Picture

NOTE:    These are DRAFT documents that are for CUCREJ partners’ consideration only.

Environmental Education and Leadership for Youth

In urban communities, young people inherit a world of often decaying social, economic and environmental conditions. This environment shapes the experiences and ambitions of the youth that grow up in it. This environment also limits youth’s access to environmental education and training. One of the key barriers to sustainability in our partner communities is the lack of environmental education in local schools. CUCREJ’s initiative in Environmental Education and Leadership will extend our existing community/university collaboration and technology infrastructure into these schools to fulfill the following goals:

  • helping youth build a fuller sense of capability and empowerment;
  • expanding their opportunities to develop skills for future employment and civic life;
  • strengthening schools as centers of learning and communication;
  • providing effective teacher professional development; and
  • most importantly, improving the educational opportunities of those most in need.

CUCREJ partners already work with local schools, recreation departments, natural resource management agencies, outreach centers, and community groups to develop programs that teach young people ecology, community stewardship, urban resource management, and basic job readiness skills in the context of their urban environment. These programs work with city youth focusing on developing marketable skills, environmental stewardship and personal self-esteem in an effort to show young people viable alternatives for their education and careers. Through such efforts, CUCREJ partners develop long-term educational and employment opportunities for participants, empower students to become responsible partners of their communities and help stabilize our urban neighborhoods from the ground up. Another benefit is the opportunity to for youth to find career models through interactions with professionals in environmental science, public service, law, and the university.

Building on its partners’ programs, CUCREJ aims to deploy the information and research resources of the University and the Consortium to improve dramatically the environmental education of disadvantaged youth and to develop their leadership skills. To accomplish this, we will focus on the following three projects:

1. School-Based Environmental Justice Electronic Newsletter.

Despite the collaborations that CUCREJ partners have established with local schools, there is little information sharing and collaboration between youth from these schools. CUCREJ seeks to create a Web-based environmental justice newsletter conceived and written by youth in schools throughout the region. This newsletter would be a vehicle for students’ analysis of and participation in environmental issues in their own communities, as well as a means for understanding and collaborating on environmental issues in other parts of the region.

CUCREJ’s community-based partners already have been trained in Web-authoring, and have in many cases extended this training to youth within their communities. They have used the EJ Web, along with other Internet-based resources, to encourage students to learn about their local environment while also developing their computer skills. The development of a Web-based environmental newspaper would build on these efforts by expanding students’ environmental education and developing their group dynamic skills through their collaboration in producing the newspaper.

To establish the newsletter, CUCREJ requires a full-time newsletter technology coordinator to solidify the linkages in local schools, to conduct teacher trainings for local teachers who would serve as technology trainers and local editors, and to develop and institutionalize the curriculum for the electronic newsletter’s “environmental reporters” (local students). The coordinator will also be responsible for final production of the newsletter on the Web. Initially, CUCREJ will work with one school in each community that already works with one of our community-based partners. As the project expands, additional schools will be encouraged to participate.

2. Real-time Environmental Education: Using Telemetry in the Classroom.

Environmental data are collected by Rutgers University telemetry devices in various locations throughout the region, including the Hackensack Meadowlands and Liberty State Park in New Jersey. Through cooperative agreements with other environmental/ecological research centers, telemetered data from labs in New York State and Puerto Rico are also available. This second project aims to integrate remote, real-time data into the environmental education curriculum of our partner schools. A curriculum will be developed to enable students to use these technologies themselves in an inquiry-based and problem-solving learning process. Accomplishing this requires the following:

Data Harvesting

CUCREJ plans to develop a harvesting method to collect data in an understandable form for use in the classroom. There are two reasons for developing a data harvesting method. First, telemetry devices are capable of collecting a tremendous amount of information and offer little if any way to construct meaning from that information. Second, a framework for accessing data sets will enable students and non-expert teachers to use the collected information effectively. The methods developed would demystify information and consequently increase its utility for classrooms. CUCREJ’s aim is to develop some form of Web-based scripting that allows the user to select specific environmental variables for downloading (e.g., time period, temperature, humidity, etc.). In addition, some of the scripting would scale data to help eliminate variables that create noise but not relevant information.

Development of Curriculum

CUCREJ will develop curricular materials based on remote data in order to place this information into a context of students’ everyday environmental experiences. Use will be made of resources from our EJ Web, the Harlem Environmental Access Program (HEAP), Columbia University’s Institute for Learning Technologies (ILT), and Rutgers-Newark’s Distance Learning Research Laboratory (DLRL).

Teacher Training

CUCREJ would conduct trainings with schoolteachers on the use of this environmental education resource and curricular material. CUCREJ partners will nominate schools for inclusion in the training. Teachers will receive hands-on training on using the data harvesting methods and the incorporation of telemetered data into environmental education lesson plans.

Environmental Fieldwork

Each class, using the real-time data system, will make at least one field trip to a study site during the academic year to learn about the equipment first hand. They will also engage in additional hands-on learning exercises, such as a Data “shoot-out,” in which they collect monitoring data and compare results with each other, automatic monitoring equipment, and field scientists.

3. Summer Environmental Justice Teacher’s Institute.

CUCREJ will work with Columbia University’s Institute for Learning Technology (ILT) to provide a summer institute for schoolteachers on environmental justice issues. The ILT already offers training for teachers in an Earth Core Curriculum at Teacher’s College, and CUCREJ will develop add-on modules to provide environmental justice training. These modules will include training on:

  • Use of telemetry data in lesson plans.
  • Distance learning capabilities and resources.
  • Urban ecological concepts.
  • Use of digital libraries to enhance environmental learning.