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Idyllic paradise? Check

Sunshine and rainbows? Check

Beautiful beaches? Check

Laid back lifestyle? Check

And the list goes on……..who wouldn’t want to move to Hawaii?  They say money makes the world go around.  Well not so in Hawaii.  Or at least, you need a lot of it to get anywhere.  Sure you can survive here with less, but that is easier said than done when you have a family to feed.  This is a major problem in Hawaii that is plaguing many in my field of wildlife biology.  You don’t see a lot off biologists here with families, and those you do see have a handful of other jobs up their sleeves to make ends meet.  It’s not just that the costs are higher here, it’s that there are less resources too.  It is difficult to find reliable daycare, and very difficult to find a reliable school.  So many of the public schools here are being plagued by the same problem.  People say the public schools are bad here.  I don’t think they are necessarily bad, they follow a similar curriculum compared to schools in the rest of the U.S.  And there are good teachers, I have personally met many of them.  But the problem is retaining those good teachers.  This article explaining why so many teachers bail on Hawaii public schools sums it up pretty nicely.   The bottom line?  Teachers simply aren’t getting paid enough.  How do you put a value on education?  Is private school really better than public school?  

I was fortunate enough to attend both public and private schools, a total of 2 public and 2 private schools.  I have to say both private schools I attended focused a lot more on language instruction and creative writing, and challenged me by placing me in more advanced classes backed up with regular counseling sessions to keep me on track.  In contrast, it was actually hard for me to advance in public school.  I was put in the lowest level math class despite having near perfect test scores, and despite my requests to be moved up, was still put in just one level up (from lower remedial to remedial) the following year.  At that rate, I would have only reached the most advanced math class in my graduating year.  It was difficult for me to get a personal audience with the teachers at my public high school whereas I had a lot of personal communication with my teachers at my private high school.  This level of individual attention and personal connection with all my teachers at my private school made all the difference in my opinion, along with the heavy emphasis on very structured and rigorous language instruction which I think is one of the most relevant, transferable, and useful skills you can have.  The private schools I experienced constantly challenged and pushed students and I think this ultimately benefited me as well.  From my experience, I would favor private schools over public schools, but I would of course do my research beforehand.  Public schools vary greatly, and although Hawaii’s public schools may have a bad rep overall, there is obviously a spectrum of quality.  There are some really great public schools out there.

Ultimately, I think the decision lies in getting involved as a parent.  Doing your research, visiting schools, talking to other parents and teachers, and deciding what’s best for your child’s needs.

In my last post, I described a case study that I came up for a course in which I gave a guest lecture. Because I have already described the course and case study, I will not rehash those details in this post. Please refer to Posting #1 for those details if interested. This second posting is really just to express my thoughts on how this real world case study example went, things that worked well and things that did not, and what I might do differently next time around to improve the case study’s application in a PBL setting.

Things that worked well:

Small class size – About 10 students attended the class that day. This extremely small group size allowed me to interact with every student in the class. I found interacting with each student to be very helpful because even in a class this small, there were 2 or 3 students who immediately stood out as taking the lead in the discussion. Interacting with all the students helped me to involve the other less vocal students, who still had very important and valid things to say but needed encouragement to make themselves heard among the more vocal students in the class. I was surprised by this dynamic because for some reason, I thought that a smaller group size would change the dynamic for less outgoing students, make them more likely to become outgoing and take a lead in discussions. But I found, even in small groups, there are still those few outgoing students who immediately take the lead. I am not against outgoing students, but as a previously shy student myself, I think disrupting this pattern of a few outgoing students leading the class is key to successfully implementing PBL. I think participation by every student on as much of an even level as possible is very beneficial to the class as a whole. Everyone gets to participate, leaders have the opportunity to hear the opinions of less outgoing students and the unspoken are encouraged to have their opinions heard.

