Keywords

Current science curriculum reform initiatives in most areas of formal and informal education increasingly call for integration of a global perspective that shifts the discourse of science instruction to a more holistic view of the complexity of civic/science issues (Birmingham & Calabrese Barton, 2014; Tilbury, 1995; Zeidler, Berkowitz, & Bennett, 2014; Zoller, 2012). This is true of environmental education as well, which, as Birmingham and Barton (2014) state requires, “an individual’s capacity to build understanding and take action on socioscientific issues of local, national and global importance as a responsibility of democratic citizenship” (p. 287). These conversations parallel national dialogues reaffirming notions that the Earth is flat and that economic, health, and environmental issues require a broader lens in order to negotiate effective solutions to global problems (Jickling & Wals, 2008). For example, climate change is increasingly recognized as an environmental issue that knows no national borders and must be addressed through policy at a global scale (Skamp et al., 2011). This is true of issues of sustainable development and sustainability as well (Corney, 2006).

Perhaps, somewhat ironically the push for the integration of globalization themes in environmental education curricula is occurring at the same time as a renewed argument for environmental education to go local; a pedagogy known as Place-Based Education (PBE) (Gruenwald, 2003; Smith, 2002). Place-based education combines the context of local culture with the historical relevance of place to reinvigorate student learning of environmental science content (Smith, 2002; Stevenson, 2007). This pedagogy seeks to engage learners in issues occurring in their local community and thus leverage this relevance, and scientific understanding, to promote meaningful learning and civic action (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2010; Smith, 2002). These learners include not only students but also pre-service and in-service science teachers who might struggle with the emerging concepts of sustainability.

The themes of globalization and PBE pedagogies are not necessarily in conflict, as they may first appear. In Tilbury’s (1995) framework for Environmental Education for Sustainability (EEFS) she notes that one of the key components of environmental education is the ability to investigate issues at different geo-political scales. Tilbury indicates that sustainability issues are locally contextualized but also inextricably linked across local, regional, national and global scales. McInerney, Smyth, and Down (2011) note, “(t)he ties that bind us have global connections but are anchored in a strong sense of locality” (p. 3). Place-based pedagogy can be harnessed to connect students and science teachers to broader global issues related to environmental sustainability, which can be facilitated by first engaging them with projects in their local communities (Corney, 2006). In the context of education for sustainability this need to harness the locality of place might be particularly relevant. Studies have shown that in-service teachers often lack a full understanding of sustainability issues and carry with them misconceptions regarding these issues (Cross, 1998; Gil-Perez et al., 2003; Spiropoulou, Antonakaki, Kontaxaki, & Bouras, 2007).

How can the local and global scales of education for sustainability be reconciled in educational contexts to provide utility for instructors and meaning for students? How can instructors assist students in mediating the distance between these two scales: local and global? How can instructors maintain the local relevance in education for environmental sustainability while allowing for student and teacher access to prevalent global problems? With these questions in mind, the goals of this chapter are as follows. We describe the goals, components, and implementation methodology of the Bennett’s Millpond Environmental Learning Project (BMP) that sought to engage high school students and teachers in place-based, collaborative research experiences related to environmental sustainability (Karl, Haase, & Day, 2004). Next, the case is theoretically situated in the framework of educated action in science (Birmingham & Barton, 2014) that informs our views on the importance of PBE curricula in assisting not only globalized environmental education but also global environmental action for sustainability. Finally, results from a formal program evaluation of this work that reflects the relevant outcomes is presented. The intent of this section is to provide some lessons learned from the experience as well as examine how sustainability behaviors were maintained over time. The role technology played in student learning, teacher professional development and learning, and in facilitating activist behaviors toward sustainability of place are examined.

The Bennett’s Millpond Environmental Learning Project

The Place: Bennett’s Millpond, North Carolina

Within the past few years, North Carolina has developed a statewide STEM Education strategy that identifies priorities to ensure a workforce prepared for a global innovation economy. These priorities include assisting students and teachers in developing applied knowledge and twenty-first century skills. To provide support and clear direction for the strategy, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) identified eleven attributes that describe characteristics of a high quality STEM school that include a high frequency of project-based learning, establishing meaningful community partnerships, practical applications of STEM content inside and outside the classroom, strong communication and collaboration at all levels, the use of relevant technology and tools to enhance STEM learning, authentic assessment of student work, regular opportunities for high quality professional development including specialized community/industry partnerships, and support for a school wide culture of inquiry and creativity between and among the STEM school/program students, teachers and administrators.

