It’s my first time in an online school setting. I’m 49, and I honestly lack the technological background that might have made all of this easier. (Oh, how I envy the younger generation’s skills in the mysterious arts of computational technologies. Ahem.) I’m frustrated that I may have missed deadlines, but I feel like it’s because of my lack of computer skills, and not effort. I’ve spent my most of my free hours doing this for the past couple of weeks. I might be a slow processor and typer. But I’ve thought a lot and tried to work a lot out in my head, which takes time, too.
This email, (which will be pirated in order to post on the 790 Weebly page), is an attempt to describe my childhood and personal and teaching experiences that may have led me to these questions. It’ll try to explain how my big questions formed, then morphed, and then morphed again, as my experience in teaching, technology, and now in the masters program, grew. Again, I apologize for the long narrative, but I’m a semi-old dude who likes to tell stories. A Personal Narrative on the Formation of a Master’s Degree Thesis in Innovative Learning... A long, long time ago….. Childhood. Nature. My earliest memory from growing up in Sebastopol is a hot day when our goat died after knocking its water bowl over. I remember coming home and finding it dead.Then the burial and placing a flat rock over its grave. I was two or three. In the next two decades, with more success at 3845 Twig Avenue, we also raised dozens of chickens, 3 seasons of pigs, 2 sheep, and another goat. Our neighbor, Marie St. Marie, would sometimes bring her barrel racing quarter horses by to graze our small back field. I was a member of 4H, and raised the pigs to butcher and sell the meat. My friend Patrick Albini’s dad owned the local butcher shop. When it was time, one of his employees would come by in a brightly painted orange pickup truck. It had a big box on the back for hanging carcasses. My mother and I would collect eggs and butcher the chickens. With money I earned from raising the pigs and selling their meat, I bought a Schwinn SX2000 BMX bike. My neighbors and I used to like to ride our bikes down to the local creek. We’d ditch the bikes in the bushes, and explore the creek for hours. As a kid, it was by far my favorite thing to do. We’d walk what seemed like miles north and then east along the creek out into the floodplains around the laguna past Todd Road. We picked sweet, ripe, blackberries along the way, and fished for catfish trapped in the evaporating pools of summer with screens from house windows. Being out there I would feel so immersed in the experience that the hours would fly by. I had similar experiences in eighth grade when we camped at Camp Cazadero and explored the redwood lined creeks which flowed into the Russian River. Being in nature, immersed in the intensely beautiful and life filled creeks, exploring, made a mark on me. The first interactions I had with computers happened in Gravenstein Junior High, which was next door to my home. We had a computer lab with Texas Instruments computers. This is in 1981 or I982. As I remember, one of our math teachers had applied for a grant and acquired for our school 10 or so. Our assignments were to program them so that these little square boxes on the screen would shift from one location to another. At home, these computers could be loaded with floppy disks to play simple video games similar to the ones we played on Atari consoles. When we were not playing Dungeons and Dragons, late nights playing Atari became another of our favorite pastimes. In high school, the emphasis on programming continued. The one thing I remember that the teacher in this class said was, “GIGO” (Garbage in, garbage out). He said this when students did not have success in their programming. They were unable to make things move on the screen. We did not use word processors to write papers at that time. I never took a typing class on one of the electric typewriters at Analy High. As I peck at this keyboard now, I still regret not having learned to type quickly. When we learned to drive, our trips usually took us to the local beaches, lakes, and forests to explore nature and one another. In college at UCSC, I did use an Apple II to write and print papers in my Spanish Literature classes with one of those loud, percussive sounding printers. But it spat out gobbledigook on a final paper, which made me miss a deadline, lowering my grades. Maybe it was this which instilled in me a lifelong mistrust of getting too dependent on technology. I’ve adapted to the increasing influence of technology in our lives, but I’ve never been a leader of this movement. And yet it’s amazing how far things have evolved and I have evolved alongside these dramatic changes. Integration with and dependence on our phones and computers is becoming more and more inevitable and ubiquitous with 21st Century living. You’ll see, however, a bit of reticence on my part to embrace technology wholeheartedly as I develop this capstone project. I suppose it does not matter one way or another as my pre-digital age attitudes are grains of sand in this exponentially growing transformation of our global society. I feel like someone from the middle ages complaining about the advent of the