Role playing – I ended up splitting the class into two groups, each with about 5 students. Group A was to imagine that they were off-road vehicle users and Group B was to imagine they were bird watchers. These interest groups have completely opposing views in the case study (refer to Posting #1 for more details). I then asked the two groups what they value most and what they would be willing to compromise on. I found that splitting the class into 2 opposing groups worked well because this encouraged some friendly rivalry and also the students got to learn two sides to the story from their fellow classmates.

Things that didn’t work so well:

Time constraint – I would have loved to do more with this class, but the time I was allotted for this lecture was 50 minutes. It still worked out alright because the class was so small but I had to leave out a lot of details from the case study and I feel we only just scratched the surface of key sticking points in this case study. But this brings me to a much larger important point. I find time constraints are a problem for pedagogy in general. This class that I guest lectured in for instance, has such a jam packed syllabus. I think back to my undergraduate degree and even high school. If I think of what I was being taught on a daily basis, I feel as if the main aim of my education has been to cram as much information in my head in as little time as possible. And the same goes for my dissertation work. I feel as if I should be reading many more papers and exploring some aspects of my project in much finer detail, but I simply do not have the time because of all my long laundry list of other tasks I must complete to “get the job done”. This problem I think speaks to a larger movement that has repeatedly come up in GEDI class. The world is become ever more connected, resulting in a mind-boggling rate of information flow that is affecting every single aspect of our lives. If time travel were possible, my main interest in going forward or backward in time is to see how time management has been altered through the years. Were we always like this? Running around trying to cram as much into our busy lives as possible? Imagining what life would be like without electricity probably conjures up images for many of folks sitting by the light of a candle….reading, telling stories. But I have a different image in my mind. I think of a family, waking up at dawn to tend to their cows, chickens, and goats. Rushing to prepare their fields and gardens for planting so that they can have enough food to outlast the following winter. Washing clothes, baking bread, gathering and preserving food, taking care of children, dealing with everyday injuries…..all without any modern technology. I often hear people comment about how bored folks must have been without modern technology. I think on the contrary, they would not have had time to be bored, they barely had time to ensure they made it through the winter. I started gardening a few years ago, at first just a few vegetables. Now I have a much wider array and I do preserve my meager harvest as a hobby. But this takes up so much time that some years, I can’t do it because the dissertation work and other life demands wins out, even when I do try to plan way in advance. If I can barely fit in this one task, I can’t imagine having to do at least twenty other tasks in one day that demand just as much attention. To summarize this long thought, I think time constraints are not a result of modern technology, but an inherent part of our life. I think modern technology has changed we interpret and view time constraints, but I think time will always be a huge constraint as long as we exist. I think we have to ask ourselves not how we should best manage our time but what is the main thing guiding how we manage our time. Is it a form of modern technology? What form of modern technology? How can we use this technology to shape how we manage time?

What I might do differently next time around:

I don’t have time (haha) to answer the questions I ask above. I think for the limited aims of this course (because the main aim of the course it seems is to expose students to a little bit of every kind of wildlife management out there and not go into depth with anything), I would not change anything, because I feel I accomplished my goal in giving students a taste of what coastal management is like. But I do feel that had this been my course, I would have been faced with the very hard decision to either give students a taste of everything OR leave out some kinds of wildlife management in order to really delve into one kind. I think if it were up to me, I might have given serious consideration to the latter option because  there are a lot of similarities among the different kinds of wildlife management, but you are never going to get a true sense for the level of some challenges that you will inevitably face in wildlife management if you do not truly get involved in a real life case study. I cannot change this within the confines of one guest lecture, so I will summarize here by saying I think the students came away with a sense of some of the challenges inherent in coastal management and that I would use this case study again because it can be easily modified to achieve a wide range of teaching goals. It could even be simplified for a much larger gen ed class, although I highly doubt 50 minutes would be enough time with such a large group.

