In my early years in the MAT in Missouri, I co-founded a small school that operated mostly outside and gave students democratic control over school activities. Because students had considerable freedom in how they spent their time and attention at Wild Folk, it was essential to work with their natural interests and energy. Teaching effectively in this style was a central challenge I explored during this time, and I explored this challenge in my MAT course lesson plans. How could I provide new information, experiences, or challenges to children that helped their play become richer in learning?

One of my first attempts at this was to write a flexible, inquiry-based unit based around exploring creeks. As was typical during the early days of the school, the unit wasn’t carried out as I wrote it for class; we never held a session of the “creek science club” I planned out. But the lesson plan did provide certain routines and rituals that I was able to turn into habits at our school, such as sharing observations and questions at circle and returning to them again as a class. Comfort with these kinds of routines is immensely helpful when teaching in a truly child-led inquiry-based way, where students participate in building the research questions (Hart, 1997). 

This experience of trying multiple approaches to teaching about creeks helped our little school mature and refine our approach. We shifted from a purer unschooling or Sudbury Valley approach, which gives students the ultimate choice on how they spend all their time, to more of an emergent curriculum approach, where teachers work with students’ interests but provide regular provocations and direction (Gray, 2015; Jones & Nimmo, 1994).

The inconsistently-applied initial lesson plan turned into a much more thorough and successful unit the next year, when we spent an entire semester studying water. That semester kicked off with a watershed walk: starting from the dry ditches next to the school, we followed the water until it became a stream and then the main creek running through downtown. We were able to work with the observations that students made for the rest of the semester, and their understanding of connections among local waterways, roads and parks was unmatched. After the early experiment with the inquiry-based creek club, this subsequent unit worked out the balance of offering the students direction and giving them freedom.

This 3D model of the local Flat Branch Creek watersheds was one outcome of the watershed walk students took. Although this model was not part of the original creek club lesson plan that I wrote for class, it grew out of the trial-and-error of the earlier approach.  Taken Sept. 2016 at Wild Folk Learning Community.

Our watershed, of course, was much bigger than the mile and a half it took our little school to walk to Flat Branch Creek. We were only a few miles from the Missouri River, whose watershed covers ⅙ of the US. I began collaborating with the non-profit Missouri River Relief (MRR) on their educational work to figure out how we could connect public schools to this immense system of water.

To target outreach efforts, I created an interactive map of all schools within a walking distance of Missouri River along its entire length (see the image below). The hope was that schools with such easy access to the river would be more receptive to incorporating the Missouri River into their curriculum.The map is now a resource used by MRR education coordinator and education committee to inform outreach.

Although I considered myself well-informed about my regional watersheds, nothing tests that like creating useable maps of the nesting waterways. Dividing such an enormous area of land into useable units required me to develop a more applied understanding of the way water moves, watersheds divide, and people access water than I had before. 

At the same time, I was assisting with field trips to the river and smaller creeks with both public school groups and my small Wild Folk school. The logistics of taking kids to a safe, interesting and accessible section of riverbank challenged me to consider how well I actually knew my local waterways from tangible experience, as opposed to book knowledge. Trying to connect people to these watersheds at various scales forced me to go into a deeper personal relationship with the river as well. 

The mapping project also prepared me to better understand the challenges and opportunities for community groups to partner with schools. Although I connected the map to databases that provided school contact information, this was of limited use compared to more personal relationships with schools and teachers in the community. There are so many barriers in getting to the river beyond whether students are within 0.5 mile walking distance, and we could only get to know those barriers well in communities nearer to us. However, the perspective of the map still gave MRR’s education projects reach and connections beyond just our state near the bottom of the river, which still holds potential for the organization.

After creating the map, my partnership with MRR grew into co-developing a 4th grade Missouri River unit. I piloted the unit at multiple schools in Columbia, Missouri, reaching 250 students. After the pilot, MRR partnered with University of Missouri to revise the curriculum and engage teachers in professional development, leading to a paper presented at the 2019 NSTA Conference. This curriculum may be made accessible to schools across the entire watershed, as identified on the map.

A screenshot of the map I created for Missouri River Relief in October 2015. The red line shows the 0.5-mile corridor we considered to be walking distance from the river, and the text box shows details on a school located within that distance.

In environmental education, it is common to talk about concrete goals such as improved environmental literacy or a river clean-up. But part of what I was seeing in my work was a more soulful shift. When our professional media writing course prompted us to craft an article to submit for publication, I attempted to communicate some of the ways that working place into identity impacts people’s well-being and social justice. The resulting article, “Finding One’s Place,” is currently under consideration for publication by Rethinking Schools magazine. 

The process reinforced the importance of being a voice for how environmental education can improve community and personal well-being. Many people see environmental education as all about learning science or encouraging environmental stewardship. The importance of nature connection to health, mental well-being, and personal identity is much less discussed--not to mention the ways that being separated from one’s place has been a major part of our culture’s history of oppression, from enslaved Africans, to Native Americans, to British peasants.  For this reason, I chose to submit my article to publications focused on social justice and tolerance education, rather than green publications. 

