Learning in the Landscape: Tackling Climate Change Education through STEAM on Campus
With the start of April, we welcome in World Landscape Architecture Month and a greater sense that Spring is upon us, at least for those of us in the Northeast! April also brings with it Earth Day when many millions more will celebrate our collective environment and shine a light on the impacts climate change is having on where each of us lives.
This past winter a CNN headline on climate change education in US public schools caught my attention. The good news is that roughly 75% of public schools in the U.S. include some climate change topics in their science framework (based on a 2016 National Center for Science Education paper), but there isn’t a mandated curriculum of what should be taught. Often, it’s the teachers who are advocating for environmental teachings in the classroom, and that can lead to inconsistencies and mixed messages. In digging deeper, I find myself asking the question – How do we further raise awareness of the critical importance of climate change without finding ourselves in the middle of political polarization or cancel culture backlash? Is there a role in this conversation for landscape architects, designers, educators, and citizen scientists? I think yes! Our students would benefit from clear and complete guidelines on climate change education, and our teachers should adopt techniques that teach the subjects deeply and with a hands-on, student driven approach to allow for maximum lesson retention.
For 5 years I recorded phenology data weekly from March through November on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Phenology is defined as the study of when certain biological events that depend on climate take place. Some examples as they relate to plants include breaking buds, leafing out, and bloom times and duration. My observations contributed to a much larger body of records charting the yearly changes in plants in my local environment. As a next step, I’m exploring how the collected efforts can be applied to middle school and high school curricula, cultural projects and College and University campuses. I see opportunities for us to empower our children and the greater community to discover and research their own unique environments and contribute to the greater climatic conversation.
We’ve recently begun a series of new projects at The Park School, a private pre-k through eighth grade school in Brookline, MA. The school sits on a bucolic 34 acres filled with woodlands, specimen trees, stone walls, and sports fields, creating the perfect testing ground for phenology inspired teachings. The school already has a robust science curriculum that incorporates an ‘Outdoor Learning Garden’ (a small garden of raised beds where students grow edible plants to learn about life cycles, food webs and integral organisms) and a ‘Change Sites’ project (a 1m x 1m woodland plot where seventh graders observe, measure, record and analyze data throughout the school year). As part of their annual May Day celebration this year, students from each grade will plant a new tree on campus. Many of these trees will be new introductions to the existing woodland/campus canopy composition. These new trees, combined with the existing palette of native species, will allow teachers and students alike to make yearlong observations, collect phenomenological data, record changes over time and analyze and visualize their findings. And in doing so, begin to gain a firsthand understanding of how small climatic changes over time can be made tangible in our own landscapes.
Our vision is to work with the science department to leverage the project work we are doing on campus and help them continue to develop new opportunities for learning in the landscape.