
which are a framework of standards and curricula
that we use to describe science education.
Then we have this MWEE, which is an approach to teaching
and learning focused on environmental literacy.
When you look at how these things match up in that graphic
on the right-hand side of the screen,
there’s a lot of similarities.
So we recognize that and we’re trying to capitalize on that
in terms of that whole view.
So here’s Question 2 and what I’m hoping
to understand through this –
again, it’s sort of like an audience question –
is like so where are folks coming from
to this conversation or others? What is your background?
And I kind of describe it as the context in which you work,
so if you could take a minute and just tell us what in general
or how you would consider the context in which you work:
Are you a field educator, a classroom educator,
what have you?
So if we could just get a sense of the folks who are out there
so I’ll turn it over to Bruce to say go
or maybe you can just go.
Yup, folks can just go and while folks are filling out
that poll over the next moment or so, Bart,
there were a number of folks who had asked some questions
regarding the links in order to access
a number of the resources that you pointed out earlier.
So maybe you might quickly add a slide toward the end
that you might be able to pull up with some of those links
that folks could access them
when they view the archive later on.
Yeah, I can totally do that, sorry.
And I am going to point to kind of the one
in terms of the meaningful watershed education experience,
the place to go to. I’m going to be calling
that one out specifically in a little bit.
Great. Okay so we’ve gotten most of our folks have voted.
Just another few seconds here on the line and we’ll close it up.
Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.
All right, great, awesome, terrific
so a lot of formal ed classroom educators.
That’s great. We can all see the results there.
And I always struggle personally with the language of education,
right, informal versus non-formal versus formal,
which is one of the things that we had long conversations
about in terms
of the development of the whole MWEE piece.
And we deliberately kind of just broke it down
into those classroom-based learning because it’s actually
about the students and field-based learning,
which can happen in multiple contexts
whether that’s outside by a stream
or in a museum or a zoo,
what have you, that connects all that sort of thing so thank you.
Thanks for sharing where you’re from and that’s great.
So I mentioned this earlier that we consider the MWEE
to be an approach that addresses kind of several goals.
So the MWEE has the potential, this environmental situated
context to increase student engagement.
I had the opportunity to have a couple of conversations
with students about things like climate change
or actual phenomenon that you see right out there _____
_____ _____ [audio glitch]
those kinds of things happening right around us
we often find to be pretty engaging.
Because of all the stuff
I was just talking about in terms of connections
to next generation science standards and stuff like that,
we hope some of the work that the MWEE can do
is help support standards-based student achievement
so these rich opportunities for honest-to-goodness
three-dimensional learning.
And because of all the change around us
that we’re experiencing
because of the emerging job opportunities
that exist out there, whether that’s green building stuff
or maybe even more effective communication
between diverse audiences, we consider that the MWEE
is an opportunity to advance 21st century learning skills.
That’s part of what it’s supposed to do
and then, ultimately, through the learning,
through the experiences,
through having a robust kind of connection and context
to where you are and places around you
and how connected they are to you that _____ _____
_____ [audio glitch]
responsibility will ultimately emerge as one of the endpoints.
So this is all the work that we’re expecting folks
that are going through this whole MWEE process to do.
And I would be, I mean, so hopefully
– and I bet you’re getting a sense of
how I’m going to call it “big” but how big these meaningful
watershed education experiences are.
And whenever you’re doing anything of this size and scale,
it’s really important to think about
what is that ecosystem of educators and education
out there that really makes this stuff happen?
And, again, the end goal is student environmental literacy
for these MWEEs but folks that are all equally important,
I would say,
and kind of revolved around each one of these spheres
that I put up there on the screen.
So field-based educators with content knowledge
about local environments and experience
taking students outside in safe and engaging ways,
classroom educators who are hugely skilled
at being able to help students understand core learning topics
and provide meaningful ways of organizing that learning
so that students get out of it what we hope they get out of it
and have to get out of it in a lot of cases.
The curriculum and those that put together curricula,
you know, one of the challenges
with the meaningful watershed education experience
has been that if you see it as something outside of what you’re
– I’m going to say required.
