Ecology Education – The New “EE”

Article by Steve Signell, Co-founder of the
Ferry Beach Ecology School in Saco, Maine,
and its former Director of Curriculum

A car stops at a pullout at the edge of a salt marsh in a National Park. A woman looks out from the car and scans the area for signs of wildlife. Seeing a couple of wading birds, she snaps a photo, then pulls out and continues on her way. A few minutes later, a second car pulls up and another woman gets out of her car to look at the same salt marsh, but sees something quite different??a story, a mystery that goes back millions of years. She sees marsh grasses growing out of soil, which she knows is made up largely of tiny fragments of rock – sand, silt, and clay created by centuries of weathering. She pictures in her mind the mile-thick glacier that once stood over this land. She sees the tide coming into the marsh, bringing with it countless unseen microscopic plants and animals. She understands how these tiny organisms provide food for the fish and shrimp that the wading birds feed on. She wonders how the marsh will look in fifty years, or in fifty thousand years. She even thinks about how the car she drives may affect the marsh – both today, and into the future.

As environmental educators, we can probably all agree that we’d like students to think more like the second woman in the above story and less like the first. We want students to begin to see themselves as a part of the landscape they live in, not as an outsider merely passing through. How then do we go about getting students to see the way geology, climate, plants, animals, and other organisms have interacted over time to create the landscape we see today? The science of ecology, The Study of the Interrelationships between the Non-Living (Abiotic) and Living (Biotic) Parts Of Our Biosphere, provides an excellent starting point and roadmap for teachers who are looking for a way to foster this kind of thinking in their students.

Ecology Provides a Framework for Your Science Curriculum
Many environmental educators have difficulty focusing their curricula. Because there are so many topics related to the “environment,” it can be hard to sift through all the information and get to what is really important. Part of the problem may result from the word “environment” itself – it has so many different meanings and connotations that it doesn’t provide much of a framework for basing a curriculum. The first definition of “environment” in Webster’s is “the circumstances, surroundings could be classified as environmental education – even a class on objects, or conditions by which one is surrounded.” According to this definition, anything having to do with one’s interior design!

The second definition of the word “environment” in Webster’s is “the complex of physical, chemical, and biotic factors (as climate, soil, and living things) that act upon an organism or an ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival.” This sounds a lot like ecology, don’t you think?

Ecology provides a great framework within which to organize your curriculum, because it covers an immense variety of topics while assigning more importance to certain concepts. Using the science of ecology as a guide, you can see that you should spend more time on the water and carbon cycles than you should on the population cycles of rabbits and foxes. The range of ecology allows you to cover many diverse topics, while the hierarchy of ideas keeps you focused on what is most important to get across. (Some former environmental educators, including the teacher-naturalists here at Ferry Beach, have begun to call ourselves “Ecology Educators” to keep us focused on our methodology, as well as to differentiate ourselves from other, less science-oriented programs.)

Ecology Is Multidisciplinary
Ecology is the ultimate multi-disciplinary science. Because the story of nature is so complex and interrelated, an ecologist must at times draw upon such diverse disciplines as geology, climatology, hydrology, chemistry, biology, botany, oceanography, astronomy, and both natural and human history. The beauty of ecology, however, is that you don’t need to be an expert in all these fields to understand simple ecology – you just need to know the basics. That is why ecology makes the perfect introduction to other sciences like biology, chemistry and physics. As an example, let’s look at the process of photosynthesis.

Teaching photosynthesis is incredibly complex and challenging, as anyone who has taught science knows. Most often, teachers will focus on the nuts and bolts of photosynthesis the role of chlorophyll, the structure of the glucose, the pathway molecules take through the plant’s cells, etc. The ecological importance of photosynthesis, however, often gets short-changed, or is sometimes even completely ignored. Ecologically speaking, the details of photosynthesis are not as important as how photosynthesis, along with respiration, is largely responsible for running the carbon cycle, one of the most important processes for life on Earth.

