In my quest to gain a better understanding of how to connect digital learning to transformative learning I am auditing a course called Interdisciplinary Science for Teachers. This course is based on the premise that Place-based education (learning) is the key to connecting students to science which thereby makes science more relevant and meaningful to their lives. This is an interesting concept because it basically seeks to situate the student between his life and life experiences and the content being learned.
Furthermore, according to Wikipedia “place-based education promotes learning that is rooted in what is local–the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place -that is, in students’ own “place” or immediate schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community.”
Can place-based education be used as the foundation for digital games and digital learning to help connect what the students learns in digital games to real life situations? Can it help the student who learns via digital games transform his daily actions? If so, can it be used to teach the student sustainability concepts which he then applies?
In our first day of class, Dr. Chinn and her co-teacher Jennifer Hoff lead us through a “sense of place,” where we wrote about several childhood experiences that we believed connected prompted our environmental awareness we possess today. After a brief writing exercise we shared our thoughts within our groups. It made for interesting conversations and lead to connections we found between each other and our childhood experiences. Later, we took a field trip to a local stream where we engaged in some hands-on science experiments to test water quality and to track local versus invasive fish. At the end of our day we debriefed and spoke of the relevance of our experiments in relation to our daily lives. It was an interesting day and will provide me with plenty of new questions on how to make digital learning transformative.
Day 3. Today we went to Mokulea Island, the last remaining Hawaiian Fishing Village in all of the state of Hawaii. There are four families who live on the island. They are direct descendents of original families of this fishing village. Our work today involved helping to plant native vegetation to prevent soil erosion, to pick up and dispose of trash, and to gain a better understanding of how to use sea birds as barometers of the health of the sea and the land. It was a perfectly sunny and breezy day. There were many good interactions and conversations going on between the teachers and the researchers. These types of connections are what lead to effective environmental awareness campaigns and action. We were able to make a connection with the people of this island when we learned about the decades of suffering they have endured as a result of urbanization and modernization. It is safe to say we worked today to benefit their lives as much as the lives of the ecosystems that we hope will thrive here again.
I have missed out on many of the other field trips. However, I have been enthralled with what I have participated in and observed about place-based learning in science education. I hope by the end of the course to gain a better understanding of how place-based education can fit into technology-based learning
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