The Bennett’s Millpond Project corresponds to many of the NCDPI goals. The Millpond Project establishes community/industry partnerships, uses practical applications of STEM, develops communication and collaboration skills, uses relevant technology and tools, and develops a culture of inquiry. The pedagogical importance of project-based learning on the NCDPI STEM Attributes Rubric validates inquiry investigations both inside and outside the classroom. This emphasis on the relevance of learning experiences for students calls for increased teacher attention to building community STEM connections with academia, resource professionals, local government officials, and industry professionals. In light of these new criteria, school districts are actively seeking meaningful experiences for students that incorporate advanced technologies, provide guided mentoring, and inspire youth to contribute positively to their community through action behaviors.

The BMP project ran from 2002 to 2012 and was supported by two Howard Hughes Medical Institute grants (as well as from funds from the Golden Leaf Foundation), with the overall goal of increasing the environmental literacy of rural high school science students and their teachers through both formal and informal collaborative research experiences. The project began in partnership with the Albemarle Learning Center (ALC), an educational non-profit organization located in Edenton, NC that focused on educating teachers, students and local residents about agriculture, naturalism and science within a PBE framework. The ALC provided physical resources such as meeting rooms, computer labs, and laboratory space to support the outdoor work.

The colonial-era Bennett’s Millpond is centrally located in Chowan County surrounded by upland farm fields and coastal swamplands for which little ecological data has been collected (Fig. 14.1). It is owned and managed by the County, and staffed with a science educator as part of a partnership with The Science House at North Carolina State University (http://www.thesciencehouse.org/). Millpond ecosystems are unique in eastern North Carolina in that they are subjected to periodic and dramatic fluctuations in water levels due to severe coastal storms, climate variability (including droughts and flooding), and an influx of invasive species. The NCDPI quality attributes and the pedagogy of PBE are well aligned with teacher and student research at Bennett’s Millpond, as they engage in learning and professional development with a community focus to understand more about this ever-changing and fragile ecosystem.

Fig. 14.1
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Regional map of Chowan County, NC and the Bennett’s Millpond research site (Courtesy of the Albemarle Resource Conservation and Development Council)

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Program Objectives and Structure

The specific objectives of the Millpond project were to: (1) actively promote the use of current and relevant science by all participants (students and teachers) in their formal schooling and daily lives, (2) encourage participation in authentic science research by student and teacher participants, (3) prepare rural students for a wide range of scientific careers, (4) reduce the isolation of student and teacher participants from the practice of science, (5) promote and develop collaborations between students, teachers and local, regional, and national scientists, and (6) support service learning in schools through cross-grade-level collaboration and student/teacher environmental activism. Student-teacher teams achieved these objectives through active participation in a place-based authentic research project associated with the local natural site. Authentic research is defined in this context as projects in which students developed their own questions, developed and tested hypotheses, derived experiments and tools to test their hypotheses, and interpreted their data in terms of environmental sustainability.

As part of the BMP, collaborative teams of students and teachers from regional schools interacted with scientists at North Carolina State University and other local colleges, as well as local environmental experts to design and implement authentic research projects that lasted over a 2-year period (including the summer months). Students typically joined the project in their junior year and completed their work as seniors. Each teacher worked with four to six students as part of their collaborative research team. Participant teams engaged in designing and implementing authentic research projects of their choosing that focused on issues of environmental sustainability such as, water quality (chemical, physical, and biological properties), hydrology, meteorology, and aquatic/terrestrial ecosystem dynamics.

Participating students submitted an application as well as recommendations to be eligible for participation, and were selected by teachers and administrators from their high school based on their level of interest, academic achievement, and ability to commit time to the project. Teachers who participated in the project each year were provided with a stipend. Students who participated also received a stipend and the potential of obtaining course credit. Since 2002, a total of seven teachers participated from four different high schools in Northeastern North Carolina (all within a 35-mile radius of the Millpond site).

Collaboration and professional development were reinforced through two major events during the course of the project, Summer Academies and a Spring Research Symposium, that were only part of the year round visits for the research teams. Summer Academies provided time for student-teacher teams to: collect data; develop science content knowledge, skills and habits of mind; collaborate and share data and techniques; mentor incoming cohorts of students/teacher teams; and develop as scientists and science educators. The Summer Academies consisted of two cohorts of student-teacher teams: those drawing their projects to a close and those just beginning their projects. This allowed for project continuity and cross-cohort mentoring. Students shared their completed work with their teachers, parents and peers, research scientists, local environmental experts and the local community during the yearly spring research poster symposium. Throughout the year, the project director met regularly with the participating teachers to provide instruction on new technologies and to share skills for mentoring students as they explored research questions about Bennett’s Millpond.

