A Teacher Fellowship Program: Integrating Place-Based Sustainability Education into K - 12 Classrooms

Abstract

The Dow Innovation Teacher Fellowship (DITF), sponsored by Dow Chemical, aims to provide educators with more support as they become stewards of the environment. DITF is implemented through the University of Michigan’s Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER). DITF supports professional development of teachers in the SaginawMidland-Bay tri-city area of Michigan on sustainability education methods, through professional development opportunities. The program integrates sustainability across school subjects, to support the execution of interdisciplinary sustainability learning units in middle and high school classrooms, using project and place-based pedagogical methods. This project leveraged a targeted qualitative research process (under IRB exemption number HUM00165059) by UM School for Environment and Sustainability (UMSEAS) graduate students to enrich the pilot year of the DITF program. We began in Spring 2019, conducting an annotated literature review about place-based and environmental education, as well as other approaches to sustainability learning. The idea being to benchmark for professional development activities on best practices with incoming fellows in addition to professionals interested in this work. As the cohort embarked on designing sustainability learning units for their respective classrooms further research was conducted to monitor their progress. Research methods included: ● Documentation of Fellows early progress on developing learning units through semi structured entry interviews ● Track challenges and collaborative successes through participant observations and touchpoint interviews ● Evaluate learning experiences for educators, civic partners, and students through concept maps and exit interviews ● Analyze all observations, interviews, and media to design a case study on one Fellows experience with the program utilizing supportive information from other cohort members. Interviews were transcribed and coded using Dedoose software. Interviews enabled us to elicit feedback, provide suggestions for future DITF growth, and recruit and train for a second cohort in Spring 2020. Interviews also allowed us to select from among the cohort a focal “case” from which other educators, school administrators and civic partners can learn about evolving best practices through the perspective of Phil Schwedler. An online case study is pertinent especially in the current time (we are currently in the global CoVid-19 pandemic) as shifts to online learning are becoming more prominent. We scoped the resultant learning case through analysis of our qualitative data and a series of case conceptualization workshops alternately held in the gala platform offices at UMSEAS and at CEDER in the UM School of Education. The case, hosted on Gala, an open access platform www.learngala.com, follows Phil, an eighth-grade teacher from Freeland Middle School in Bay City, Michigan from the summer professional development workshop through lesson creation and implementation, to mentoring others participating in similar work. Trying something new as a teacher is always risky but teaching in times of environmental crisis brings new challenges. The DITF Program offers supportive partnerships and professional development experiences for educators; the collaboration between UM SEAS and CEDER displays how support can be paid forward through agile, responsively designed, learning tools for integrating modules on emerging fields of knowledge in environmental curricula. A note to the reader: The purpose of this research was to develop an inaugural CEDER Michigan Sustainability Case Study about how teachers develop and implement place-based sustainability education. The case is set up to narrate these experiences in order to reach a broad range of audiences with specific helpful insights to aid educators and other sustainability education organizations in their future endeavors with this work. Michigan Case Studies are one library of modules showcased on learngala.com. What follows is the main content of the case study, in text form. For a more interactive experience, follow this link to see our case study on the Gala platform. Learning Questions 1. What is the importance of place-based learning in terms of sustainability education? 2. What methods and modalities can educators use for sustainability education? 3. How can we better support our educators as they help us learn more about the environments we live in? 4. How can place-based sustainability education inspire future environmental leaders?