Michelle « The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

About Michelle

I am a PhD candidate in Environmental Sciences at Oregon State University, focusing on research in informal education settings. I regularly post about my experiences as an external evaluator for museums and a local school district as well as stories or ideas that catch my attention. Research for my doctorate focuses on how aquarium staff and volunteer environmental identities have formed over time.

What do erupting volcanoes, learning to code, building bridges, creating art, and cooking have in common? They are all STEAM activities! This past year I started working as an external evaluator on Lincoln County School District’s (LCSD) 21^st Century After School Program. There are seven sites throughout the county that are funded as 21^st Century Community Learning Centers. The goal of the federal program is to “provide academic enrichment opportunities during non-school hours for children…offer students a broad array of enrichment activities that can complement their regular academic programs, and offer literacy and other educational services to the families of participating children.” LCSD’s program aligns with these goals, focusing specifically on providing students and their families STEAM-based activities.

Being a new project in the 2013-2014 school year, the 21^st Century After School Program kept me on my toes as an external evaluator. All documents for data collection had to be written very quickly so they could be distributed as close to the start of the school year as possible. While the tools for collecting data did not fail they certainly could have been better. As the program moves into the second of it’s five years, I thought it best not only to redesigned some of the tools but also to communicate to the site coordinators why collecting this data is important. Site coordinators, one for each of the seven sites, are responsible for distributing, collecting, and turning in all of the instruments I use to collect data. The only part of data collection they are not responsible for are the standardized test scores, which are handled by the school district. Collecting data is no small task for the site coordinators because they already have a lot on their plate. Therefore, the program coordinator and I agreed that sharing results from the first year would showcase the importance of data collection.

Early in September I presented preliminary findings at the first site coordinator meeting of the second year of the program. You can view and listen to my presentation here. The presentation ends with me addressing the four main instruments for data collection: a monthly recording sheet to document the STEAM activities and resources, the student STEM interest survey, a family literacy and STEAM night reporting document, and the parent survey.

Working as an external evaluator on these types of projects is always exciting for me. They push me to think in new ways and certainly make me a better researcher and evaluator. If you have any questions about the 21^st Century After School Program or the documents I’ve produced, please feel free to be in touch.

Whenever and wherever I hike I always take a little time to reflect in the peace and quiet of nature. I hear sounds all around me, both natural and man-made, but I also pay close attention to my inner dialogue. Recently, I was hiking in Crater Lake National Park and had an epiphany: hiking is like education.

First, when you hike you need to know where you are and where you’d like to be, both physically and mentally. You need to know the trail you plan on hiking, how long and difficult it will be, and how much time it will take you to complete. You then need to compare that data to your ability and ask yourself “Is this hike something I can do? Will it challenge me just enough but still be enjoyable?”

Educators, rather formal or informal, need to have a foundation to rely upon. We are taught basic educational practices and learn the theories on which those practices are built. However, it’s important to keep up with changing curriculum, standards, and practices. One way to do so is through professional development. My experience working with teachers who participate in professional development indicates that these are the teachers who know where they are and know they want to push themselves further but don’t quite know where they’ll end up. Involvement in one professional development opportunity alone helps educators see education and pedagogy in new ways. No doubt that professional development and its questioning, challenging, and pushing of practices is difficult for some educators but everyone involved tends to learn something and move forward in some way.

Second, you need to be prepared with the appropriate tools and gear for your hike. No matter how long you plan being on a trail, you should always carry water. Wearing proper clothes and shoes is also important for your comfort and safety. Carrying a compass or a topographical map might be necessary, especially for hiking in the backcountry or un-manned terrain.

Likewise, educators need to utilize the variety of tools available. As technology infiltrates our everyday lives more and more, it must be mentioned here. Museums have been thinking about technology integration for years and have adapted as the technology has changed. We have moved from audio tours on iPods to Hatfield’s CyberLab and touch table exhibit. I’ve seen iPads used on the museum floor, in classrooms, and on school field trips. Every tool has affordances and constraints. A map is useful but having a compass and knowing how to use it will make it easier to orient your map. Educators need to think outside of the box and plan to use a variety of resources available. Technology can be a great resource in education but that doesn’t mean it’s the only, or the best, option for all activities. The tool needs to match the terrain being traversed. Books, paper and pencil, markers or crayons, and the schoolyard are sometimes more appropriate to use.