I am guest lecturing for a fellow teacher’s undergraduate  course next week. What a perfect opportunity to apply all the knowledge I have gained about case based teaching! (Thank you GEDI’s, Shelli, and Sarah Karpanty!). This is my first of a series of postings chronicling my experience with actual case based teaching, through which I will outline what worked, what didn’t work, and what challenges I encountered in applying my case study.

But first thing’s first, let me tell you a little about the course I am guest lecturing for. Wildlife Habitat Ecology and Management (FIW 4434) is a senior level course with approximately 16 students. Students are from a mix of Fish and Wildlife, Forestry, Geography, and Natural Resources Conservation backgrounds. So far, with this being a small group and composed of students that already have knowledge of the environmental sciences, it seems like it will be easy to come up with a case study for this course. I am going to teaching the students about Coastal Habitat Management, and I have the perfect case study for that. My case is super controversial, has been an issue for decades, and perfectly exemplifies some of the extreme challenges that habitat managers come up against in coastal areas.

Here’s a quick run-down of my case study:

The problem is common to just about any national seashore in the United States that allows beach driving, but I am focusing on Cape Hatteras National Seashore because the disagreement between two opposing sides of the issue I am about to explain has escalated to a point of ridiculousness. The anger that this problem has incited between off-road vehicle users and conservationists is so intense that you would think we were talking about a matter of life or death. Well actually, it sort of is, from the standpoint of some wildlife species at least. So what is this problem anyway?

I will get to it, but first a little necessary background. Yellowstone, the first National Park was designated in 1872 as a “public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” This set a precedent for recreation over conservation. It wasn’t until the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 that wildlife and their habitat were given specific protection within national parks. The act presented a huge challenge for the National Park Service because of the large number of parks in the United States that together cover an extremely wide range of wildlife habitat. With this comes a variety of different climatic zones, human population densities, and other factors that need to be individually accounted for in any management policies.

If you’re interested in more details on changes to the National Park Service mission over the years, check out the National Park Service timeline.

Because the focus has largely been on public recreation for National Parks, balancing conservation needs with tourism is a real challenge, especially when it comes to endangered species. This challenge is the main focus of my case study. I am going to be presenting students with a case  study of off-road vehicle management at Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The park has been embroiled in disputes over off-road vehicle management policies that are now required by every national park. The management plans for vehicles need to cater to both a) recreation purposes and b) wildlife habitat conservation. I am going to brief the students on the details of this case and then I will split the class into two groups, one taking the stance of off-road vehicle users, and the other group taking the stance of birdwatchers. The groups will pretend they are at a public hearing for the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Off-road Vehicle Management Plan, and will answer a series of questions related to the case. My aim with this question is to get them thinking about what each opposing group values, and what sort of solutions might address the needs of both groups. After this discussion, I wanted to ask all the students to put on their manager hats and discuss the process of formulating a management plan. My aim with this task was to place the students in a real world context of habitat management and get them thinking about the whole process of approaching a management issue.

Now that you have a little primer on my case study, here is a rundown of the pros and cons I encountered while preparing it for the class.

Pros:

Students from specific disciplines. I can cater the case study to Natural Resource Science students so I can assume that the students already have general knowledge of wildlife and wildlife habitat.

Small class size. It should not be too difficult to split the class into groups and monitor them.

Cons:

Small class size. What if some students do not come to class? Just a few students missing might really affect how groups can be divided.

Short time frame. This will be a major challenge. I am presenting a very specific case study aimed at students from a specific discipline. Yet I only have 50 minutes to do this. Yikes!

Next up. Post #2 will describe how this case study played out and what I would change if I were to do it again. Stay tuned!

I don’t know about you, but whenever I read any piece about why traditional lecture format classes are outdated, inefficient, inappropriate, etc., I picture myself in a large lecture hall, listening to a professor way down at the front of class writing equations after equation on the board. In essence, when I think bad lecture format, I automatically think math.

