Classroom Earth!

Natural History, June, 1999 by Tom Horton

A good place to learn is in the muck and the mud. That was my experience during the late 1980s, when I ran a residential education center on Smith Island, a three-hundred-year-old community of crabbers and oystermen in the middle of Chesapeake Bay. My employer, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, sent small groups of public school children, grades seven through twelve, to the island for three days and two nights. It took only hours for this natural paradise, where kids could catch their own seafood dinners, to work its magic. And every boatload of little suburbanites found the islanders themselves engaging, even if their dialect and culture may have seemed quaint.

I would often wrap up trips by displaying a map of the Chesapeake's immense watershed, which stretches from central New York State through southern Virginia, draining 64,000 square miles in six states. No larger than grains of rice on the big watershed map, Smith Island's three villages lay downstream, totally dependent on a healthy natural environment. What should we conclude? Return home (wherever that may be) and act irresponsibly toward your environment, and you put a nail in the coffin of this unique and irreplaceable spot.

Maybe a few students missed that cosmic lesson, but I doubt that any forgot getting covered in glistening black mud, the theme of virtually every field trip we ever made to the island. You got muddy because the island's waters, like most of the Chesapeake, are shallow. The whole tidal estuary--about two hundred miles long between Baltimore and Norfolk and up to twenty miles wide--averages only twenty-one feet deep. Huge portions are covered by less than three feet of water.

Hollywood Elementary School

The adoption of environment as an integrating force in the curriculum of Maryland's Hollywood Elementary School began with a small project in which students investigated their school yard stream. The original goal was simply to increase the kids' awareness of the 64,000-square-mile watershed of the Chesapeake Bay, to which their stream belonged. Projects at Hollywood have included planting butterfly gardens, turning a storm-water collection pond into a wetland, recycling, composting, and monitoring water quality.

One key to Hollywood's success has been the leadership of principal Kathy Glaser, who sought to "define a community of learners and leaders." She got some small grants from the state to bring in artists such as Tom Wisner, who is a Maryland poet, singer, storyteller, and environmental educator. And she supported and hired such teachers as Betty Brady, who, until her retirement last year, would recruit up to twenty volunteers a week, from local crabbers to high-tech workers at nearby Patuxent Naval Air Station.

From this muddiness, kids could be guided to make myriad connections, beginning with the dominance of salt marshes and vast meadows of aquatic grasses. These in turn nurture the blue crabs, whose capture during the soft-shell season consumes the islanders as the wheat harvest occupies Kansas. From the bay's bottom muck being so close to the water's surface came the shoal draft designs of the area's traditional oyster boats and crabbing skiffs. The winter presence of more than a million ducks, geese, and swans that have found sustenance in the shallows spawned the Chesapeake's custom of waterfowling, whose practitioners find food for table and soul in the hunt. The "mud connections" go on to include spectacular nesting colonies of wading birds, the Bay's extreme vulnerability to polluted runoff, and more.

Kids would often tell me that the experience changed their lives, and perhaps this vivid but far too rare exposure to nature really did--for a few. Then there were the other 98 percent or so of Maryland's school population, for whom a unique place such as Smith Island was out of reach (we could accommodate maybe a thousand students a year). But plenty of other opportunities were available closer to home.

One year, wet weather made a corner of the yard at Greensboro Elementary School in rural eastern Maryland too soggy for routine mowing. Thus reprieved, a little patch (amid acres of turf) erupted in a crazy quilt of marsh plants and creatures--cattails, dragonflies, frogs. The kids just naturally gravitated there at recess, and fourth-grade teacher Suzanne Wells began incorporating the patch into their science lessons. The class got a promise from the groundskeepers to let it be. Wells remembers the day her students bolted from class, screaming in panic, thinking mistakenly that they heard mowers closing in on the pocket wetland they regarded as their own. (Now the school is letting a full eighteen acres revert from farmed fields to form a nature education complex of wetlands, woods, and wildflower meadows.)

This kind of environmental education, which we desperately need, has little to do with showing more classroom nature videos, offering more "green" electives, or raising funds for computers so kids can "net-surf" for environmental links to Antarctica or the Tropics. It entails routinely expelling classes--and teachers--into the natural world around them to learn directly from its workings and dysfunctions. Although most school curricula nowadays make at least a nod to the environment, "at the very maximum, perhaps 5 percent of all our schools are doing anything substantive," says researcher Gerald A. Lieberman, program director of the State Education and Environment Roundtable, a group of educators from twelve states working to promote an environment-centered, hands-on approach to schooling. Lieberman is coauthor of a report that appeared the Achievement Gap: Using the Environment As an Integrating Context for Learning." The report details how forty cutting-edge schools in thirteen states are using the local environment as a major outdoor extension of the school and as the basis for teaching everything from math to social studies, art, and language. This, in the roundtable's lingo, is EIC, Environment As an Integrating Context.