All of the Millpond teachers contributed to cultivating an appreciation of the local environment with the students by reinforcing leave no trace practices, organizing improvements to the Millpond study site, and pointing out unusual flora and fauna during scheduled outings. Several specialized activities were required of all project teams to help familiarize the participants with some of the basic ecological features of the area. Both students and teachers had the opportunity to have student/teacher groups observe the natural restoration and succession of the Millpond over time. One successful introductory learning strategy for both teachers and students was the completion of standard water quality and meteorological background sampling by each county team when they worked at the Millpond. As such this project helped the student/teacher teams participate in relevant data collection regarding the sustainability of this particular local ecosystem.

Often, professionals from various STEM fields joined the teams to share their knowledge about coastal swamps. During these visits, student/teacher teams were assisted in the use of special technologies that modeled real-world scientific sampling. The BMP teams worked with fisheries biologists from the NC Wildlife Resources Commission as they electroshocked the Millpond to survey diversity, used differential GPS systems to map points on the pond with assistance from NC Geodetic Survey personnel, recorded cricket frog calls with a local researcher, installed groundwater monitoring wells at several locations around the Millpond with guidance from a hydrologist, mapped wetland plants with a USDA expert, collaborated with research scientists from NC State, and more.

Teachers and students were encouraged to collaborate with local experts and share their experiences and findings with their local schools and community. They were also provided with an online tool in which learning teams could collaborate asynchronously including a Moodle course management site with discussion forums, photo sharing, rubrics for project benchmarks, and other pertinent project guidelines. In addition, highlights from several projects are currently accessible for other science teachers nationwide in an interactive format (http://media.hhmi.org/bulletin/nov2010//millpond/modal_millpond.htm). With these programmatic and statewide objectives in mind, the theoretical framework undergirding these objectives is discussed. All of these opportunities served as implicit means of professional development for the inservice teachers who learned about authentic research and sustainability as they participated in these projects (Fig. 14.2).

Fig. 14.2
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Picture of the Bennett’s Millpond research site

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Education for Sustainability in Place-Based Contexts

This work takes into consideration place as an important dimension in student learning and teacher professional development. As Greunwald (2003) notes, “Contemporary school reform takes little notice of place. The emphasis on state-mandated standards for teachers and students tends to work toward the uniform… (and assumes) that the only kind of achievement that really matters is individualistic, quantifiable, and statistically comparable” (p. 620). Place-based learning as a way of approaching environmental education for sustainability has a geographical component in that it roots learning in the unique, local environment of the students. Perhaps more importantly, as Greunwald argues, pedagogies of place have perceptual, sociological, ideological, political and ecological components that ground the educational experience with relevance (see also Bowers, 2002).

The value of place-based learning is that both the community in which the work is embedded and the students and teachers may benefit from the experience. Communities may find that teachers and their students are able to contribute to some of the many aspects of rural life, thus sustaining community programming (that generally has few allocated budget dollars). As the work of teachers and their students become more embedded in community initiatives, their sense of place and investment in the community is also strongly increased (Goralnik & Nelson, 2011). Place-based environmental learning projects create more time for all participants to relate closely to the natural world, thus fueling the process of community building and the development of a greater sense of responsibility for the sustainability of the local environment (Goralnik & Nelson, 2011)

The theoretical framework of PBE posits that extending pedagogies to a consideration of the local context in which they occur will make teaching and learning more relevant, tangible, experiential, and therefore will assist teachers and students in taking an active role in what happens in their community (Stevenson, 2007). However, Birmingham and Barton (2014) argue that there is little consideration in studies of environmental education as to how and why PBE curricula promote local environmental action. Much of this work with the Bennett’s Millpond Project was driven by a recognition that many rural students and teachers do not voluntarily participate in science within this community due to lack of knowledge, realization of opportunities, resources, or motivation (Avery, 2013; Clark, 2014).

In the context of this study, the teachers and students are conducting a form of citizen science, a form of PBE that seeks to engage citizens in collecting data about their local environments that can then be used to inform the larger scientific knowledge basis (Gura, 2013). As an extension, we consider what Birmingham and Barton (2014) call educated action in science. Educated action in science, “involves the capacity to leverage relevant and multiple areas of knowledge and practice to inform democratically responsible actions” (Birmingham & Barton, p. 287). Both Birmingham and Barton as well as Tal and Abramovtich (2013) extend the idea of education for sustainability to include not only focused educational objectives to teach students about content, but also using it as a pedagogy to promote participant responsive and informed action in their local community. The Millpond Project envisioned PBE as a means to instruct students and develop teachers in science content, but also provided opportunities for participants to directly impact their community in environmental sustainability and activism at the local level (described further below).

