TAKING SCIENCE FROM CLASSROOM TO COMMUNITY

Place- and community-based education is an approach to teaching and learning that encourages teachers to link curriculum content to local phenomena, knowledge, and issues. Rather than learning primarily from textbooks, demonstrations, and controlled laboratory experiments, students and teachers can instead engage in investigations of their own surroundings and participate in work that has authentic scientific merit. In Lubec, Maine, biology teachers have created units that focus on aquaculture and marine biology. With the help of their small town and outside founders, they oversaw the renovation of a wastewater treatment plant into an aquaculture lab where trout and tilapia were raised and experiments conducted on different feed and the color of sea urchin roe. Students also became involved in the construction and monitoring of a dock where mussels were grown and participated in drift flow studies and research regarding the impact of phytoplankton on the health of local species. In Roxbury, Massachusetts, students participated in a six-year effort to address asthma rates in their community, initially by assessing the volume of diesel traffic on local streets and then working with local environmental non-profits to see that air monitoring equipment was made available to community public health agencies. They conducted surveys of local residents about asthma and their knowledge of air quality issues. Finally, they helped organize a long-term anti-idling campaign that resulted in a judgment against the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (one of the primary contributors to poor air quality) and a city-wide enforcement of a five-minute idling limit in any one location. Students in Cottage Grove, Oregon have received a grant from the Weyerhauser Foundation to conduct a five-year study the health of microorganisms essential to the health of forest soils. In the summer of 2009, a team of students worked in southeastern Oregon mapping with GIS equipment the location of Douglas firs that were encroaching on aspen groves. In all of these instances young people are given the opportunity to engage in the work of scientists in ways that create genuine benefits for their communities. This poster session will include information about these and similar projects.