I’m not sure that’s the right word
– but required to do because of the curriculum,
then oftentimes it’s a really hard thing to get done
even though as the classroom educator,
field educator or whoever, you think it’s a great idea.
You think it’s really good learning.
You think it’s really positive for your students,
but if it’s outside of what you have to do,
being able to do it can often be challenging.
So having we call it the MWEE
being systemically integrated within the program _____
_____ _____ [audio glitch]
part of the conversation is a very important piece.
And then because a lot of times this involves
taking students out of the classroom,
maybe even going to distant sites within your region,
there’s a really important element of institutional support
that is key here.
A lot of us can’t get a whole lot done
unless the principals and the institution itself
is onboard regardless of whether or not
there’s any Chesapeake Bay-wide goal
of promoting environmental literacy.
If a principal is having a hard time,
you know, focused more on literacy like literacy itself,
being able to read and write,
then it’s going to be hard to get out of that classroom.
So the whole point of all this
is if we can get these different spheres of folks
working together on developing and implementing the MWEE,
then as intended the MWEE’s not something that happens
outside of what students are required or have to do, right.
It’s all a way of doing that stuff.
So the MWEE itself has a number of parts to it.
And I was going to dig into these parts a little bit
just to kind of give you a sense of what is –
what the full model of the MWEE is
and you can kind of see what they are here.
So the four key essential elements –
and these are things
that students should be intimately involved in
and almost student-centered or student-driven if possible.
That’s things like issue definition,
outdoor field-based experiences,
synthesis and conclusion and action.
So before I dig into those,
here’s one of the links that I promised I would share.
Really the best place to go to learn about MWEEs right now
and into the future will be this website baybackpack.com
and it’s got a lot of resources there for folks
in the Chesapeake Bay region
but, like I said, if the MWEE is indeed –
and I believe it is –
a model for environmental literacy programming
that exists out there, then this, you know,
there’s a whole tab right here on this website
that helps describe the MWEE _____
_____ _____ [audio glitch] so
_____ is one of those sites to check out and bookmark.
All right so what is issue definition?
So what that looks like is students are focusing
on a driving question
that has to be tied to something that’s locally relevant,
some issue that is happening right around them or phenomenon
that they can actually see, touch, feel, smell, whatever.
The learning about that issue happens
both in the classroom and in the field
and is not just about field educators
or classroom educators,
but also being able to bring people in the community
in as experts and documentation,
whether that’s new articles or news reports or other writings.
All of those types of publications
are all about doing the background research,
understanding to the greatest depth
possible the issue that’s going on.
And then the other powerful piece is about issue definition
is that it allows us to connect to _____
_____ _____ [audio glitch]
groups and communities and public values.
So you start thinking about how you are connected
to whatever this problem, phenomenon,
issue is from both your perspective and others.
And I can’t stress how important I feel this notion
of empathy really is for us in the education community
and the environmental education community, in particular,
and I think this tries to get to some of that.
And so what does it look like?
This does look like classroom instruction.
It does look like the collection of data out there in the field
or within even as we do a lot of times
within the research community,
like we’re online collecting data
from observation systems that exist out there.
So students can do that, too, talking to experts,
reviewing credible publications.
The second essential element of MWEE
is outdoor field experience
and, again, so connecting students to place,
that situated learning notion.
It really gets locked in when students have the opportunity
to have outdoor experiences that are,
you know, “sufficient’ is how we describe it,
but they provide enough time and enough latitude
for students to really be able to investigate that issue,
problem or phenomenon.
So it could be just one time outside
looking at turbidity in the stream
or it could be multiple trips in different parts
of the watershed to fully understand that.
It’s really based on what the resources are available,
what the student’s interested in,
the resources you can pull out.
But the whole point is like the outdoor field investigation
is not an isolated field trip.
It’s directly connected to that issue your identified
and helps you answer those questions as well
as potentially form actions of how you’re going to deal
with whatever problem you might find.
And I do want to stress that when we _____ _____ _____
[audio glitch]
to go to an island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay
to learn from both the people that live out there
and the environment around it.
But that’s not accessible necessarily to everybody
and, really,
you can look at resources in your own schoolyard
or that property nearby the community
that will help you to understand the issue and stuff like that.
So it doesn’t have to be far-flung field trips.
