Page 115 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

92 K. Love et al.

choose to work on this project the following year with the ground work already
established for them. Each time, a new avenue of the project would become
investigated.
While I know some teachers or teacher educators may cringe at the use of a
model or framework, the reality is that teachers and students do not always come
to the table equipped to ask questions that will take them to “next steps,” or
actions. Without appropriate scaffolding, as suggested by Peter above, students
and their teachers could potentially lose the interest that is needed to propel impor-
tant environmental programs. Frameworks create a conversation. They can be
changed with time. One change for the Youth Summit was acknowledging the
importance of a community inventory. The KGHS inventories are large sets of
questions constructed by experts on nine different topics that students download
from the Internet and answer with their teachers. Some inventories are difficult
and most require talking with adults at the school or district levels. If students
begin to lose interest in completing the inventory, I go to the school and support
them in making a decision to complete the inventory, and work with them to do
as much as they want to do, before going on to the next step, or go to a completely
different questionnaire. I find that once I do this, students understand that they
can make appropriate decisions that matter to them and still continue with our
program. The CAPS program asks teachers to take their students on a community
walk (generally around their school building), where students are asked to make
observations and inferences, and ask questions about their student-defined com-
munity. I have worked with many teachers who needed support for how to do this
community walk by pointing out what they could be looking at and suggesting
ways for them to involve community professionals who can lead the students.
This type of support provides for more informed inventories from which other
student groups can continue to work with the project. Through our involvement
from the institute, we are able to support teachers in their process of involving
students in the ownership of selecting good experts and how these professionals
can be contacted. These examples serve to elaborate points made in Roth’s article
about the relevance of experts.
Since incorporating the KGHS and CAPS programs, we have had to limit the
number of schools that participate in the Environmental Youth Summit. The breakout
sessions emphasize the use of tools and skills necessary to collect, analyze, and
interpret both quantitative and qualitative data in six different topics. Last semester,
these topics included greenspaces, transportation, energy consumption, solid waste,
storm-water runoff, and carbon sequestration. The breakout sessions end with an
explicit discussion of how what the students learned can be implemented into their
schools in different ways. We have added a “showcase of schools” component,
where students share what they are working on with other students, community
members, and administrators. We also have started a new mentor program where
community experts are trained to support the ongoing projects when requested by
students in between Youth Summits.
Students and their teachers are now working beyond the frameworks offered
and are beginning to develop their own approaches to community-embedded