I am a doctoral student in Learning Sciences and Human Development. My research interests are in early childhood science learning and family/community leadership and engagement. Utilizing participatory design research methods, I am interested in co-creating equitable spaces for families, communities, educators, and researchers to design and implement (and re-design) early learning environments that foster expansive forms of science education. I am a research assistant on the Family Leadership Design Collaborative project and the Learning in Places project. I am also a mom of two vibrant, amazing girls.
Anna Johnson is a Research and Education Associate for Tilth Alliance. Before becoming an informal educator, she received a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a Minor in French from Calvin College in 2012. She has worked with community members of all ages around growing and cooking food. For four years, she served as a community partner on a research project around food access and food security in Michigan. In 2017, she returned to the Pacific Northwest and continued her work in informal education with Pacific Science Center and now with Tilth Alliance. She enjoys learning about the natural world through place-based science investigations.
Maren Neldam is the Youth Education Program Manager at Tilth Alliance. She has been working in place-based environmental and food systems education for 10 years, and previously worked in sustainable agriculture and river restoration. In her roles at Tilth, she has worked with people of all ages to steward land, grow food, and cook in community. This includes leading science-based outdoor education in school gardens and public green spaces, facilitating workshops for teachers and families on sustainable school garden program development and outdoor education, and supporting design and development of school and community gardens. She is passionate to learn about complex systems and participate in community driven solutions to environmental and food issues.
Our design principles are based on the idea that power and historicity shape all science education and need to be explicitly addressed in the design of our project and in our model for field-based science learning.
Alice Tsoodle is a proud mom of three amazing children. She comes from the Kiowa people of Oklahoma and is also descendent of Irish settlers. Her interests and experiences include walking with and learning from children as they reclaim their relationships with lands, waters and more than human relatives. She holds a masters degree in education (UW), a bachelors in environmental studies (UWB) and certificates in education for environment and community (IW), restoration ecology (UW), and permaculture (OSU). Her work specializes in community outreach, program development, outdoor environmental education, curriculum design, and learning sciences research.
Creative Kids Learning Center at Viewlands Elementary
Creative Kids was recently featured in the Washington Post as one of the first educational centers to participate in the Seattle Public Preschool Program. We have a second preschool location at the Carkeek Park Environmental Learning Center. During summers, I work with preschool through fifth grade students implementing and participating in their outdoor summer daycamp adventures. The Viewlands students and their families help us maintain the garden and outdoor learning areas each summer at the school. We harvest berries and apples at Carkeek Park and use them in our classroom. At Creative Kids we explore ways to eat and make better-tasting, fresher and healthier foods while learning about science and the environment.
Kate Bedient
Director of Urban School Programs, IslandWood
Kate’s formative years were spent on the ancestral land of the Oneida people of Upstate New York, collecting fireflies and cooking up batches of mud soup. These experiences, coupled with a life-long interest in scientific and nature-based inquiry, eventually led Kate to the National Park Service, The Pacific Science Center and The North Cascades Institute. On becoming a land-owner in Seattle, Kate’s focus within the field of environmental education shifted. This pivotal life moment lead her down the path of exploring the many layers and complexities of urban environments (both built and natural) and the systems of inequities that continue to affect how (and by whom) land is used in cities. At IslandWood (where she has worked since 2010), Kate leads our Urban School Programs team and is honored to work with a rock star group of individuals who are committed to up-ending the dominant narrative and addressing the inequities in both the environmental and education fields. Kate is also a mother, an experience that has solidly reinforced her views on the importance of empathy, compassion, and mindfulness in learning environments. If asked what single food item she would bring with her to a deserted island, there would be no question that the answer would be a jug of Grade A Dark Maple Syrup from the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.
