TAKING ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE OUT OF THE CLASSROOM AND INTO JIUZHAIGOU NATIONAL PARK, SICHUAN, CHINA

For two weeks in June 2006, Amanda Henck, Dee Mulligan, and Stephen Frister conducted an environmental field course at Jiuzhaigou National Park in Sichuan Province, China for high school students from Hong Kong International School. The class was a collaboration between a graduate student and her advisors, a high school interested in field based problem solving, and a national park which is trying to develop environmental education programs. The primary goal of the course was to expose students to the process of field science and to give them practical experience to aid in development of critical thinking, intuition, and understanding. A second goal was to expose Hong Kong residents, who have not had sufficient exposure to the natural world, to real phenomena to which they can tie the academic knowledge they acquire in science classes. A third goal was to give children who have traveled extensively in China but have never left large cities some idea of China's geographic and cultural diversity.

The learning objectives were designed around essential questions or questions that the students should be able to answer by the end of the course. These questions included: How can Jiuzhaigou be sustainable and balance the pressures on the park, including economic, socio-political, cultural, and environmental? Why are watersheds placed in a position of so much importance by this park? How did park residents make the transition from logging communities to a national park? How does the park avoid unintended consequences, specifically in their search for a sustainable waste management system? From these questions we created a curriculum that focused on environmental geology, ecology, and anthropology in Jiuzhaigou. A service project was included to give something to the communities in which we studied. Students were evaluated daily and material was modified to fit the needs of the class.

The end result was a course with lectures, field labs, nature walks, and self designed research projects. In a final journal entry, one student wrote, “I never expected any of the information from the classroom to become applicable to the outside world. However, I learned so much from seeing and being directly involved in the environment that I began to truly understand the reasoning from the text book in contrast to the natural world”.