printing press. The changes happening are profound and have had impacts on our brains in how we think, remember, and interact with each other. How do I interact with and see technology currently? Without going into too much detail, I use my phone and my laptop a lot to communicate and get information, but I do not feel a need to participate in Facebook or similar platforms. I do not feel like I want an “online persona” or to share my world with people online. I try to not use devices too much. I worry about my fifteen year old son’s use of screen devices. I see his world as very different than the one I grew up in. He seems to get so much of what he needs from his phone. He does not go out to meet with friends or invite friends over like we used to as kids and teenagers. He can stare at his phone all day, if we let him. He seems to have an insatiable appetite for the world there and the streams, rivers, and oceans of information it provides. My friends have similar experiences with their kids, as do the parents of my students. They all talk about how their efforts to reduce their children’s screen time. During parent conferences this is by far the biggest concern that parents discuss about their kids. It’s been uncomfortable for me as an educator to inform them that their kids will be spending a good portion of their day on screens in school, as well. Kids are increasingly staying indoors, and watching screens. In the meantime, outdoors, there is an increasingly urgent environmental dilemma unfolding. I’m worried that kids are getting too detached from the outdoors to be aware of the environmental problems. If they are unaware, how can they do something about it? Because to care about something you have to be aware of it. You have to focus your attention on it. Alas, it seems like kids are focusing their attention on the amazing dance of nature, and their place in it, less and less. So in my recent years of teaching I have been trying to awaken kids to the natural world and to inform them of environmental causes. I have not felt particularly successful in this, until just recently when I discovered nature journaling. I took a teacher training class on this at Pepperwood Preserve. It felt like I had finally “seen the light” and found a curriculum designed to get kids back in touch with nature. Through direct observation and interaction with the natural world, through drawing and recording their thoughts and questions about the details they observe, children can learn to appreciate nature more. The book “Last Child in the Woods” has been a favorite read of mine lately. It talks about how more and more children are moving indoors, and reflects on the consequences of this. I feel passionately that we need to teach our kids to observe their world closely, and to think critically and deeply, in order to make connections between themselves and it. Only then might they solve the big problems that face our environment. This is why the core idea of nature journaling, that of the importance of direct, prolonged observation and discovery of nature, has really intrigued me. In this class I learned from reading John Muir Laws about why it is hard for us to do this. Through evolution, people’s brains evolved to identify things quickly and move on. Hunter gatherers needed to know: Can it eat me? (Then run.) Can I eat it? (Then, consume.) Once something has been identified, we quickly move on to the next thing. This mentality served us well to survive by consuming nature. In an evolutionary historical context, we have behaved this way in order to survive. But this consumer mentality has led us to consume our resources to the point of global collapse. It has also led to our consuming of each other. Not like cannibals, of course, but as slaveholders and societies that take advantage of groups of people in order to benefit from the profits of their labor. As our treatment of nature and of other people becomes more problematic to the prospects of our ongoing existence, we are in dire need of a dramatic mental shift. I think we need to learn to be protectors and caretakers, rather than conquerors and consumers. Environmental justice and social justice go hand in hand. We need to develop a new mentality of appreciation, stewardship, and conservation of nature. I can see how the direct, prolonged, observation of nature could be an important part in our ability to train our brains to do this. We can begin to see a bigger picture of the world and our place in it. If we slow down long enough to attempt to draw something, we can begin to see the connections between plants, animals, the elements, and ourselves. Unless we take care of each other, this will be impossible. We need to help each other rather than take advantage of each other. The parallel narrative to this one about kids’ increasing focus on technology, is in fact, one about the dramatic demographic shift that has taken place in California in my lifetime. Since I was a child, around twenty percent of my friends were latino. Now in our local schools latinos make up around seventy to eighty percent of the population. While these people have thrived in many ways, they have also been taken advantage of. Their labor has been cheap. They have taken the agricultural jobs that the dominant