There has been much research on the role that place-based education has on assisting students in learning science content and developing positive attitudes towards science, etc. (see Endreny, 2010 as an example), but there is less work examining the effects of these programs on teachers (Chinn, 2007). Chinn found that after providing professional development opportunities for instructors that focused on local place-based practices, participants evaluated indigenous practices more positively, were able to better critique the lack of place-based resources in their local curricula, and identified local concerns that might be integrated into their own classrooms. PBE engages the instructor at a higher level of preparation for a defined objective, allowing for flexibility in instruction and student response to instruction. Teachers involved in place-based learning often make connections with local businesses, resource agencies and Institutes of Higher Education to generate opportunities for the application of science content, as well as to encourage creative design and critical analysis skills in their students.

It is our belief that the BMP participating teachers became particularly important agents of change during the professional development experience through educated action in science. These ideas are important when considering education for sustainability. The term of sustainability or sustainable development is complex and contested, but the discourse in the research literature has been concisely conceptualized by Kilinc and Aydin (2013) as consisting of five general trends. Our work is consistent with themes in trend two. Trend two suggests that sustainability cannot be discussed without considering the intertwined nature of the environmental, economic and social aspects of the issue at hand. This suggests that discussions that do not consider the complex interactions of these three aspects are too narrow in scope (Feinstein & Kirchgasler, 2015). With the complexity of this construct it is our contention these interactions are made relevant and accessible for both student and teachers when the context is local. With the challenges that many teachers have in not only understanding the complex ideas of sustainability, but also in translating this to appropriate classroom practices in-depth and sustained professional development is needed to support this curricular agenda (Feinstein & Kirchgasler, 2015; Gil-Perez et al., 2003; Kilinc & Aydin, 2013). Below we describe results of evaluation of a program in which teacher professional development in education for sustainability was embedded in authentic research projects at the Bennett’s Millpond.

Project Evaluation and Outcomes

Participants

Over the entire course of program, ten cohorts of students and seven teachers participated over a span of 10 years. Each year of the project resulted in five new research teams with one teacher mentoring four to six students per research team. Although, over 100 total students participated in the program, the evaluation results reported here come from 46 students that participated in the program during which formal data was collected. Of these participants 41 % were male and 59 % were female. The majority of the student participants identified as White, with one Asian, eleven Black, and two Multi-racial students participating over the course of the 4 years. Better than 80 % of the students who participated pursued a 4-year college degree, with a high number of students majoring in STEM fields or STEM-related professions (e.g., science teaching). All seven teacher participants are National Board Certified, have a Bachelor’s degree in science or mathematics (with three having Master’s degrees), and have more than 20 years of teaching experience in various science and mathematics subjects between them. Within the context of the project we wanted to know how the collaborative research experience with students played a role in their own professional development and sense of teaching self-efficacy about environmental sustainability in a place-based context.

Data Collection

Instructors involved in the BMP during the seventh year of the program participated in short (30 min to 1 h) semi-structured interviews at the conclusion of the Summer Research Symposium during the summer of 2009. Teacher participants were asked: What led them to become involved in the project? What did they most enjoy and least enjoy about their time with the project? What their perceptions of the most important things students learned from the project? What their perceptions of the most important things they learned from the project? Each of these open-ended questions was formulated to elicit their emergent impressions regarding environmental education and the progress of their own professional development.

In order to get a sense of the residual longitudinal effects of the project on teacher impressions of environmental education and sustainability, five of the seven BMP teachers were also contacted in the spring of 2014 and engaged in a semi-structured interview protocol. The dialog was both face-to-face and through written correspondence, depending on the willingness of the contacted instructor. Each follow-up interview lasted approximately 30 min. Based on prior results, teachers were asked about the impact of the BMP on their classroom practice, personal attitude changes in regards to sustainability and conservation, how they integrated technology into their classroom practices, and any examples and extension of PBE projects within their own communities that might be related to sustainability. The question regarding technology integration was a point of interest of the second author who noted in her work with these educators an increased use in technology to create collaborative communities. What these data sources allowed us to examine was teachers’ impressions of their own knowledge of sustainability practices as well as their ability to implement these ideas in the classroom both during and several years after participation in the professional development program.