Third, it is not necessary to listen to your surroundings but I highly recommend doing so. Without a doubt you will hear both natural and man-made sounds (i.e. the birds chirping and the inevitable plane flying overhead) but you’ll also hear your own thoughts and, if you’re like me, begin the reflective process. “Wow! This is challenging. What am I doing here?” One of my favorite sounds to stop and listen for is wind moving through trees or mountains. What I like about this sound is that something is created from nothing. It is simply air being pushed through certain crevices or against specific objects and a sound is created. If you don’t stop, stand still, and listen then you’ll miss it altogether.

While an educator’s inner dialogue and reflection of practices is important, what is even more important is to listen to the students. Start dialogues and encourage multiple voices during learning experiences. Not only should the educator know and respect the learner’s background and what is happening in their day-to-day life, but other learners should also be exposed to that information. Critical pedagogy is a must but that teaching and learning environment needs to be respected and the power of voices, or the sounds of the classroom, needs to be recognized.

Can you think of other comparisons? Or a different analogy altogether?

As the school year comes to an end so too do the school-based projects I evaluate. What this means, first and foremost, is a mad rush to collect data. It’s also a time for those involved in the project to come together and share what they’ve been doing for the past 8 months. As an evaluator, I have been focused on the mad rush of data collection – writing surveys, distributing surveys, leading focus groups, and conducting site observations. All of this data is needed to prove these projects are doing great things; however, what I truly love is hearing about the activities educators are using to engage their students in STE(A)M.

As an evaluator I have to ask: how do you capture the amazing ideas these educators are coming up with and how do you evaluate the impact they’re having? And by impact I mean both the impact on students and the impact on other educators who are hearing what’s been done in other educational settings. What I’m actually asking is how do you evaluate jaw-dropping moments?

To put these questions into some context I need to clarify that I am, from here on, talking about my experience as one of the evaluators with the Oregon Coast Regional STEM Education Center . The STEM Center is a collaboration between Lincoln County School District, Tillamook County School District, and countless institutions and organizations up and down the Oregon Coast. A U.S. Department of Education Math Science Partnership grant funds the STEM Center, which offers professional development to teachers in both school districts. Over the course of the school year the teachers put Project-Based Learning (PBL) into practice.

Now to turn back to the questions I asked above. How do you capture the amazing ideas these educators are coming up with? We do collect and archive as much as we can, specifically PBL overviews, PowerPoints, assessments, and other resources teachers and students use during PBL and include them all on the website for others to use. 2013-2014 school year PBLs should be up this summer but you can peruse 2012-2013 PBLs here.

Sean Bedell shows his colleagues a core sample he and his students took while looking for evidence of Oregon’s 1700 tsunami (project further discussed below).

How do you evaluate the impact these projects have? This question is more difficult to answer. For students, we distribute a STEM interest survey at the beginning and end of the school year and we use student test scores, but to me that can’t tell the whole story. The hard pill to swallow as an evaluator is that in order to capture what I would call the true impact on students and the whole story, this project would require longitudinal study (think 5 or 10+ years of collecting data and interviewing students). We also have teachers complete pre- and post-project surveys and have them write a reflection and those sources have proven to be useful in past projects to understand impact. We talked about running a focus group with the 2013-2014 STEM Center teachers to gauge how they incorporate all of the information delivered through professional development to plan and implement their PBLs. Anecdotal evidence shows that teachers are no longer taking a kit or pre-written lessons and using it as is in the classroom; instead, they are taking ideas from multiple sources and piecing together large scale projects. Essentially, their self-efficacy to do PBL and STE(A)M in the classroom is rising.

