Instructor: Larry Boese, College of Education
Description: Although environmental education (EE) has received a substantial amount of official support from California policy makers in the last two decades, to a large extent it remains an “inconvenient truth” in terms of its actual implementation as an integral part of the taught curriculum in the State’s public schools and classrooms. Within the traditional confines of the core subjects, English language arts, mathematics, science, and history/social science, EE is too often an add-on, side bar, after-thought to classroom instruction. Some advocates of EE argue that we may need to fundamentally re-think and re-design both the content and structure of the public-school curriculum and how it is taught if we are to truly prepare our youth, not only to comprehend complex environmental issues and challenges but also how to effectively address them as active participants in society, economy, and the political system.
This class will provide students with the opportunity to critically reflect on the environmental education they experience as k-12 students, especially at the high-school level and to examine California’s EE policy initiatives and some of the EE curriculum resources that have been created and compiled as a part of this effort. Students will also participate in focused field research on how and to what extent EE is currently being delivered in public schools in the Davis vicinity and the larger Sacramento region. Finally, students will be introduced to a range of philosophical and ideological perspectives on EE that they will apply to a critical evaluation of their EE experiences, findings for the field research, and a review of the content of an actual EE curriculum resource developed as a part of California’s EE initiative.
Students will learn about California’s environmental education initiative and curriculum resources through reading and review of primary documents; they will gain experience in field research in schools; they will learn about different philosophical perspectives on EE and use this as a framework for evaluating EE as the taught curriculum they experienced and investigated; and through these activities, they will clarify their own environmental values and their understanding of the role that EE does and should serve in preparing us as citizens to confront the environmental issues and challenges that our society is facing.Format: The seminar will meet for one hour a week for each week of the Spring 2007 term. As the instructor I will assist students in designing a common interview protocol, with which they will arrange to interview principals and at least one teacher in public schools in the region. Students will be able to visit school sites as individuals or teams, and will help select the sites to be visited. If site visits are not feasible, telephone interviews may be used as an alternative method for collecting information on the EE taught curriculum at selected schools. Students will also be asked to read a limited set of chapters from books on environmental education that will be put on Reserve in the Shields library. These combined activities should result in no more than five hours of work per week on average beyond the one-hour seminar. Grading: Grading will be determined on the basis of the following assignments and activities, with each representing about 25% of the grade: (1) attendance and participation in seminar meetings; (2) a short paper based on students’ critical self-reflection on their own k-12 EE experiences and learning; (3) a brief report of findings based on interviews conducted with staff of at least one school site regarding EE in its classrooms; and a brief critique of at least one EE curriculum resource developed as part of California’s public EE initiative.
About the Instructor: Larry Boese is a Lecturer for the UCD School of Education, where he received his Ph.D. in Education. He also has an M.S. in Ecology with an emphasis in human ecology from the UCD Graduate Group in Ecology. He has had a strong interest in environmental education since his years as an undergraduate student, and he is interested in creating opportunities for UCD students to learn about environmental education and prepare to make their own contributions in this critical area, particularly at the elementary and secondary school levels.