I discovered that writing the article also helped me be an advocate for my own region of Appalachian Ohio. As I wrote about the importance of place in one’s identity, I also made an argument in defense of all that is beautiful and meaningful here. Beyond what I can include in this portfolio, the unique ecology and culture of our area has turned into amazing educational opportunities on unions, the tradition of selling wild ginseng, lichens, glacial refuges, and mushroom hunting. Teaching in a way that embraces students’ cultural and lived experiences is a good practice; and the appreciation for home that I want to celebrate with my students came through as I wrote the article as well. As it turned out, this challenge to some of the stereotypes of Appalachia is what intrigued the editors at Rethinking. 

Before undertaking the projects below, gaining some understanding about citizen science’s potential and limitations was necessary. Like I found with the BioBlitz of the Wayne, enthusiasm for citizen science as an engagement tool is high, but faith in its reliability for actual scientific research is shakier. I synthesized the research on citizen science data to gain better understanding of just how scientifically useful it was. 

This question is important because we often motivate our participants by telling them they are truly contributing to an important project; it would undermine our work if their contributions were not truly needed. Additionally, it might be possible to improve the usefulness of citizen science projects with a few simple changes. 

The literature revealed that citizen science data is often useful, but it requires a larger sample size to accommodate the datasets’ tendency to be noisier than professionally-collected data. Often, projects are good candidates for citizen science if they require a larger or geographically wider dataset than a small team of professionals could collect personally. Project designers also need to determine whether they need data that can only be relied on from a stricter collection protocol, or if more casual observations that only prove presence of species (rather than abundance or absence) are sufficient. 

This research background has empowered me to make more informed decisions about which citizen science projects to engage students with, understanding their potential and limitations. Citizen science is somewhat popular currently, and without conducting this research, it would have been easy to assume all are equally valuable; instead, I can distinguish between educational and scientific outcomes of a project. It reinforced for me the importance of being not only an educator, but also a researcher and community scientist. As environmental educators, our word about science is often immediately trusted, and it is important to create a culture of rigorously verifying the source of our knowledge. 

In 2015, an unusual set of groups were in heated disagreement with each other: nature preservationists and a bicycle/pedestrian advocacy group. The bicycle group and the city were planning to build a bridge that would connect two disconnected networks of bicycle paths, dramatically improving the practicality of bike commuting (see the map below). But the bridge would go through a rare wooded patch of urban land, and nature-lovers in nearby neighborhoods organized as defenders of the urban wild. 


Diagram of proposed options for the Shepard-Rollins trail connector from the City of Columbia, MO. 

 I wondered about the underlying premise of the dispute: do bike paths in Columbia actually impact biodiversity or not? I conducted a plant diversity study comparing parks with and without paths. I found that, on average, Columbia’s parks all had low biodiversity and high numbers of invasives, regardless whether bicycle paths were present. A few outlier patches of diversity existed in non-pathed areas, and identifying these spots for protection seemed a possible route for compromise.

However, my work ultimately did not enter the debate or impact outcomes. This was my first attempt at an inquiry action project, and I lacked confidence in my results: the data had to be collected in the fall rather than a more abundant time of year, my sampling sites were somewhat few, and I had done it all by myself. I hesitated to advertise results widely. Looking back, I should have more confidence in my work, but even more importantly, I should have engaged community more deeply in the project. If I could do it again, I would collaborate with the arguing groups before starting, making sure there was input on methods and interest in the results, instead of trying to carry it all myself and not having strong enough connections to put the results to use. I learned that action research is much more useful when created in community.

This citizen science project was started by educators, and it shows. My co-workers and I at Rural Action in Ohio conducted wildly successful, engaging data collection days with multiple local high schools, and led identification hikes that engaged many community members. But after three years and 14,500 observations, we had a lot of data and were not sure what to do with it. I engaged with the data to see what possibilities were in it for actually informing land management choices at the range, and ways the data could be improved. I also engaged a 5th grade class in analyzing the data and comparing it to data they collected in their land lab, to see if the WNF BioBlitz could be leveraged for meaningful smaller projects in the community. 

Using the observations collected in iNaturalist in the Wayne, I discovered that the area north of Burr Oak State Park's lake was a relative hotspot for observations of threatened species. Map created for Rural Action in October, 2020.

The experience showed that the platform was an excellent tool for taking educational experiences from theoretical to applicable, as the students had real results and good action ideas in response to it. It has shifted the way we teach the BioBlitz to include more steps of the scientific process, not just the data collection piece. Although the results did not make significant contributions to the land management process at the Wayne, they did spur conversations about the project that are encouraging our education program to consider more conservation goals in our programs, not only educational outcomes. The process made me better at using truly local places and problems as the basis for my teaching, rather than using generic national EE curriculum. To do this requires me to actually have detailed experiences of wild places and society through our region myself, and engaging with this deep dive into the Wayne and people who love it forced me to gain that localized knowledge. I will be a better guide to the local area.

Comparing BioBlitz data with 5th graders at Logan Middle School. They combed through iNaturalist to compare their school to a nearby high school and the Wayne National Forest as a whole.