Why is that, I wondered? I’m sure I am not alone in thinking that math is among the least exciting subjects out there. But is this line of thinking due to the fact that math really is boring? How can math itself be boring when it can be applied to any other subject, even the cooler ones? Take a favorite subject like sports, math plays a huge part in sports, how about travel…..well space travel is an obvious one, but even plane, train, automobile travel wouldn’t be possible without math. What about music? Surely math can’t play a role there. Yep it does. Math is behind everything we do….so surely it can’t be boring.

The boring aspect that we associate with math must come from how we have learned about this fascinating subject. Anything would be boring if you had to sit down and listen to someone talk about it for an hour, all the while using terminology you don’t understand and making no mention of how or when you will ever actually use it. And yet, this is exactly how math is taught. I know that the lecture formats in some schools are changing to include problem based learning, peer teaching, and other more engaging techniques, but I think one huge aspect of the math curriculum is not being addressed. Shouldn’t we be rethinking the WHAT as well as HOW we are teaching?

I found an OpEd by Andrew Hacker, a poli sci prof at Queens College of CUNY, entitled Is Algebra Necessary? Woah! What? Algebra necessary? Is breathing necessary? I could see why this piece was met with immediate heavy criticism. But I think Prof Hacker brings to light an important issue that is nicely summarized in this reply by Forbes contributor Mike McClenathan and also by Glen Whitney, founder of the Museum of Mathematics (MoMath). That is: WHAT we are teaching about MATH needs to be revamped just as much as HOW we are teaching it. Now I am no math whiz, I have no answers to how the traditional math curriculum should be changed to reflect our modern day world but I do think it is an issue that deserves some serious thought.

Reading through Tarantula’s Students or Learners? post the other day got me thinking……about critical thinking. This is a concept that is central to education and yet I rarely see it put into practice among undergraduates. I think part of the reason for that is because critical thinking is an elusive concept. Thinking about how I might define “critical thinking”, I couldn’t exactly put my finger on one definition. I wondered……What is critical thinking? When does critical thinking develop? And why does it often seem that we lose our ability to think critically as we get older? How has critical thinking in a pedagogical context changed through time? I found a great literature review that focuses on these questions and more. It’s 50 pages long but it’s an extremely quick read and is divided into clear sections so you can choose which sections you want to read.

I came across the term “Food Desert” a couple of years ago after reading this article in the Roanoke Times. Having spent a large portion of my life in Montreal, Canada, a city where a convenience store was just a block away and the grocery store not more than a ten minute walk or five minute bus ride, I had come to take the availability of quality food for granted. But since I have moved down to the United States, I have lived in small towns that are typically characterized by a mix of suburbs and rural landscapes. There are many things I love here, but one thing that has always been a difficult pill for me to swallow is how so many of the towns and cities here are built to accomodate vehicles. Pedestrians are a complete afterthought, or are given no thought whatsoever. I did not own a vehicle before I moved to the states, and although I largely grew up in Montreal, I also spent time in small towns in Labrador and Ontario. Even in those small towns, the grocery store was never further than a 15 minute walk away and you could always catch a bus there, or ride your bike without having to contend with vehicle traffic.

In general, many cities and towns (with the exception of Toronto) in Canada are clustered instead of sprawling, and they are extremely bike friendly and pedestrian friendly. In contrast, thinking of the mall area in Christiansburg, you are almost risking life and limb if you try to cross the road from Walgreens to Starbucks for example. Sidewalks are non-existent in this area, despite the fact that it is a major shopping hub. The Huckleberry Trail is located at the mall, which is great, but I have to drive my bike there because I feel like riding my bike from my house 2 miles down Peppers Ferry Road would be a suicide mission. Speaking of bike paths, why are there not any bike paths going through downtown Blacksburg? And I’m sure I am not alone in saying that I cannot count how many times I have almost been hit by cars on campus.