Inductive methods were utilized to analyze the instructors’ responses and to identify relevant themes within the sample. Using NVivo software, reoccurring emergent codes were identified and sorted. Emergent codes that had high re-occurrence frequency were then examined a posteriori to develop relevant themes from teacher responses. The focus of this particular chapter is on teacher impacts and outcomes although student data were collected as well. The outcomes are discussed within the context of the three themes below related to educated action in science: (1) development of teacher as scientists during collaboration on research projects as a precursor to educated action, (2) teacher translation of their work on the project to educated action in their local communities, and (3) technology as a means of scaling-up educated action in science from a local to global context. We also discuss pertinent aspects of the professional development program that might have acted as the impetus to elicit these particular responses. When relevant, data is compared and contrasted longitudinally in order to get a glimpse of any sustained impacts of the BMP on outcomes of interest related to environmental sustainability and education action through the professional development experience.

Development of Teachers as Scientists

Aligned with the BMP, one of the more important goals of the project was to stimulate authentic, place-based, and community-oriented research projects for students and teachers regarding environmental sustainability. The initial objective was to promote STEM interest and cultivate an appreciation for the natural world. During the initial introduction to volunteer teacher participants we found there was little teacher experience in preparing students to ask authentic questions and in shaping the design of a research experience. Teachers brought research experiences with them but most of these experiences were bound in a classroom context and only a few had had past opportunities to conduct scientific investigations in their local community.

All the teachers interviewed agreed that the main reason they became involved in the project had to do with their own intrinsic motivations to enjoy science in a natural setting and their own desires to have students participate in authentic science research outside of the science classroom. During this process, the student participants refined their research questions over the course of 2 years with the first year on the project serving as an apprenticeship working with a more experienced collaborator on their project (much like the work of a graduate student or post-doctoral researcher).

While students and teachers were engaged in the process of refining a hypothesis statement, they were also deciding on the types of data to be collected, and they were selecting or building appropriate instrumentation and collection devices for their own projects, such as a group who had to actively seek out technological means to measure underwater sound. In order to complete projects, teachers and their students gathered at Bennett’s Millpond to collect data after school several times per week, on weekends, and during the summer.

To get a sense of the scope of some of the collaborative research projects, the titles of projects presented at the Summer Research Symposium during year seven of the BMP are listed below. The format of the presentation was akin to a research symposium in which students presented their data in paper sessions to the collected audience consisting of fellow students, educators, collaborating scientists, and the general public. Following the presentation, time was provided for questions. A formal poster symposium was held during which audience members could visit the researchers for more in-depth questions.

  • Seasonal preference of the Peromyscus gossypinus at Bennett’s Millpond

  • Nitrates and phosphates = Alligator weed?

  • Root characteristics of Ludwigia decurrens and Boehemeria

  • A comparative distribution of protists and small invertebrates in Bennett’s Millpond

  • A study of bottomland hardwood forests and channelized riparian zones in removing nutrients

  • Light wavelength effects on the propagation of duckweed in different media

  • Average size population of black crappie

  • Monthly analysis of fish sound patterns in the Millpond

  • The relationship between water loss and survival rate in wood lice

  • Effects of different light wavelengths on alligator weed growth as compared to natural light

  • Lichen distribution: Growth on cypress trees at Bennett’s Millpond

When participant teachers were initially asked about the biggest benefits of the BMP for students, most of the answers revolved around teachers’ perceptions that the program taught students more about the “realistic” aspects of science. This included ideas about how science was not methodologically limited (i.e. not conducted using only the classical scientific method). Teachers mentioned the importance of inquiry skills, critical thinking skills, learning to make observations, forming good research questions, and how science is an ever-changing enterprise as crucial learning objectives that students gained from their projects.

Interestingly, many teachers were initially concerned with their own efficacy as scientists. For example, one teacher described the benefits of the project in providing students the needed time to complete an authentic science project and also how the common expectations of standardized tests in schools do not allow students the opportunities for creativity and individual thought to be associated with science. The most commonly cited professional development benefit for each of these instructors was their training in the use of certain scientific instrumentation that they felt comfortable and confident enough to effectively use back in their classrooms, such as dissolved oxygen probes and other tools. As with many professional development opportunities the teachers appeared to focus on the career utility of the experience over professional reflection.

Results indicated that the instructors valued the place-based context of their research projects and this value had to do mostly with the authenticity and the community-embedded experience for their students. Teachers were encouraged to participate and learn more about authentic scientific inquiry as a system of exploration of sustainability. Participating teachers found collaborating with the students beneficial to their own professional development and rewarding but were largely unaware of their own development as scientists. When asked in the recent post-interviews about the professional development benefits of the project, one instructor noted the efficacy she now has with translating the research process into her classroom practice.

I have incorporated many of the professional development activities from the project into my current classroom teaching. There were PD opportunities during the year… that focused on many different topics including using the scientific process to encourage research.