I’m not even going to use the word
“field trips”, field experiences.
It can be right there in your own schoolyard
depending on what your question is.
The next essential element is this thing we call
“synthesis and conclusions” so what that’s all about
is claims, evidence and reasoning, right,
so being able to apply the stuff that you learn,
stuff that you’re seeing, the data you’ve collected,
and organizing it in a meaningful way
for both yourself in your work
but also for the ability to communicate
about that stuff to others.
And that’s a key piece of students
being able to kind of own the work that they're doing.
And, again, that’s where that student-centered,
student-driven type of conversation is.
And I want to also point out
that each one of these essential elements of the MWEE,
they don’t happen in sequence.
So it’s not like you identify the issue first.
Then you go outside.
Then you do some synthesis and conclusions around it
and then you do the final piece as an action project.
But they can all happen really in any order
that makes sense for the students
or for the teachers or the school system that’s part of it.
So that brings to me to the last piece or the last one
I’ll mention, which is that action project.
So that’s if you’ve identified an issue or a problem,
what can you do about it?
And then key to the action piece is that you don’t just leave it,
but you also kind of think about how effective was this?
And actions don’t need to be always
planting a habitat for _____ _____ _____ [audio glitch]
frequently found within the schoolyard or elsewhere, right.
It could be that for sure.
But it could also look like actions
that influence everyday choices,
so that might be about power we consume
or how we deal with waste personally.
There’s also an opportunity for community engagement,
which is things that might be …
action items that might be able to kind of get more of the folks
around the neighborhood or the school involved
and so a campaign to grow more local food or civic action.
And that gets to the politics of the thing.
So one of the things that I think that a lot of us
that work in environmental programs realize
is that it’s really important that people understand
how their decisions
and their actions influence the world around them
and that they work within the government structure
out there to do what they feel is important
within those communities through voting
and through being civically active.
I want to mention the Baybackpack resource again
because not only is it where you go to learn about the MWEEs,
but Baybackpack also has tons of resources.
And one of the other resources that is brand new on Baybackpack
and is worth looking at if you get the chance
is all about action projects. And this has traditionally been
one of the harder pieces of the MWEE.
But to support people and getting action projects done,
the Chesapeake Bay program partners
at the Maryland Association
of Environmental and Outdoor Educators.
MDNR and others, Maryland Department of Natural Resources
and others have put together the resources available in this site
that kind of describes all kinds of school action projects,
clean water projects,
projects to conserve resources, et cetera,
and they go into quite a bit of detail for each one of those.
So if you decided to conservation of resources
type of project, one of those that comes up
is food waste reduction and composting.
And you can kind of see on the _____ _____ _____
[audio glitch]
thought about and have resources to support you in doing.
And we hope that this resource has been a pretty powerful tool
in helping people think about, organize
and implement action projects. Again, it’s on the web.
It’s accessible to educators, students,
whomever so it’s one of those things.
So those are the four kind of core pieces,
and those are all things that students are supposed to be
really powerfully engaged in,
so that’s that student-driven or student-centered piece,
but there’s a big role for us as educators out there.
Whether you’re in the classroom or the field,
you’re needed in this space, right. Can’t do without.
And so we call these the “supporting practices”
but you can see what they are:
active teacher support to facilitate student learning
and make sure that those essential elements
are present in the meaningful watershed education experience
and that those elements are not extraneous
to the learning that needs to happen, those academic goals.
That’s really all about that classroom
integration piece, too,
and then ensuring that the context is relevant and key also
is that it’s not a one-off. It’s a sustained thing,
part of a unit of learning or study
that happens over a period of time
is kind of what’s been found to be the most powerful.
So really, educator, whether you’re in the classroom
or in the field, you’re the person on the ground.
You’re the content expert. You’re the facilitator
and within the homeroom MWEE P’s making sure or doing
what you as an individual or the organizations around you
can do to help support you in your knowledge, your skills
and as you try to plan and implement these MWEEs.
_____ _____ _____ [audio glitch]
that one simply does not just do a MWEE, right.
It is a big project and there’s a lot that goes into it
but not outside the learning that needs to happen
and powerful way to approach environmental literacy.