Cheri Bloom
Les Dames d’Escoffier Green Tables
Cheri Bloom’s expertise is in horticulture education and delivering agriculturally focused curriculum to the classroom. Her award winning Greenhouse and Sustainability Program at Montlake Elementary School provided K-5thgrade children with the essentials for a healthy diet and sustainable gardening education for over sixteen years. Presently Cheri is a member of Les Dames d’Escoffier Green Tables which supports projects centered around funding programs focused on education on all aspects of growing, sourcing and preparing nutritious food.
Belinda Chin
Seattle Parks and Rec
Belinda Chin is the Program Coordinator for the Urban Food Systems (UFS) Program at Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR). She oversees 23+ acres of SPR public space dedicated to growing food. Gardens and orchards are used for community-building efforts built on diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. By working in partnership with community organizations and other city departments, their collective actions aspire topromote public health and culturally relevant food access; support local economic development; provide services to improve the quality of life for residents through engagement with their environments and neighbors; and lead efforts to restore a healthy environment. This is particularly meaningful for Ms. Chin, the daughter of immigrants who fled their homeland to escape a war shattered environment and agonizing poverty. Her family’s pursuit of culturally relevant food resulted in lasting impressions about boundaries, specifically those that discriminate by race, class, and place. Ms. Chin is a long-time advocate of the City of Seattle’s Race & Social Justice (RSJ) Initiative and is a co-lead of SPR’s RSJ Change Team.
The advisory board includes national leaders in science education, ecological cognition, design research, and learning gardens.
Douglas Medin
Professor, Cognitive Science and Learning Sciences, Northwestern University
Douglas Medin has expertise in culture, ecosystems cognition, and science education.
Heidi Carlone
Associate Professor, Teacher Education and Higher Education, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Heidi Carlone has expertise in science learning and identity and a focus on outdoor environment science learning.
Dilafruz Williams
Professor, Educational Leadership and Policy at Portland State University (PSU)
She has served as Chair of the Board of the Council of the Great City Schools, Director of Community-University Partnerships at PSU and is cofounder of Portland school district’s Environmental Middle School and Leadership for Sustainability Education at PSU, where she established a master’s level academic program, and initiated, designed, and supported Learning Gardens at several schools addressing local farm-to-school food and nutrition issues and integration into major curricular goals.
Human communities have always made socio-ecological decisions. From choices about what to eat, where to live, how to get around, to whether water is safe to drink, amongst many others. These choices are shaped by our values and cultural practices and fundamentally reflect what we call construals of nature-culture relations. Nature-cultural relations are the ways human communities construct their ways of thinking and being (everyday, institutional, legal, etc.) with the natural world.
All social and ecological systems interact in a complex web of relations across time and place. These are referred to as socio-ecological systems. Understanding complex socio-ecological systems is increasingly important in a world that is socially and ecologically shifting at rapid rates. For example, it is important for people to be able to reason about patterns in the Earth’s climate or diversity of life. Systems reasoning, or being able to understand properties and behaviors of systems, is an academic demand in science learning environments but also increasingly a demand of everyday communal life.
Modeling and forming explanations are two critical ways that scientists build knowledge and then test, critique, and revise that knowledge. They are tools that scientists use to help them make sense of the world, and field-based scientists are no exception. When learners engage in field-based science, they can use the models and explanations they construct based on data and evidence to help them engage in ethical deliberation and decision-making about socio-ecological phenomena and the complex socio-ecological systems of which they are a part.
Research has shown that when learner questions are centered in science activities, those questions can drive sense making and guide the formation of field-based investigations.
La investigación ha demostrado que cuando las preguntas del alumno se centran en actividades científicas, esas preguntas pueden impulsar la búsqueda de sentido y guiar la formación de investigaciones basadas en el campo.
The term place in socio-ecological systems refers to both geographical locations as well as communities’ lived experiences in and with the natural environment. Our understanding of place is shaped by family and cultural histories, knowledges and practices, and consists of interdependent and powered relationships across local and global scales. Place, put simply, is where and how culture and the environment are co-constructed. As an educator, it is important to be aware of the multiple histories of a place, and to recognize that you, learners, and their families and communities may have very different histories and relationships to that place. This is critical to educating and designing learning opportunities in and with places.