I think by and large, the United States is overwhelmingly a culture built around cars, and this is part of the reason why there are food deserts. I was hoping that, with the rise in gas prices to over $4 a gallon in 2008, more pedestrian and bike friendly changes would be cropping up everywhere. But instead, at least where I have lived, I only saw many people complaining, travelling less, and more complaining. I was happy to see when I moved to Blacksburg that the city was full of cycling enthusiasts. But I find it is more of a hobby here than a way of life. In Montreal for instance, the city has a system of publicly available bicycles, BIXIBikes, that you can rent for almost no cost. There are more than 300 stations where you can take a bike out and return it to any other station in the city. Designated bike trails run through the entire city, off roads and beside roads. It is almost a hassle to own a car in many of the cities or towns where I have lived in Canada. I cannot say that about any place I have lived here. I often have to drive my bike somewhere in order to use it.

What does this all have to do with education? Well I think access is the key word here. Access to food, and transportation, healthcare facilities, education, libraires, and many other community amenities is tied into socio-economics. In short and simple terms, unequal access to food trickles down to all other aspects of life, including access to quality education.

Just watched Jane McGonigal‘s Gaming Can Make a Better World video. Pretty interesting talk and a novel idea that gaming can improve or even solve some of the world’s biggest issues. But I am skeptical of this idea that online gaming is beneficial on a large “let’s solve the world’s problems” scale. I wish Jane had touched more on how gamers would apply the 4 things (mentioned in the video) that they are “virtually” good at in real world scenarios. The examples she gave of “real” world problem video games were all in actuality, virtual. If you know something is not real, no matter how real it is simulated to be, I don’t think you can ever attach the same gravity of consequences and level of responsibility that an actual real situation would. Even if you are socially interacting with real people in online games, noone is actually going to die if you give the wrong advice or make the wrong decision. Virtual problem solving is so popular because it is just that…..virtual. I’m not convinced that it is possible to just jump over to reality in applying these virtual game skills and approaches to problems. Nor do I think it should be possible, lest we start under-appreciating real life consequences. I think oxymoron when I hear the term “virtual reality” because to me, they are two completely separate worlds.

This is not to say I am against virtual games, I do think they have benefits. They help us learn the mechanisms of problem solving and they provide an escape from the real world. I just don’t see the same level of benefits that Jane insists are present through online gaming. In fact I have the opposite view. In her article Be a Gamer, Save the World, Jane says “the real world just doesn’t offer up the same sort of carefully designed pleasures, thrilling challenges and powerful social bonding that the gamer finds in virtual environments”. Do you know the first things that popped into my mind when I read this?

Carefully designed pleasures: Picture a delisciously juicy fresh from the oven deer tenderloin, stuffed with goat cheese and rosemary, served with a cranberry port wine sauce. It was from a young buck that I got with my husband this past December that we butchered and processed at home. The pleasure as I cut into it and put the first juicy morsel in my mouth, the creamy goatcheese mingling with the earthy melt-in-your-mouth tenderness of the meat, dripping with sweet succulent sauce, is what comes to mind when I see this phrase. There is no way I would get this excited about any achievements in WoW, or even getting all acheivements for that matter.

Thrilling challenges: So I’m going to geek out here for a minute, but not virtually. I mean geek out in the real world. I think of my dissertation project as a thrilling challenge, really I do. I’m using a model to predict the effects of sea-level rise, it’s a novel model that incorporates dynamic sea-level rise, meaning it doesn’t just assume that everything will be flooded at a certain level of rise. It accounts for differences in groundwater levels, slope, elevation, substrate, vegetation, tide levels, and a myriad other variables that make sea-level rise a dynamic process. I am tempted to write pages more as I sit here blogging, truly I am. This is a thrilling challenge to me.

Powerful social bonding: I don’t know about you, but interacting socially online has never given me butterflies in my stomach, made me cry out of sheer joy, or made me think I can’t possibly live on without someone. I won’t discount this blog just yet, but so far, only some very important people in my real life have made me feel these strong emotions. This to me is powerful social bonding. Asking an online player to help you beat a mage is not.

