This poster session was about Digital Observation Technology Skills (DOTS) program, an environmental education approach that engages K-12 students across Wisconsin in water quality monitoring activities. The session highlighted successes and learning opportunities from year one of the project based on evaluation results and discussed their significance for best EE practice.

Calling all Urban Engineers: You are the director of this Anthropo(s)cene! Our citizens need your help designing their future. Your objective is to take ancient wisdom and combine it with cutting-edge ideas to create resilient and adaptable cities! Using tools like systems thinking, causal maps, story chips and hands-on models, your team will define the big ideas, design for a specific geography & climate, test the resiliency of your design and ultimately tell your city story. Our future depends on how we decide to shape it!

This presentation addresses educational processes that have resulted in citizens who embrace environmental stewardship and are active contributors to a healthy, sustainable society. The presentation has been framed around the current research of two integrated curriculum programs that have demonstrated long-term learning outcomes related to active citizenship.

This presentation shares research describing features of the learning environment linked to the long-term learning outcome of active citizenship. It tells the story of how the learning environment in a high school integrated studies program contributed to the development of citizens that embrace environmental stewardship and are active contributors to a healthy, sustainable society.

For over 20 years, the Field Museum's Action Center has engaged more than 100,000 students in conservation work throughout Chicago. Staff will share lessons learned from their community-based model. Attendees will gain insight into building stakeholder partnerships, measuring outcomes, working with volunteers, and ensuring that students make contributions to conservation.

Learn about a Green Schools program that partners schools with their local government to increase environmental literacy in the community. It provides educators with resources to connect classroom concepts with the city where students live. Partners will share strategies to increase local environmental education opportunities and offer advice for collaborating with local schools.

Biomimicry is an approach to innovation that develops sustainable design solutions by studying and applying functional strategies and patterns exhibited in nature. At a time when many students have a fractured relationship to nature, biomimicry-based learning offers a profound shift in how we view and value the natural world and an exciting context for teaching STEM and environmental literacy. This Bright Spot session featured the Biomimicry Youth Design Challenge (YDC), a free project-based learning program hosted by the Biomimicry Institute and pilot tested in spring 2018. The YDC challenges student teams to create biomimetic solutions to a climate change problem. Teachers are provided with a biomimicry design curriculum (co-authored with EcoRise) and a variety of other supports. Visit youthchallenge.biomimicry.org to register and learn more.

We’ll introduce the NSF-funded Comp Hydro project and demonstrate activities that develop hydrologic and computational knowledge as well as practice through NGSS-aligned instruction. Using the East Helena Superfund Site as a context, students become groundwater scientists, through connected experiences with phenomena, data, and modeling, then develop a plan for remediation of groundwater contamination.

This mixed methods study evaluated the validity, and reliability of a scoring guide designed to assess a middle school student’s proficiency in systems thinking as described in the 2010 Oregon Environmental Literacy Plan. The commonalities between formal and non-formal educators revealed a high level of validity for the construct of proficiency with systems thinking, and a moderate level of reliability between the scores assigned by two groups of educators. In the words of the middle school students, formal, and non-formal educators, who volunteered to create the scoring guide, the ability to make responsible decisions with natural systems, community, and the future in mind involves: 1) creating solutions for systems that are not in balance; 2) presenting the complex inner workings of a system in a simple and succinct way; 3) collaborating; 4) exploring multiple solutions; and 5) sharing ideas in a way that people will understand you.

During this session, we will demonstrate how correlating to NGSS and STEM builds environmental literacy that supports both the Service mission and formal and non-formal educators. We’ll also share best practices and examples of curriculum throughout the Service that correlate to STEM and NGSS.