Now that you have reflected on your meaning-making from your model, your data (from investigations and community members) and your research on what people already know about your “Should We” question, you’re ready to make a decision about your “Should We” question and share it with others. This activity will take you through some steps to consider as you decide what you should do.
Constructing knowledge about seasons and the earth’s rhythms and patterns is something that culture communities across the earth have done since time immemorial. Engaging these cycles and rhythms has been central to how societies have developed specific nature-culture relations and the routine practices of human activity. Over time, scientists have come to call the study of seasonal impacts on plant and animal life cycles, including humans, Phenology!
Construya conocimiento sobre las temporadas y el ritmo y patrones de la tierra es algo que las comunidades con cultura a través de la tierra han hecho desde tiempo inmemorial. Involucrar estos ciclos y ritmos ha sido fundamental a cómo las sociedades han desarrollado relaciones específicas de naturaleza-cultura y prácticas rutinarias de actividad humana. Con el tiempo, científicos han llegado a llamar fenología el estudio de los impactos de las temporadas de los ciclos de la vida de animales y plantas, incluyendo humanos, ¡Fenología!
Interdependent relationships undergird all aspects of socio-ecological systems, are dynamic and shift across time, space, and levels of organization. Research shows that sensemaking across these multiple shifting scales requires intentional scaffolding, particularly for young learners and is necessary for complex socio-ecological systems learning.
Now that you’ve made a decision about your “Should We” question, your decision becomes much more powerful when you share it with others! In this activity, you’ll decide on some ways to share your decision, why you think the decision is important, and what you hope to accomplish.
El poder y la historicidad propagan todos los aspectos de los sistemas socio ecológicos. Este marco proporciona una descripción general de la formas en que el poder y la históricas, así como algunas dimensiones rutinarias asociadas con el poder y la historicidad en un contexto estadounidense, están presentes en los entornos de aprendizaje y dan forma a las interacciones a nivel individual e institucional. Este marco está destinado a articular algunos conceptos clave y puede apoyar el desarrollo de orientaciones y prácticas que transformen las formas normativas de poder y privilegio y comprometan al alumno, la familia y la agencia comunitaria hacia formas de aprendizaje y ser éticas, justas y sostenibles.
Power and historicity permeate all aspects of socio-ecological systems. This framework provides an overview of the ways power and historicity, as well as some routine dimensions associated with power and historicity in a US context, are present in learning environments and shape interactions at individual and institutional levels. This framework is intended to articulate some key concepts, and can support the development of orientations and practice that transform normative forms of power and privilege and engage learner, family, and community agency towards ethical, just, and sustainable forms of learning and being.
This framework 1) identifies several models of family engagement that support or hinder familial & communal thriving and learning across places; and 2) proposes key shifts in family engagement that can support transformational partnerships towards familial and communal thriving and learning across places.
Observations are a multi-sensory way of noticing and learning about socio-ecological phenomena in the world. Through scaffolding and guidance, systematic observations can become a form of data collection. This framework is intended to support educators in facilitating and scaffolding observations and data collection in field-based learning environments.
Desde nuestras elecciones cotidianas hasta cómo construimos comunidades (incluso en entornos urbanos densos), pasando por la política nacional y global, casi todos los aspectos de nuestra toma de sentido, decisiones e infraestructura social están moldeados por concepciones construidas culturalmente de las relaciones humanas con el mundo natural a lo que llamamos relaciones de la naturaleza y la cultura.
From our everyday choices, to how we build communities (even in dense urban environments), to national and global policy, nearly every aspect of our sensemaking, decisions, and societal infrastructure are shaped by culturally constructed conceptions of human relations with the natural world–what we refer to as nature-culture relations.