Most of the teachers presented their 2013-2014 PBL to their colleagues last Saturday. I was in the audience with my jaw on the floor for most of the day. I really appreciated the variety of presentations, which included posters, ignite presentations (i.e. short, sweet, and fast), and student voice-over presentations. In the afternoon some students came and presented PBLs from their perspective. I can’t cover all of the projects here and encourage any readers to keep checking the website as we add the 2013-2014 PBLs. Here’s a selection of projects that caught my attention:

– Students at Newport Prep Academy studied marbled murrelets and corvids, specifically how the latter prey on the former’s eggs. Human interference (i.e. leaving trash at picnic sites) brings corvids closer to marbled murrelets. Check out the Public Service Announcements produced by the students using iPads and iMovie. QR codes the students created will soon be at picnic areas of state and national parks.

– Students at Eddyville Charter School focused on tsunamis. They designed, built, and tested their own tsunami structure at Hinsdale Wave Research Lab. Students also researched the earthquake and tsunami that hit Oregon in 1700 by taking core samples at five different locations to look for tsunami evidence. Check out their website, which contains videos and student wikis about the project.

– At another school, students had to engineer a closed forest ecosystem to gain an understanding on how we could sustain life on another planet. This was definitely a test-retest project as students had to monitor pH and water levels to keep plants alive. Many students had to re-engineer their plans and use different materials to meet the challenge.

Examples of student-designed forest ecosystems.

– In Tillamook, elementary students were given a challenge by the local utility company, which was really a fake letter written by the teacher with the company’s approval. Students had to evaluate different sources of renewable energy and where such sources could be placed within the landscape to be most efficient. At the end of the PBL, students presented their findings to an expert panel.

See? Jaw on the ground! And this is just a sample of what these amazing teachers in Lincoln and Tillamook County School Districts are working on with their students!

Seven months ago I joined Twitter. Now I want to reflect on that decision. In my post I claimed that Twitter has changed language use and what I meant by “language” at the time was what I would call grammar, or certain rules that we have in place for language. Today, seven months later, I still support that general claim. However, I don’t think Twitter has changed the wider use or rules of language; instead, what it has done is create a language and rules within Twitter that may or may not work outside of that interface. For instance, it would sound rather peculiar if we actually said “RT” or “MT” when we shared or modified someone’s ideas aloud.

What I mean is that content within Twitter is tied to a specific context, the Twitter interface, and is therefore contextualized. The content, however, is not tied just to the interface but is also tied to the person who originally posted the tweet. Any Twitter user knows what happens next. The tweet gets responses sent directly to the original publisher, it gets re-tweeted by a person to all of their followers and/or it gets marked as a favorite.

As soon as this process begins the content starts to become decontextualized. The idea or content embedded within the tweet also becomes a dialogue opposed to the monologue that it started as. The difference, of course, between monologue and dialogue is that there is one voice in the former and multiple voices in the latter. What I find interesting, though, is that tweets can move from a monologue to a dialogue back to a monologue if we think of a monologue not only as having one voice but also as internalizing an idea and making it our own.

What I am describing is a theoretical approach to an issue, the thoughts of which originated after reading a blog post by James Hayton. He wrote,

“…because everything is limited to 140 characters, conversations about complicated topics become reduced to soundbites devoid of any subtlety of meaning. I write a 1000-word blog post on skill development in writing, and I get a 140-character reply saying ‘get words down and worry later’. It makes me want to beat my head against the desk.”

How can I write about Twitter and linguistics and discourse analysis all in one blog post? Consider a tweet an utterance. Better yet, pretend you’re a linguist and refer to it as an utterance proper.

If we were to analyze tweets, what would we define as an utterance? As the picture shows, every utterance proper is responsive and anticipatory. It responds to a previous action or idea and anticipates an answer or justification. We can think of the entire diagram as one utterance so it’s not solely the original tweet, but also the ideas that came before and the responses to that tweet. The utterance changes only when the theme or topic changes.

My reflection after seven month comes down to this: As an academic I can overthink and evaluate the whole process. However, Twitter is a tool that has many benefits when properly used. It has a language of it’s own that one must learn and internalize but once that language is internalized you can gain meaningful connections and participate in meaningful conversations.

