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Hi,
my name is Amy O'Donnell and I am a teacher here at the museum. I'm
lucky enough to work in a place rich in resources and to work in partnerships
with two specific schools, one of which is a middle school and a high
school combined and the other that is an elementary school. Both of
the schools are experiments in how a museum and a school can have
a close relationship, more than just the once- or twice-a-year field
trip to the museum. At the New York City Museum School, which is the
middle school and high school, I work with teachers and I am a primary
teacher at that school. There are collaborations between museums that
act as partners with the schools—there are five participating
museums—and there are classes that kind of borrow the idea from
elementary schools of having interdisciplinary curriculums. And they
pull together the ideas that are tangent to all of the different curriculums.
The teachers that I work with are science teachers—I have a science
background myself. We work on taking these ideas and weaving them
together with critical-thinking skills, with math, with literacy,
and we use the museum's exhibits and resources, as well as the science
that goes on here at the museum. So that's one paradigm of a school-and-museum
relationship. The other school I work with is an elementary school.
And I work at that school more in the capacity of a staff developer
for science literacy for the fourth grade, with an extension to other
grades. In that program, which has been changing over the years as
we figure out exactly what the needs of the teachers are, I work to
infuse science first of all into their curriculum, because often elementary-school
teachers do not feel as comfortable with science as they would with
literacy, or with the social studies, though many, of course, do.
But also I link that school to the museum's resources and with outdoor
opportunities here in the city. So I actually consider myself pretty
lucky. I have a very interesting job.
I consider my role in teaching biodiversity to be looking for opportunities
to infuse or tweak the curriculum in a way that will make it more
provocative for kids. Something that's going to open them up to recognizing
biodiversity, to being involved in an authentic experience where they're
actually doing that kind of science and they recognize that everything
that they see on Discovery Channel and everything that they read in
books is because somebody was very observant, somebody was very inquisitive,
and someone got out there, tested, measured, and connected things.
That's the kind of experience we're trying to replicate for the kids.
I think that one of the very first things that we try to do is to
expose the kids to an outdoor environment and to biodiversity. I remember
in my own education taking a mycology course. And, of course, I recognized,
like many people, the large mushrooms that you might see. But it wasn't
until I took a walk with a man who was incredible in pointing out
all of these other kinds of creatures I had never noticed that the
next time and every subsequent time that I've been in the outdoors,
I all of a sudden noticed this plethora of different kinds of funghi.
And so that's the kind of experience that I want to repeat for these
kids, especially working with urban kids. These kids—they don't
have the base of knowledge that you might expect. The kinds of things
that you might just mention in passing and then move on to another
more complex topic, even when you're talking about elementary-school
kids, they don't even know those words. And so they haven't had those
experiences. And in one way that's a very sad thing, and in another
way it creates an opportunity for incredible wonder to happen in the
classroom and to participate in that. Because kids can be wowed very
easily, especially if they haven't had that much exposure.
Another charge in the programs I work with is to make the ordinary
extraordinary and to work on observation skills. I have passed out
—I don't know if people came in late so they might not have one
—but you might just want to refer to this sheet that I have here.
This is just an example of some of the different things that we have
at the museum - things that are found in our local environment. You
know, we often study rain forests. I have a whole module with the
eighth grade where we look at taking a virtual journey, using the
Amazonian hall, to the rain forest and look at microhabitats and look
at the diversity of cultures and look at the diversity of organisms
and look at strata, etc. But more often, I try to take the opportunity
to take a look at local ecosystems. We start off by just really kind
of honing the kids' observation skills and their questioning skills,
and getting them excited about tiny little nuances that they can piece
together to create a story about how things work and make connections.
So on this sheet—this was actually just a piece of bark that,
on the underside, you could see had been worked by some kind of a
boring insect. It was about looking at something that might be very
common, trying to find evidence of something else in the environment
that had influenced it, and trying to figure out what had happened,
why it had happened, and to be somewhat amazed at that. We'll start
out sometimes looking at a diorama and a diorama at the museum, of
course, is there to teach about the diversity of a place and a situation.