So I’m going to pause there for a drink of water.
[Laughs]
So all that is just to say so we have this MWEE model.
It’s got these essential elements.
It’s got these supporting practices.
And so if you actually want to do one of these things,
how can you help organize your thoughts
and your thinking around this?
So that’s where we came up with the MWEE guide.
And I should also mention that whenever I saw “we”,
this goes back to the Chesapeake Bay program,
and there’s a lot of folks from a lot of organizations
involved in the thinking and the development
and the writing about this sort of stuff.
So this MWEE guide came out of a collective _____
_____ _____ [audio glitch]
Chesapeake Bay programs and environmental literacy group.
And the MWEE guide is fundamentally just a tool
for connecting both the field-
and school-based educators in the service
of designing and implementing these _____.
And in this guide there’s all kinds of tools,
and I’m just going to run through them quickly,
but one of them is what we call the “MWEE think cloud”
so this is really just a tool to capture ideas
about what the MWEE might look like.
What are the learning objectives?
What are the potential partners?
What’s the local context that’s key out there.
In terms of developing, driving and supporting questions
and the content areas they support,
there’s a form for that to help you think
about some of that stuff.
And then field sites and those places for outdoor learning,
because they're such an important piece of the MWEE,
thinking about how those sites can really robustly support
the programming that you want to implement is key
so we try to call attention to that fact.
_____ _____ _____ [audio glitch] options because certain sites,
whether that be the schoolyard
or the field site in a local park or have you,
like can it do the work that you want it to do
because we’ve already gone there and checked it out
or your partners have already checked it out
and said yes, that issue of cloudy,
turbid water exists within this place,
so we know there’s an opportunity for students
to be able to study and identify that issue there.
Or curricularly speaking is are we looking for a place
that is directly connected to people
and what that influence would be.
There’s also tools to support as you think
about what are you learning from this?
What are your conclusions?
Then what actions can you use to address it?
And, again, you’re looking at multiple actions
because all along the way here every time
there’s multiple opportunities,
you’re thinking big and then taking the opportunity
to prioritize based on whatever criteria you want
or need to find the thing that’s really, really _____
_____ _____ [audio glitch]
so those are some of the basic tools.
Probably one of the anchor tools within this MWEE
guide is what’s call the “Environmental Literacy Model”
or ELM.
And fundamentally, ELM is this method
of integrating environmental issues,
civic action and academic goals
and putting that all into what is a nice package
that encourages education
that is three-dimensional or transdisciplinary
as well with hands-on field-based stuff _____.
And I will say that ELM came out of the Maryland
Environmental Literacy Partnership,
so that model was developed by educators,
partners at Howard Hughes Medical Institution, the HMI.
They did a lot of the thinking about taking this on
and pulling this together.
But we feel that it really works to provide that big,
big picture and a workable template
for thinking about the MWEE
and the multiple parts of the MWEE
and the work that MWEE is intended to do.
So this slide’s really about
what’s in each one of those parts.
And you might notice some of the colors that we use
within the ELM model, being green, blue and orange.
And that is intentionally designed to kind of relate
directly back to next generation science standards,
the green being cross-cutting concepts,
the blue being the practices,
and orange is the disciplinary core ideas within the next gen.
Here we kind of think more about it.
The orange ends of being what is our action?
What is our claim and all of those pieces
so it’s a little outside the DCI thing.
But still, those are intentional to try and describe
that because cross-cutting concepts
are those overarching things across things.
The issue investigation is really
where you would deploy the practices of science.
And civic engagement is where either you dig
into some of the other _____ _____ _____ [audio glitch].
And this is just what those documents look like so pages,
but the whole point being these are planning documents.
These are tools that were generated by a group of folks
that we hope are useful in planning
and designing and implementing MWEEs
and working as a team to do that between non-formal educators,
field-based and classroom-based educators.
And then kind of once you have all that stuff under your belt
and you’re working on it
or maybe you already have a program that is,
you know, has those essential elements
and those parts of the MWEE,
well, we also wanted to in the toolkit
provide a way for you to look at your programming
and kind of think about, all right,
so what are some of the strengths of it
or what can I improve?
And so we call it the MWEE Audit Tool
and so this is designed to help you think
about your programming.