society has moved away from. In schools, as can be appreciated in “The Flat World and Education” by Linda Darling-Hammond, immigrant children have been systematically underfunded and ignored. As a child, I had always had positive interactions with latino friends. At seven, I had my first kiss with our neighbor Alicia Aragon in the tall grass behind her house. Later, my best friend Joey Gonzalez, who’s mother is Pomo Native American and father Mexican, shared many formative experiences growing up. Rubén Arceo and I would bass fish in the local ponds and shoot bb guns. (One of my biggest regrets in life has been killing songbirds with that gun.) In high school I took three years of Spanish. When my Spanish teacher announced a Rotary Scholarship opportunity to study abroad, I jumped at the opportunity and spent a year in Spain, during my senior year. Upon returning I had found a new appreciation for Spanish speaking people and culture. After two years at Santa Rosa Junior College, I enrolled in Spanish and Latin American Literature at UCSC. I studied abroad for another year, this time in Costa Rica. When I graduated, I went to Sonoma State to get my bilingual teaching credential. During my first year of teaching second grade at Roseland Elementary, Proposition 227 passed, making bilingual education illegal in California. We went from teaching a strong, dual language curriculum where both languages were taught with the end goal of creating bilingual, biliterate citizens, to a subtractive bilingual model where as soon as kids met grade level standards in their home language, they were transferred into English Only instruction. Out of frustration and disillusionment, I joined the Peace Corps. There, in Paraguay, I was lucky to be part of a pilot program in bilingual education. The country was coming out from under a thirty-five year dictatorship under Alfredo Stroessner. During this time, Guaraní, which is still spoken by the majority of the population, was prohibited in schools. Now, they are interested in regaining their cultural identity through Spanish-Guaraní dual language education. I gave workshops to local districts and trained teachers in bilingual education techniques. We built classrooms, we brought running water to our local school. I learned to play guitar. I met my wife, and upon returning to California, we had a baby. I could not find a bilingual teaching job around Santa Rosa, so we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There I taught for five years in a dual language school called Valle Vista. The program was strong. Our students did well on big tests. We could have stayed, but my wife was homesick and we moved back to Paraguay for three years. I tried to open a private school in her hometown of Horqueta, but it proved to be too small for the school to get enough students for us to survive. Luckily, my old director’s position in the Peace Corps opened, and I got it. But his experience was bitter sweet. Due to big budget cuts from the federal government, prior to my hiring, the program was already slated to be cut. I managed the last two groups of education Volunteers in the program, and returned home. Two other big factors influencing our return was the dengue fever spreading over the area which killed three people I knew, and the uprising of a revolutionary group called the Paraguayan People’s Army, right in my wife’s home region. They are a land reform movement. Their goal is to drive out foreign landowners, mainly from Brazil, and secure land for local Paraguayan farmers. They exploded a remote controlled backpack bomb at the local police station a few blocks east of our house. Then they blew up a judge’s house a few blocks west of our house. The last straw was when they firebombed my father in law’s radio station. He had been asked by the occupying government forces to read over the air announcements about rewards for the capture of Paraguayan People’s Army members. We decided to move back to the United States. This time, I had already secured a teaching position in Petaluma in a new dual language school called Loma Vista. I taught there for two difficult years. Morale was low. Our principal quit halfway through the second year. We were losing many of our English dominant students as test results did not compare favorably with neighboring schools. We were teaching combined classes. It was difficult to find qualified teachers. Etc etc. I took a job in Calistoga. That’s where I’m at now. I was happy because it paid significantly more than other local schools. I finally felt like I could provide for my family. The problem has been for me that the school does not teach in Spanish. Calistoga tried dual language instruction in the nineties, but the program was not successful. Without the bilingual model, I have struggled to address the language needs of my English language learners here in Calistoga. This year, I have two newcomer students from Guatemala. They have next to no English. It’s a challenge to differentiate for their needs in the classroom. Luckily, we began a newcomer classroom for them for a couple of hours a week. I employ my classroom assistant to teach them basic vocabulary and reading. But there are still holes in my instruction that need to be filled. How do I get them better