I had the opportunity to visit a private, Christian K-12 school in San Jose Del Cabo, Mexico on the Baja Peninsula where a close friend of mine currently teaches science. As a science educator/biologist, I was really interested in understanding both the school system in this part of Mexico and also the students’ thoughts and experiences regarding conservation and development, as the region is rich in biodiversity and has experienced a great deal of controversy and political tension with regards to whether or not to develop large portions of its pristine coastline.

Beach on the Sea of Cortez in Los Barriles, Baja California Sur.

Upon arriving in Mexico, I learned that the teachers at the school I visited are recruited from both the US and Mexico, and they teach their lessons primarily in English so that the kids can gain English speaking/writing skills. All of the students are Mexican citizens and most have grown up in Baja. The school is private, but is run by a charitable organization and offers many scholarships to students in the area with low socio-economic status. The socio-economic status of the children ranges widely from some kids having parents who work in the high-end resorts or the land bureau offices to those who live in poverty with their families in the desert arroyos (seasonally filled washes or dry desert stream beds). Their teacher told me that she often participates in feeding and clothing her own students. She is a scientist with no previous formal teaching experience, and upon her arrival to the school last year she was given 5-7 full periods of classes per day. Her classes range all the way from elementary to high school and she teaches both science and English. She spoke to me about the difficulties of being a new teacher and having many students not only at different grade levels, but also with a broad range of English speaking abilities. Some kids are close to fluent, while others need students to translate for them during class, which creates some classroom management issues as there are always students talking to one another in side conversations in Spanish. Prior to her coming to the school, none of the kids had science classes, even at the high school level, because of the inability of the school to recruit teachers knowledgeable enough about the content. When she leaves soon to return to the US, there will again be no science classes for any of the 200 students in the school.

While visiting the school, I was able to teach four periods of science classes during which I did a Communicating Ocean Science to Informal Audiences (COSIA) activity with the kids to help teach them that although most of our planet is covered by water, only a small proportion supports a large concentration of life because of nutrient availability in the ocean. The slides were in Spanish, but I conducted the lesson in English, stopping every so often to allow kids to translate for one another and to check for comprehension. This was necessary as neither I nor the teacher were sufficiently fluent in Spanish to be able to help translate ourselves. Some students were more vocal than others which seemed to correlate with their comfort with the English language, but in general they were engaged in the activities and discussions and offered many intelligent suggestions.

I was able to tie the activity we did regarding ocean productivity directly to their home in Baja as the peninsula supports a great amount of biodiversity due to its’ nutrient rich waters, and it still has a lot of pristine coastline despite much development by corporations and large resorts. I incorporated a discussion into the activity by showing a public broadcast video about a failed development plan in Baja that would replace one of the last untouched wetlands in North America with a resort and a golf course. The video also talked about the loss of many potential jobs because of the development failure. I asked the students to reflect on what they had just learned, and we had a class discussion on whether or not Baja’s coastline should be conserved or developed. We also discussed sustainable development and talked a little bit about how development could impact some of Baja’s natural resources and coastal ecosystems and how it could be good in terms of economic growth. The resulting discussion surprised me in that there was an almost unanimous, hands-down response that Baja should be conserved. Their teacher had previously told me that many of them aspire to work at the resorts in the area, so I was somewhat taken aback by their strong anti-development opinions in regards to conserving the natural beauty of their home. One student simply wrote on her paper “Save Baja” and held it up. Another student said that God created the beauty of Baja and that they should protect God’s creatures. Several of the students brought up that there should be a balance between conservation and development that will keep Baja wild, but also bring much needed jobs to the area. In regards to tourism’s effects on the environment many of the students said that “ignorant” Mexican locals hurt the environment with trash and pollution much more than the tourists in the area. They had a strong desire to have clean and beautiful beaches where they could see whales and dolphins, and in our more informal discussions, many of them described spending much of their free time at the beach going to bonfires, surfing, swimming, etc. It occurred to me that their conservationist viewpoints may have stemmed somewhat from their valuing of the pristine coastline where they choose to spend their free time socializing. During my friend’s time at the school she had also brought in local environmentalist guest speakers to talk about sustainability and had taken her class whale watching, which may have also affected on their views towards development. Many of the students had a lot of interest in science and in the politics of their country, although most did not feel empowered to change the governmental actions and policies regarding development and broader issues they did not agree with because of corruption at many levels.