Is it a MWEE? How close is it? What else can you do?
But I want to also harken back to something I mentioned earlier
and that is that regardless, you know, we totally understand.
We feel personally – I feel – that field-based
experiences for students are hugely beneficial.
So knowing that the MWE at least folks are developing
and working towards it is a pretty high bar.
Like we don’t want to discourage
really powerful field experiences for students
because they have tons of values.
But the point of this is just kind of saying
that, yes, there is a tool out there
to help you evaluate your programming
and think about how close it gets _____.
So … sorry, one more sip of water.
So I just wanted to hit on a couple of examples
so you could get a sense of what the MWEE looks like.
And these are all, I mean, they're coming
from the Chesapeake Bay region.
So the first example is from _____ _____ _____
[audio glitch], part of the University of Virginia
that is in western-ish Virginia.
And the program itself is designed around
both geographic and environmental literacy.
That’s one of the other literacies
that I didn’t mention earlier but there’s a lot of synergy
between those tyo types of literacy,
a lot of it having to do with a sense of place and a context.
And for Blandy, the big idea that they had was how –
and this is overarching.
So how do land use decisions impact our environment
and our environment influence
how we can actually use the land?
So that was their big idea that they brought to this.
And the issue that they came up with was all about
that their education programming was expanding at Blandy
and at Blandy’s property
and they needed more teaching space
to meet their growing needs.
So this is kind of the problem that they posed _____ _____
_____ [audio glitch].
So the fundamental driving question
then is where should Blandy build this education
or visitors center?
And I would – I think part of it also was that.
And so as they kind of worked
through the whole issue investigation element,
they did all kinds of stuff to try to understand that issue,
be aware of the local context,
what natural resources exist there, what cultural resources?
This is an old historic property
with pretty cool cultural context.
And then what would the impacts of building new structures be
and then also be able to collect baseline data around this
to identify what areas might be particularly sensitive
and be able to tell if things changed over time.
And they did some cool other stuff to try to understand
the issues like the picture on the screen
is about a model that they developed looking at runoff
from different types of land use.
So each one of the trays on the stepladder
is a different kind of soil,
a different kind of substrait, some with plants, some not,
and you look at actually the volume of water
that flows through there
so there’s a really powerful quantitative element.
_____ ____ _ _____ [audio glitch]
students and this is an example of some of the student work.
You know, looked at their data of all kinds
and went through that synthesis and conclusion process
at multiple stages within the program
and kind of just came up to a synopsis of,
all right, in this case what does the critters,
the macroinvertebrates in our stream look like?
As is our stream one of those super-healthy ones
with a lot of sensitive organisms
or is it one of those streams that has impact
and we see organisms that can handle some pollution in there?
And they found that they had
some fairly intolerant critters there.
Almost – over half of the critters in the stream
were somewhat intolerant to changes.
And I mentioned the cultural piece.
At Blandy Farm there is a lot of historical connections,
one of them even being they had some slave quarters
that were there because it was plantation.
And that historical context
and where that was was brought into thinking
about what the education center might look like,
be able to harken back to and support
and where, most importantly, would they be building?
And they ultimately decided and proposed that –
different groups proposed different things.
I think the one that got the most buy-in was to say
let’s lose the parking lot and build the center there.
But the action piece really ended up being a presentation
by the students to the State Arboretum Board of Directors.
So that’s a pretty high-level thing
that they were talking with and discussing what their ideas
were for where to build this environmental center.
And this program is a pretty amazing program
and I know Blandy is working very, very closely
with the teachers of Frederick County, Virginia,
to help design and implement this program
and everybody has gotten a whole _____ _____.
All that program was largely, I would say the primary driver
although it involved all those pieces of the puzzle
that we were talking about earlier,
was from a provider side
so somebody that they do a lot of work
in environmental literacy programming as part of that.
This second case study is actually a MWEE
that was developed by a high school teacher,
Hema in Wicomico, Maryland, so Wicomico’s the county.
The city they actually worked in
and that she teaches in in Salisbury.
And this investigation was actually
more of a phenomenon-driven investigation
and, again, though it looked at land use and human impact.