I’m still going to try some of the games on  Jane’s website, and I will read further on her research. But at this point, I am not convinced that online gaming is all that and the real world is really that bad. Because to me, the real world is awesome and I am constantly amazed by its wonders. Maybe I am just too optimistic.

Convince me otherwise! I want to hear your stories about how you think online gaming can help make the world a better place. And particularly, how it fits into education and current pedagogical practices compared to practices that present students with real-world situations.

As I was watching the video “New Learners Of The 21st Century” https://video.pbs.org/video/1797357384/, I’m at once inspired and intimidated by the case studies showing new approaches to learning. I suppose the education revolution that these examples showcase is not all new, at least not in my last ten years of education as a university student. Since starting my undergraduate degree, classes that take place outside the traditional setting have been the norm in my field. Gaining a thorough understanding of wildlife conservation would be impossible without a heavy emphasis on field experience. So to see elementary and high school students getting outside and learning in non-traditional educational settings makes me very excited. But in the back of my mind, there is a lingering fear about this education revolution because despite the fun learning experience that is inherent in my current field, I feel like I have been beaten over the head with a traditional education to a point where I fear I would be a little at a loss with anti-teaching. I’ll explain exactly what I mean but first allow me to explain why I feel this way.

Elementary school for me consisted of classrooms full of starched uniforms and shoes scrubbed white. Not a hair was out of place and students only spoke when asked. The rest of the time, students were to sit in their chairs diligently taking in whatever the teacher was saying or writing on the blackboard (yes, we only had blackboards back then!). Discipline was paramount and no one dared challenge that. Much of my high school years were very much the same, except that we did have computer class, where instead of writing compositions with a pencil, we wrote compositions with a keyboard (fun fun). In every class, the emphasis was on good manners and curbing your enthusiasm because it was unladylike. This may sound antiquated but I am not exaggerating. I went to a private Catholic Girls School where nuns still taught some of the classes. We had no field trips, unless you count “retreat” where the highlight of our trip was writing our sins down on a piece of paper and burning it. We had designated times to be creative, like talent days that occurred about once every few months. Basically, I come from a schooling background that attempted to squash any inkling of creativity and instead focus the mind on memorization and writing skills. Thankfully I was a decent writer, but my memorization skills are probably to blame for me failing organic chemistry twice (yes twice).

But the moment I entered university, suddenly I found myself excelling in classes that involved field trips and emphasized learning through personal experience rather than recital and memorization. But I feel like my creative bone was badly broken from so many years of passively taking in whatever information was being handed to me at the time. It’s easy for me to think of how I would engage students and provide them with the tools to learn when it comes to wildlife conservation. Bring them out for a field trip of course! But the puck stops there. How on earth would I engage students in a statistics course? Or a course on conservation law? I feel a sense of fear and dread welling up in me just thinking about thinking of creative ways to engage students because creativity is not something that was ever encouraged over the course of my education, even up to this day. I am so excited to see that others are being so creative when it comes to education but there is that lingering fear in the back of my mind that I could never be on that level. How do you encourage creative thinking when you are not sure how to encourage it in yourself? I’m sure I am not alone in this thought.

I thought I would take a minute to explain my blog name. Sans sucre literally translates into without sugar. I didn’t opt for the english version because I think the meaning carries over better in french. Basically, I wanted to convey with this title that this blog will detail my thoughts, pure and simple. Just my thoughts and impressions on various pedagogy related topics, without any added edits or changes. I like the idea of a blog because there are very few instances, at least in my field of study (wildlife sciences) and I think in many others too, that you are able to showcase your individual character. And frankly, I get a little tired sometimes of writing rather dry papers detailing findings, no matter how interesting those findings may be. I finally have a place to put my personality. So I hope you enjoy!