With every breath you take and every bite of food you eat, you are participating in the carbon cycle. When teachers have their classes follow the course that carbon atoms take through the biosphere, students visit many fascinating and important topics – nutrition, respiration, decomposition, creation of fossil fuels, and global warming, just to name a few. These topics are relevant to students – they have all studied nutrition, have seen something decompose, or heard about the threat of global warming on the evening news. When you teach ecology, you won’t often hear the old student refrains: “What does this have to do with anything? Why does this matter?”

You don’t need to understand the biological and chemical intricacies of the carbon cycle to understand how important it is to life on Earth. In fact, I suggest that ecology should be taught before the other sciences. When students are introduced to science through ecology, they learn how scientific principles and processes fit into the big picture, and how they affect the environment and the students’ own lives. After students understand basic ecology, learning the finer details of processes like photosynthesis will become more meaningful for them later on in high school chemistry and biology classes.

Ecology Is Hands-On
Ferry Beach Ecology School, located on Saco Bay in Maine, has had plenty of experience doing hands-on ecology with students from all around New England. Teachers bring their classes to our site for an entire week (five days and four nights) of ecological study. Over the years, we have developed a curriculum that teaches students how to use basic ecological principals to “Reading the Landscape.” Reading the Landscape was first described in 1964 by ecologist May Watts in her book of the same name, and refers to using the principles of ecology to better understand the workings of the natural world around us. Tom Wessels, a professor of ecology at the Antioch New England Graduate School, sums up Reading the Landscape in the introduction to his book Reading the Forested Landscape:

“Most people who share a love of nature have been taught to see the landscape in a piecemeal way. They know how to identify plants, birds, amphibians, and fungi. They may even know quite a bit about the ecology of these organisms, but they have not learned to see nature in a larger context. It is wonderful to know nature through one-on-one encounters with other organisms, but it is perhaps more empowering to gain a greater understanding of the patterns that have shaped its landscapes. Through some knowledge of history and the broader view of seeing a forest and not just its trees, we begin to see the forces that shape a place. This new way of seeing creates reverence, respect, a sense of inclusion, and accountability. Reading the Landscape is not just about identifying landscape patterns; more importantly, it is an interactive narrative that involves humans and nature. For those interested in enhancing their sense of place, I know of no better way than by becoming intimately acquainted with their local [ecosystems] and the fascinating stories they tell.”

At Ferry Beach Ecology School, we use what we call the “ABC’s of Ecology” with students to help them to Read the Landscape. Just as you learn your “ABC’s” when learning to read words, we teach students the “ABC’s of Ecology” when teaching them to Read the Landscape! The ABC’s of Ecology highlight four of the most important concepts in ecology: abiotic factors, biotic factors, cycles, and change.

The Ferry Beach location is blessed with seven distinctly different ecosystems within walking distance of our site – the sand beach, dunes, coastal forest, freshwater pond, salt marsh, a tupelo swamp, and rocky tide pools. Our naturalists take students to each of these ecosystems where they investigate the non-living, or abiotic, factors that are unique to that ecosystem. Students use soil corers, hydrometers (salinity meters), thermometers, and their own senses to determine soil type, water abundance, temperature, wind exposure, periodic disturbance, etc. They then investigate the living, or biotic, organisms that occupy the area, students find examples of producers, consumers, and decomposers and discover how they are adapted for survival in that ecosystem. Students learn how nutrients cycle through the ecosystem, and how change over time has shaped the lands and created each ecosystem.

By looking very carefully at all the different “characters” in the landscape – land, air, water, plants, animals, and other organisms – students can begin to decipher the story that is going on in the world all around them. When they learn about the stories that the landscape contains, inevitably they begin to realize that they too are a character in that story, intimately connected to the landscape. Such a perspective makes encounters with nature much more exciting and meaningful! When students see themselves as players in this grand story of the landscape, it makes it easier for them to realize the effects their actions have on the other characters in the story – the organisms, waters, rocks, and air. Humans that better understand their connection to the land, seas, and skies make better stewards of the Earth. Ecology Education is a great first step towards building this type of vital connection!