When you go to a diorama, you'll see the megafauna and you'll see
all of the different kinds of plants that live in a place—you
can what's happening in that scene. But when you go out, let's say
even just into Central Park on most trips, even to, let's say, a sandy
beach, kids are not going to see a whole bunch of different organisms
like that—ones that are big and exposed. What you want them to
do is not feel, Well this is boring and there's nothing here. You
want to teach them to look for those small bits of evidence that are
going to be left behind. And then how would you measure and how would
you calculate what was happening there? We looked at nests, and from
those nests they were able to find out information about the ecology
of the birds that made them. But also, by looking at the materials
in the nest, they were able to construct a hypothesis about the kind
of ecosystem those birds lived in. So it's the backward and forward
movement of using objects as a base. We would look at birds or other
kinds of creatures we had in our touch collection here at the museum,
and we would consider whether, if we didn't see this creature, and
yet we were trying to study this creature, what would we find if it
wasn't around? Would we possibly hear calls? Would we see a burrow?
Would we find pieces of hair? Would there be footprints? Would there
be droppings? Would there be evidence through leaf damage that something
had been here? So then we would look at small details. And then from
small details, we looked at small places, and we tried to think about
where are the microhabitats. I had a class yesterday. We're doing
an ocean investigation with eighth graders, and we had gone to Coney
Island and had taken samples and then we went to the salt marsh in
Ocean Beach and collected there as well. And we used a technique where
the kids would come back and they would analyze the macro, the micro,
and also the sediment, and then look at sand and connect it to the
earth science that they're doing. But it's not so much about finding
out the actual name of a species; it's about looking at and recognizing
details, and making a really good observation of something, and then
coming up with your own name and mimicking what scientists do. And
then later on connecting it to an actual name. So we try to move away
from, What's the name of this thing? Sometimes on nature walks, people
will point off —this is this, this is this, and this is this—and
not necessarily take the opportunity for a deeper biodiversity experience,
which would be to find out what something looks like, its form and
function. When we're studying butterflies, to just give an example
of an infusion into the curriculum, in fourth grade they're learning
about life cycles. And because we had a live butterfly exhibit here,
we took advantage of them coming here and seeing the butterflies and
seeing the different stages and going through that. Instead of learning
all the different names of the butterflies that were in the exhibit,
we looked at the diversity of strategies that butterflies or other
animals use in order to both communicate with a mate and to avoid
predation—through coloration, mimicry, cryptic coloration, eye
spots—you know, all of those things. And then the kids designed
their own butterflies and wrote up exactly what their strategy for
survival was. And that is one way to look at diversity and then connect
it to a concept that helps them understand and be really wowed. Rather
than just a list of names of butterflies and understanding that they
look different, now it's, Well, we know why they look different. Or
we can at least hypothesize why something might look a certain way
and give them a little bit more power to do more of the science.
In the page I handed out, one of the things that we work on is doing
perspective drawing and a lot of the time that is the gateway into
kids discovering things all on their own. We talk about how scientists
document their findings. They measure. They weigh. They take observations
that are descriptive, and they use precise language. They work at
accurate, detailed drawings that aren't necessarily artistic but that
are filled with what they've seen. And they have documents of their
observations. And then the next step is forming questions and hypotheses.
And I think this process is the crux of what biodiversity studies
can be in school, at all different levels. Sometimes I do much the
same thing with the fourth grade as I do with the ninth grade that
I work with. I'm working with two biology classes at the New York
City Museum School, trying to enhance a Regent's curriculum—Regents
are a test that we give here in New York that really up the ante—and
the test's a good way to make sure that there's a large amount of
information given out in a class. But teaching for the test is a bad
way, I think, to conduct a class because it doesn't allow for personal
exploration for teachers and students. So we're trying to work with
the museum, to figure out how can we make the labs more open-ended,
and how can we make them about the discussion of how things link together
and about biodiversity.
There's one curriculum—I'm just going to take a couple of minutes
to go through a couple of slides—that I worked on with a fifth-grade
class. I had traveled with them from fourth to fifth grade. What they
started out doing was a lot of ecology-based things, like looking
at different kinds of organisms and practicing the kind of critical-thinking
skills that are well illustrated in this piece of work. And then they
broke up into teams in the fifth grade and examined five local ecosystems.
