Keturah Ashfield, Environmental Education Teacher
THE INNOVATION:
Teaching Environmental Education to elementary school students through both classroom instruction, outdoor exploration and garden work at a public Montessori school.
Keturah Ashfield, Environmental Education Teacher at Eagle Peak Montessori School
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Excerpts:
- [The students] already have this innate sense of their responsibility to the planet already. And so its almost like “Duh, we knew that, well of course we have to take care of the earth. We are humans, we are at the top of the food chain and we do all this stuff. So it’s our responsibility [to take care of the planet.]” Its so cool to see that that is their natural instinct.
- [The students] know where their food comes from. They know a seed turns into a sprout and that turns into a plant that they eat and it also drops seeds... and its a whole cycle. Everything in nature is a cycle. Every time they learn one cycle they go and learn another one. It all connects... they see how the water cycle connects to this, and recycling is a cycle too. They really see how everything connects together.
- It’s amazing that [this environmental education program] is in a public school because it is just so rare. Even nowadays art and PE and music are rare in public schools. There is just so much funding being cut... and our school we have all of those things still and environmental education. I strongly believe that this class is as important as math, and history.
- There is lots of money out there for creating school gardens right now. There is a lot of money in grants. I spend a lot of my non-teaching time trying to get money so that I can enhance the program at the school. I can definitely see [school gardens] being scaled up so long as fundraising and grant writing keeps up.
- We usually do an indoor lesson to start out with... whatever I am doing in the classroom, I want to try to connect it with what is going on outside. So if we are studying birds and looking at books and doing drawings, then I want to be able to take them outside so they can see what they are studying. So I take them outside with little notebooks so they can record their observations. It’s not me showing them, they just get to sit and observe.
- I do a lot of lessons on not taking more than you need, and what happens when you do. And that could be anything from when poachers hunt elephants for their ivory and waste everything else, to talking about native americans and how they were sustainable, and that they never took more than they needed, and then comparing that by doing a lesson on packaging... One time I had all the students bring all their lunches in and we talked about “this is a reusable container, but all of this has to go into the landfill.”
- We did a food bank project where we went and visited a food bank... and then they came back to the garden and planted a bed of swiss chard. The swiss chard was harvested and we brought it back to the food bank... and gave it to some of the families there.
- I feel really lucky to be working at a public school, where I get to decide what I want to teach.
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