A few of the high school students that participated in the ocean science outreach activity.

Although there are surely challenges unique to this school in Mexico, the school and its’ students were not so different from many schools in the United States. It struck me that this under-funded school with kids from disparate socio-economic classes and wide-ranging English speaking abilities is much like many schools in the US with similar demographics. Teaching students with so many differences in language abilities gave me a new appreciation for our teachers with high numbers of ESL students in their classes, as I felt that repetition was necessary for simple comprehension for some while the constant stopping and repeating was not challenging enough for some of the more fluent students. It was also upsetting to think that some of them might not understand the content simply because of the language barrier and my inability to translate it for them.

The kids at this school were interested in science and how it affected their social and economic well-being, and had clearly benefitted from having a science teacher come to spend a year with them. I am left feeling very thankful for the experience to meet a wonderful group of kids, but also very sad at the idea that starting next week science will not be taught in their school. It is uncertain whether or not they will be able to recruit another science teacher in the future.

Do you have a favorite family recipe? Have you ever noticed how that recipe is documented? Was it orally passed down or written down? Recently, I’ve been reading a book titled Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote by Janet Theophano. This book is inspiring in countless ways including but not limited to the idea of family, community, and identity.

The author proclaims herself a “folklorist trained in an appreciation of aesthetic forms” (pg. 5) and uses this skill to find, collect, and analyze cookbooks. Not just any cookbooks, but ones that might be centuries old. And not just to analyze them but “to consider them worthy objects of serious textual analysis” (pg. 5). Read “textual analysis” as discourse analysis and I find a worthy subject for this blog. Here, I’m not necessarily interested in the role women play in recipe writing and collecting but more in heirloom recipes and how they’re passed on and transformed.

Historically, paper was hard to come by and often expensive. Even if people, women in particular, could obtain paper they had to be literate in order to record recipes. Slaves, for example, often passed down recipes orally due to the fact that many slaves were not afforded advancement in literacy skills. Today, many of us are literate and have access to paper but we still utilize the oral tradition to communicate recipes.

Years ago I asked my mom about a certain recipe for a soup we had growing up. I learned it was my great-grandmother who taught the recipe to my mother who then taught it to me. I wrote down every step as my mom and I cooked the soup together. Towards the end she told me “that’s probably the first time that recipe’s been written down.”

Notes of how a recipe is transformed are often documented once a recipe is written out. I’m unsure if Uncle Albert wrote the entire strudel recipe himself but you can see where he made notes and started making the recipe truly his own. I especially like ½ cup raisins optional ½ cup chopped nuts not optional. Theophano writes in her book that people “began to experiment with their formulas, altering some proportions, deleting ingredients, and frequently commenting on their contributions as if it were an ongoing conversation among friends” (pg. 12). I like the thought that written text, especially recipes that seem so stable, are being transformed and interpreted “among friends” through time and place.

My point is this: Think about your favorite family recipes and where they came from. How have they been passed on to you? How, if at all, have they changed over time? Recipes are a snapshot of a particular time, place, culture, and identity of their author. Recipes and cookbooks deserve to be considered valuable texts and analyzed as such even if analysis is just a personal reflection kept to oneself.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

Author Archives: Michelle

About Michelle

STEAMing Ahead at Full Speed

Hiking is like education

How to Evaluate Jaw-Dropping STE(A)M Project-Based Learning

It’s a bird! It’s a tweet! It’s an utterance!?!

Lessons from an Outreach Experience in Baja California, Mexico (By Krissi Hewitt)

Eat My Words: Transforming Family Recipes

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