And I think that was a really important step for them, because they
didn't think there were different kinds of ecosystems here in New
York. Some ecosystems may be on the periphery of the city, but they
are still ecosystems that we have a connection to and that we can
travel to and that we can study. So I invite you to take a look at
the work that we have here on this board. Much of the work displayed
is fourth-grade and fifth-grade work. I just wanted to show you some
pictures and explain the evolution of this curriculum for us.
This is a table about inquiry. It shows kids bringing in things that
they found—a lot of things falling off of city trees, containers
for looking at the diversity of seeds. When we look at the diversity
of seeds, we look at the strategies for seed dispersal. When we look
at the diversity of flowers, we look at the strategies for pollination.
And we always connect diversity with some scientific concept so they
feel that they have a greater understanding of things and can take
it to the next level and see something else on their own.
We did a growing experiment, testing out exactly what happens to plants
under certain conditions to understand how all of those abiotic factors
lead to biotic factors. We were getting ready because the fourth graders
were also working on a garden. As we were talking about erosion or
we germination, or food chains and food webs, we were actually applying
those concepts to the garden we were building.
This is the kids actually leveling out the soil in this garden. This
was an awful plot on the side of this school that gets hardly any
light. I wish I had an "after" picture because it's a beautiful garden
now. Actually, they have brick halfway up and there's going to be
a mural in the background, and all of the bulbs that we planted have
come up for the second year. There's a kid in the background. In this
slide I wanted to show you the birthday tree. We always try to make
a connection back to the kids. When we're looking at the diversity
of city trees, we're looking at what are the actual cells that make
up wood. And as the kids learn about how you can measure certain things
in the environment, one of them is you can measure how old a tree
is by tree rings—everybody's done that in class. But what we
did is make a lifeline of important events for the kids, so they made
a tree that was hypothetically planted or born on the same day that
they were born, and so it's their birthday tree. They kind of link
their lives with the lives of trees.
We went out into Central Park and we did biodiversity studies. We
learned about how you measure biodiversity, and also how you take
a measure of abundance to characterize habitats. This is when we were
handing out slides and giving out directions.
This is the kids actually creating samples, and this long stick that
this young girl has in her hand is a dowel that we were doing a transect
with—a transect is just a way of taking a random sample of the
kinds of things that are there. Just take two dowels, a piece of string,
tie them at the end, place it down randomly and actually calculate
or take a close look at what the string has fallen across, make a
drawing of it, a description of it, and then count the number of things.
This was taken in Central Park. It shows you exactly what she did.
We also did quadrants; that is, taking more of what is in a square
sample and then thinking about strata or levels—what's underneath
the leaf litter. This is also about how you would do biodiversity
science. How you take an initial survey. We talked about how you can't
tell what's happening in an environment unless you look at one measurement
versus another measurement over time. And so we were comparing one
place to another in order to actually characterize something properly.
This is a picture of students using the resources we have here at
the museum—in fact, this piece of wood right here is the very
one that one little boy used to make his observations. We started
out with all of this stuff so that we could distill it out of the
environment. We worked on observation skills so that when we got outside
and the kids got excited about being on a field trip—there was
the weather, the insects and all these things that could be distracting-the
kids really knew what they were supposed to do. In this exercise,
we worked backward and forward. What evidence about that organism
is based on its form? What kind of adaptations? What do adaptations
tell you? And then, if we didn't see that organism, what would we
find in place of it, if anything? You know, it could be cocoons or
droppings; it could be all those kinds of things.
We did a pond study. We looked at not only the big things that you
might easily notice, but at really small things that we needed to
look at under the microscope. And these are kids starting to look
in this detritus for small protists and small insect larvae.
Using ID cards, we tried to recognize creatures and match them up.
And then we finally went out into the environment after they had come
up with their own questions. What kind of tools were they were going
to need? Pack those all up. And they designed their own procedures
for doing the investigation. This is a sight—it's nice because
it has sandy beach, deciduous forest and a salt marsh right within
the same area.
And then, finally, just a nice picture of kids appreciating their
environment and taking notice.
Thank you.
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