And basically in 2016 some of the students
that were in her class had their homes flooded
and this is something that’s present
and provides a lot of context
for the students in their community
at the time that she was doing this.
And so they looked at that flooding issue
and what drove it so they had a driving question of _____
_____ _____ [audio glitch]
in the city of Salisbury
and they looked at tons of background research.
They looked at a lot of interactive models online
to try and understand watersheds,
how they work, how waterflow impacts things.
And then they did a whole bunch of outdoor stuff
to try to understand their community
and their schoolyard from mapping land
use around that school and community to now soil types
and testing things like permeability.
And, ultimately, when they got
to the synthesis and conclusions piece,
they were thinking about how does school contribute
to or mitigate flooding
and then what actions could we take to address that?
They presented those actions and then ultimately developed
and ranked the implementation actions
that they could do on the schoolyard
to manage flooding,
raise awareness around some of the issues.
And that involved doing stuff like rain gardens or BMPs,
best management practices to control runoff
and also just kind of raising awareness
through cleanup efforts.
So those are two examples of some of the MWEEs that existed
and this is just about it.
So we kind of went over what the MWEE is,
where it came from, schools to support
the development of meaningful watershed education experiences.
And I just wanted to let folks know
or just call attention to we understand very clearly
that MWEEs are part of a much larger context of education.
And this table tries to capture
– and thank you, Elaine, from Smart Outside
for putting this together –
tries to capture like what are the different elements
of different learning programs or approaches
and what are the steps in each one of them?
How similar are they?
And I think looking at this table
and maybe based on your knowledge
of how some of these things work,
there’s a whole lot of similarity
between each one of these things.
So in the Chesapeake Bay region we’re trying to encourage folks
to think about meaningful watershed education experiences,
but that’s not a whole lot different
than problem-based learning.
That’s not a whole lot different than _____ _____ _____
[audio glitch] service learning projects.
And when you look at a lesson plan format so, again,
MWEEs and all these things are bigger than a lesson
but just a lesson plan format like the 5E,
there’s a lot of similarities between all this stuff.
Also this is to say that there’s a lot of great education
approaches out there,
and MWEE is the one that we’re just kind of promoting
in the Chesapeake Bay region. So how are we doing?
So every other year we survey the local education agencies
around the Chesapeake Bay watershed to try and understand
how they're doing in terms of implementing meaningful
watershed education experiences.
So what each one of these charts describes
is how the watershed states that responded to the survey,
how are they doing in terms of implementing the MWEE.
So in elementary school almost half,
41 percent have system-wide
so that means within elementary school system-wide students
are getting their meaningful watershed education experience.
Middle school is a little _____ _____
_____ [audio glitch]
and then high school it’s a little lower,
and then I think a lot of us will understand
that there’s challenges working with high schools
because of the way courses
are typically structured and students –
it’s really hard to pull kids out of school
in high school at that point.
But you can see just where we’re at and the breakdown
is we break it down into the different states below.
But so this is the first time
that environmental literacy tool –
we actually call it the E-Lit tool –
was used and this is data from I think it’s 2015 or 2016.
So we’ll be able to now, though,
because we have been recording this track progress over time.
So what are our future plans for supporting MWEEs?
Well, Chesapeake B-WET Program
and our partners at the Chesapeake Bay Trust
and others are working really hard to continue
and maintain and encourage and support funding
for the implementation of meaningful
watershed education experiences out there.
So we have a funding element that is being carried out
and worked on.
We’re actually reaching out to other funders
and practitioners about this approach nationwide
to try and encourage more funding
nationally for this type of programming.
And then it’s specifically we are providing in-person
training about the MWEE. And one of the key things here
is although the MWEE has been around since 2001,
there’s a lot of different opinions
on what it actually means and what it actually is.
So we’re working really hard right now
to come up with that shared and common language for the MWEE
so that we’re all on the same page,
we all know what we’re working towards
and we’re all speaking the same language.
And then we’re also working on an online training
to support MWEE implementation out there as well,
which include things like videos, interactive discussions
and models like the ones I just showed you of MWEEs
and those actual tools filled out
and things along those lines.
That’s what the _____ _____ _____
[audio glitch] the meaningful education experience model.