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I was asked to work with a group of children
on a science project that would be involve environmental
science,
integration of art, and
first-hand evidence where they're investigating and secondhand evidence that
they're collecting
knowledge and information from other scientists that have gone before them.
And so
I designed a project to work with a multi-age group of students
called Prove To Me It's Spring. We talked about how they could prove to me that it was springtime.
And they would start taking pictures and they
would start doing some drawings and they would do all this elaborate investigation.
They had to collect the data.
Then we would have to say what does that really mean and what do other scientists
think that that means. And from that
I realized
that these kids, their ability to observe when there wasn't the constant structure
of
the school imposed on them,
was phenomenal.
It got me thinking how can we bring back
the arts.
How can we bring back the skills that are so natural for children?
When my sabbatical came up
I knew it would be in the summer and in the fall time.
And I knew that soil was a topic that kids had to study in school. So I chose soil.
We started out in Boston and we biked across the United States to Seattle to the San Juan Islands.
We developed a protocol for studying soil
and that became our journey's focus: how soil changed as we cycled across
the United States. And my son was eleven so
we really did it through the lens of an eleven-year-old as the scientist
who was on this journey with us.
So we'd map out one square foot of soil. That would become our study site.
But there was a lot that we would do before we get there. We'd photograph. We'd have this funnel. So we'd photograph as we
were biking, as we were approaching the site. What were we noticing and chancing around us? And then we come
closer and closer to the site. We'd actually
be photographing what was on top of the site. And then we'd photograph
as we dug down. We tried to do one square foot of soil
and then go deep twelve inches
although that was not always easy depending on the
type of soil that we had.
The idea was that if we
got children to be thinking about what's around them
that when they funnel down to really what it is that they're standing on
and what's beneath their feet and deep down, that was all information
they could use to help them better understand soil.
When you give children cameras
and you ask them to document what they're seeing
with narrative using the little video cameras
it gives you incredible insight into their thinking, what they think is important, and their view
on the world around them. Our intent was to Skype with a fifth grade classroom.
And that was all set up but we were in
such remote area sometimes that often we couldn't get the connection
to do the Skyping. But it's connected to the hydroponics now because that promise
of trying to Skype stayed true with the teacher that I was partnering with. It was this
fall then that we were actually able to do the Skyping
where the teacher learned the protocol and partnered
then with my students here on campus.
Particularly, if we want to have one whole class common experience...
My students are out teaching in the field
but they're all in different classrooms. This way
my students hear from each other what they think about what other
students are saying and their understanding of knowledge. And for our students here it gives a lens into watching children
in a way that they
can listen
to language and the way in which they construct questions
and how they have access to students' knowledge.
It was a really powerful experience for me, too. When we first started...
The first group that we did, I did most of the talking. Then by the time
that we got to the third Skype, my students were engaged and we felt more
comfortable with the technology that we were using.
I think the direction we're going in is
helping students link with other students where they're geographically
quite different. So we're looking in to Skyping with the north country
in northern New Hampshire and there is a
possibility of Skyping with a school in India.
So that then they are looking geographically much broader.
We're now getting ready to Skype the hydroponics, which is an outcome of the soil testing
and looking at the way that we grow food and food security.