Thus, we found that if teachers are to promote educated action in science to their students they must first define their own roles as scientists and have enough confidence to implement research methods in their own classrooms.

During the annual community-based symposium, students would formally share their research projects and hold an open community discussion about the state of the Millpond for the current year based on their results. A large part of conducting field science research relies on a sense of understanding of that place that develops over time from repeated exposure. From the perspectives of the teacher-participants, the students learned to be better observers of nature, developing an inherent respect for ongoing biological, chemical and physical processes that govern this ecosystem and that might impact sustainability. The Millpond Project students and teachers adopted this place as their own; they were ambassadors of sustainability for Bennett’s Millpond, sharing their expertise and their project work with many, writing mini-grants for special on-site projects, and hosting community awareness days. For the Bennett’s Millpond Environmental Learning Project participants, the understanding and personal value of place became interwoven with the practice of science that was then carried back to their own classroom instruction. The engagement with authentic research as a means of professional development changed instructor views. They reported that this greatly impacted their classroom practice.

Promoting Educated Action in Science

The 2010 Spring Symposium was opened with the following comments:

Each year, ten student/teacher teams from Chowan, Bertie, Perquimans and Gates County have been sampling water quality conditions and background microclimate information since January 2003. The student teams, consisting of two juniors and two seniors have developed focused research problems based on their observations of the Millpond. Their work is the foundation for future student researchers to use as they develop unique environmental investigations. Bennett’s Millpond holds the secrets of a past way of life in Chowan County. The exploration of the pond as a coastal ecosystem and as a community resource serves to bridge the historical past to the future.

This opening quote concisely captures the intent of the program and its message of educating students to action through community collaboration.

The BMP supported teachers on a professional development journey toward increased teacher leadership that included discipline-specific content, use of applicable field sampling and analysis technologies, extended contact with environmental specialists, development of local community liaisons, and opportunity to extend the Millpond experience into their regular classroom teaching assignment highlighting how their professional development was translated to community action related to sustainability. As a part of their community outreach, teachers helped the students organize and implement a Bennett’s Millpond Appreciation Day event, shared their work at numerous state and national conferences, connected other classes in their counties with Millpond student researchers, conducted special field trips to the Millpond, and began to extend their newly developed environmental sense of place to their own counties. Below are some anecdotes from the more recent post-interviews with participating teachers demonstrating how teachers not only utilized the experience for their own professional development, but used the experience to take educated action for sustainability in their community.

It was community-based learning in every sense. I was able to see students take pride in not only their research work, but in where they lived. Community based learning is a method of educating our students that should be implemented in all schools. I also feel as an educator I would like to be given every opportunity to share this with other teachers.

The stimulation of working on the Millpond continues today since I often take my classes to the Millpond for enrichment. The people that I met at the Millpond started to look towards me for answers about the fishing conditions and water quality of the Millpond – I was an expert. I became involved in creating a pavilion at the millpond, working with local Boy Scouts to develop several projects: duck boxes, canoe trail GPS pathways, informational nature brochures, and wooden tables. I took it upon myself to save an existing structure on the Millpond location by repairing windows and siding to keep the weather out.

Through the Bennett’s Millpond Project, I was made more aware of sustainability issues. Through various conversations with other project teachers and community members I was able to learn about various methods of sustainability such as green roofs, rain barrels, and solar energy. This has heightened my awareness about how to save energy and take care of our environment.

Sometimes as a teacher you feel like you are on an island, separated from your colleagues and other professionals. I became more at ease with communicating with others.

All of these teachers are currently strong science teacher leaders involved in many special local programs. Through participation in the program these teachers became connected with their rural community resources and some network with statewide and national agencies allowing their professional development to extend beyond teaching toward educated action. Through this experience and the development of their science identities in conjunction with the BMP, many teachers have maintained interactions with the Millpond and harnessed this local environment to take action at a broader scale through education, outreach and environmental activism.

Technology as a Promoter for Educated Action

One significant benefit of the program is that it provides a unique experience for students and teachers to engage and use innovative technologies for research in poor, rural districts that may not have the opportunity to conduct authentic science research, let alone have access to technological tools that enhance the scientific research process. The incorporation of applicable field technologies to facilitate student project data collection was a necessity; yet, few of the Millpond teachers had experience in applying technology to inquiry. Professional development on site for project teachers emphasized field science techniques for collecting data as well as managing a safe learning environment. The Millpond Project teachers were also provided guest access to online research libraries to download scientific research articles. Technology support was provided to students and teachers at schools through online access to library periodicals, digital recording devices, and expert communication forums for collaborations with science experts. These technological tools allowed teacher participants to more easily translate their own professional development into educated action that they could efficiently and effectively implement.

During the course of the project there were numerous established technologies that the students/teacher teams learned about and were trained on in order to collect regular hydrologic and meteorological data. Each team project had specific challenges associated with the collection of useful data. Many of the student projects required specialized technologies including such devices as sediment corers, stream flow meters, bottom grabs, photometers, and infrared cameras. One student team analyzed waveforms collected with a special hydrophone to correlate sound wave patterns with noises made by Millpond fish and crayfish. Another student team captured ground water level data from automated sensors placed in wells located near feeder tributaries to the Millpond. This project compared local precipitation amounts to groundwater levels around the Millpond. The teams analyzed data with programs that were specific to certain tasks including Geographic Information System (GIS) software used where spatial position was needed to enhance data understanding and display, open source software for recording and editing sounds collected with a hydrophone, online statistical tests, and several general graphical analysis programs.

The Millpond project used a variety of technology tools to assess basic conditions. Over time, this data log became a tool in itself to compare and contrast changes in the Millpond due to environmental events deviating from the norm. Students quickly learned how to use hand-held electronic weather devices to capture microclimate conditions at various locations around Bennett’s Millpond. The Kestrel® Weather Meters accurately measured temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, barometric pressure, dew point, heat index and wind chill. Rain gauges were located at the south access to the pond, and near several northern tributaries to Bennett’s Millpond. Electronic probeware for general water conditions recorded most water parameters including dissolved oxygen, pH, water temperature, conductivity, and turbidity. Students tested for nutrients with chemical test kits and compared chemical test results to electronic probe readings. The BMP used a variety of standard educational probes as well as a few professional-grade sampling instruments purchased for durability. Data were shared through The Science House at NC State University web portal that also hosted a closed discussion forum, and a file upload section for digital pictures. The practices of science were emphasized as students routinely sampled various locations around Bennett’s Millpond, regularly calibrated equipment, shared data with other teams via the web, documented locations using GPS receivers, used digital photography and video clips to capture the outdoor environmental conditions and communicated unique observations with other teams through online discussion boards. To adequately support and capture the specialized place-based learning that was occurring at Bennett’s Millpond, teachers realized the need to master many different technologies ranging from field sampling devices to electronic communication tools.

I became much more comfortable with technology because of my Millpond experience. I incorporated calculator-based lab (CBL) interfaces in many of the labs my students conducted and still use them. I also expanded field experiences for my students and introduced my inclusion students to field Biology. My students and I go down to a small park in my county located on a tributary of the Chowan River. They use CBL’s to determine temperature at various depths, conductivity and pH.

One of the most interesting and unexpected results of place-based learning investigations was the innovative technology that students developed in order to meet the needs of particular problems they faced when designing an experiment. Team project research work mirrored the engineering process as students designed specific tools and techniques to collect their samples and specimens. Project leaders and outside experts encouraged a preservation and conservation mindset. With assistance from their mentor teachers, students adapted, designed and constructed sampling devices for use in this coastal swamp environment. The ideas for many of these research team-built devices came from similar sampling devices available from suppliers. Students experienced the true feel of engineering design as they constructed and tested their sampling devices, often rethinking and redesigning when their first plan was not satisfactory. One student team built light boxes containing glow-in-the-dark sticks to attract tiny fish larvae as they documented springtime fish spawning and hatching. Another team built an array of Plexiglas plates placed at predetermined increments to study changes in colonization in the water column. This same array was also used along with a full-depth temperature probe to monitor the effects of a thermocline on colonization. The students built macropots (a milk crate containing a fish bowl with a pantyhose filter) for trapping small invertebrates at different pond locations and different depths. Other teams constructed transecting devices with bobbers to delineate measured distances from shore.

Team projects that were land-based used retractable dog leashes to drop bailers for water samples in groundwater wells, designed hinged rain gutters lined with gridded contact paper to capture tracks of small field rodents in a population border study, and built weirs to trap sediments from field runoff for nutrient testing. The technology-rich, design-inspired and student-directed research combined with a magnificent cypress swamp backdrop for exploration was a significant influence on the future career direction for many of the Millpond Project students meaning that these technology design experienced directly translated to their future educated action related to sustainability practices within their own career trajectories.

Technology development has added the ability to easily move between the two worlds of local relevance and global impact that is required for educated action in sustainability in our current age. Increased bandwidth and advances in telecommunication infrastructure to rural communities is fueling a movement toward educated action in science. Investigative strategies and data collected by teachers and students at a unique place can be shared and discussed with researchers at other localities promoting the growth and dissemination of resources that fuels educated action in other stakeholders. Teachers and students have increased confidence as citizen scientists within the community as their contributions are integrated into greater understanding of a local issue. Teachers feel empowered to share PBE strategies to guide other educators along this path. As communication technology and social media develop, communities can easily disseminate concerns and solutions and then translate these to the global community of action (Fig. 14.3).

Fig. 14.3
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A student and teacher collaborative team works with a well sensor probe to collect data for their project

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Lessons Learned

To conclude, we briefly present our findings from the program that align with each relevant programmatic objective. We only highlight those objectives that explicitly focus on teacher professional development. Where relevant we also discuss how these findings fit in the literature regarding education for sustainability and potential future directions of inquiry in this field.

Did the program actively promote the use of current and relevant science for both students and teachers? The issues that these students were dealing with in their experimental approaches are both relevant and current. They are relevant in that students are dealing with environmental issues in their own backyard. Actively participating in projects that do occur so close to where these individuals live only increases their personal relevance. At least one student stated that she collaborated with a professor at North Carolina State University in collecting her data and that reinforced a sense of relevancy. Although anecdotal in nature there is a need to examine whether PBE opportunities promote educated action in science (Birmingham & Barton, 2014) by targeting the relevancy of sustainability issues for the participants and therefore stimulating participation outside of the classroom learning environment.

Did the program encourage participation in authentic science research of both teachers and students in high schools? In interviews, students and teachers highlighted the fact that by participating in this project they were introduced to an authentic mode of science exploration. This program encourages that participation by providing a location along with resources that allow both students and teachers to participate in this process with relative ease. It is difficult to make definitive conclusions about this particular objective within the context of our limited data, but we note that when interviewed more recently the majority of our participants were still involved with the BMP in local agendas. We hypothesize that the in-depth embedded research that this provided allowed for sustained engagement of teachers as a form of professional development that might be particularly powerful in promoting educated action for sustainability (Ferrieira, Ryan, & Tilbury, 2007).

Did the project reduce the isolation of rural students and teachers from science? Both students and teachers were immersed in the science that they were doing at the Millpond. During observation it was obvious that many students were not only becoming more comfortable with their place in the environmental world, but also in how to ask questions and seek scientific means with which to answer those questions. Millpond Project teachers networked on a larger scale as they presented place-based environmental science and sustainable technology sessions each year at regional, state and national science conferences. Again, the reduction in isolation is likely an impetus for education action in science that goes beyond education for sustainability in the classroom context (Birmingham & Barton, 2014).

Did the program promote and develop collaborations with local, state, and national scientists; schools and the community through the student research symposium, interactive websites, distance learning opportunities, and by constructing an action plan for rural classrooms to use as a framework for studying coastal ecology? Collaborations were constructed at a local level, with students working across grade levels and with members of other local county schools. Teachers also benefited from this interaction. Opportunities for interaction with environmental professionals occurred mostly during the weeklong summer institutes, but support and assistance was provided from wildlife managers, fisheries biologists and university professors for student projects throughout the school year.

Closing

A transformation in schools and communities is underway, changing our understanding of the value of place from a local view to a broader global perspective. This seems to be driven by advances in data collection and communication technologies. Successful preparation of youth for responsible citizenship and meaningful contribution to a global society is the result of an equal emphasis on the experiential process as well as curriculum-guided content mastery. In addition, newly emerging pedagogical sustainability frameworks and learning objects such as those provided by the Next Generation Science Standards will challenge students and teachers alike in translating their learning to educated action in sustainability (Feinstein & Kirchgasler, 2015). Much of this successful preparation lies in the hands of science educators who must have opportunities for professional development to properly prepare them to educate others in this particular challenging field of education for sustainability (Kilinc & Aydin, 2013). Inspiration and passion for learning are ignited as sophisticated technologies help record subtle changes in our local world, aid in understanding what questions should be asked and enhance the science dialog at all levels. These technologies are powerful tools as they provide scientific details about familiar surroundings adding dimension to neighborhood places; as data fills in the spaces, the learner has a framework for educated action in science.

A classroom-oriented inquiry activity will grow into a community PBE project with support from multiple partners, schools administration and community leaders, thus empowering educators to develop their research identities, embrace diverse viewpoints and solutions, and lead others in innovative uses of applicable instructional technology. Students using environmental field-based technologies explore career level problem solving as they make decisions about data collection locations and strategies. When students and teachers are challenged to be the solution, PBE pedagogies in local context provide a pathway toward greater knowledge of global scale environmental issues.