integrated and functioning in this system? When I heard about this master’s program and its focus on closing the education and opportunity gaps for migrant children through the use of 21st Century learning techniques and technology, I applied. I hope to learn new skills that will help me to address these students’ needs in an English Only educational model. This confluence of the big themes in my teaching career, that of increased technology, increasing environmental problems, and an increasing population of language learners, is happening in this master’s program.The irony is this: How can I have just enrolled in this master’s program where technology in education is an emphasis, and simultaneously be discovering nature journaling and what I initially perceived to be a need to get AWAY from technology? My next question was, of course, How can we mix the two? Can technology be used to stimulate all kids to get back into nature, while at the same time teaching them language, thinking, and digital skills? Or, does it impede their experience of nature and isolate them? I suspect that like in the Eric Clapton song, "It's in the way that you use it." For example, the use of cell phone cameras in nature might motivate kids to observe more closely and slow down enough to photograph things that interest them. They could take these photos, and look at them again in the classroom to study, write about, and present them. But then my worry became: Do cell phones promote this quick “click, got it, move on” surface level “hunter-gatherer” interaction with nature? Again, a nature journal, where you draw something that gets your attention, forces you to slow down and observe more deeply. Instead of getting a bird with a gun like I did as a kid, we might learn to capture a bird by observing, drawing, and appreciating it. During the first week of school this year, I was very excited about nature journaling and I took my kids out on the back field, by the creek to draw plants and bugs. I was impressed with their ability to find bugs where I could not. We caught these bugs in small, transparent containers, and also picked and drew leaves. It was a very new experience for all, but we did record the following observations I had learned about in my class: I notice, I wonder, It reminds me of. These three questions are the ones aimed at getting kids thinking more deeply about nature. We discussed or drawings and observations, being careful not to say “great drawing”, because it’s not about that. The quality of the drawing does not matter. The drawing is a tool to help you slow down and see more details. We then put their drawings and written observations on the wall to share. I’ve also placed a bird feeder and a squirrel feeder in the tree behind our classroom in order to increase their interaction with nature. (They were asking me for a class pet. But I told them I’m not comfortable having animals in cages.) To integrate technology, my initial idea was to take photos of the pages out of their nature journals and place them into Google Slides presentations through Google Classroom. I have started training them on how to make slide presentations on Google Slides. We did animal presentations where the kids learned to search for images of animals off of Google. They filled out each slide with I notice, I wonder, It reminds me of statements. Then they presented their slideshows to the class. My two newcomer students from Guatemala really loved the experience of cutting and pasting images. I also taught them to use Google Translate, where they spoke into a mic in Spanish and had their voices translated instantaneously into spoken and written English. They then copied and pasted these phrases into their presentations. Wow! It felt like a very powerful experience for them. They were learning language through an authentic, self directed and interest based activity, which was greatly aided by technology. I thought that the student observations in these animal presentations might provide some good baseline data in the future. This thought made me think that if I’m collecting baseline data, then what am I going to teach specifically to see if my teaching worked. For example, can I teach kids to be better observers and record better, more in-depth observations? If so, how? Or should I not teach this and see if technology has an effect on kids’ ability to do this on their own? Here is where big questions started to develop on what a capstone project might look like. Here is a first, rambling stab at it: Does the use of digital technologies enhance students’ experience in and engagement with nature, or impede it? Or, how do children’s recorded observations of, and visual/oral presentations to a group of their peers of nature compare when they use traditional nature journals, pencils, and watercolors vs using (ipads, cell phones, and/or other??) What insights might any observable differences in (quality, profundity, creativity, pride, engagement, etc.. give us into the effectiveness of one style compared to another? How do we measure effectiveness? Specifically, as all this relates to language, how does it affect students’, (and specifically second language learners’), ability to demonstrate language acquisition? How may this be appreciated/measured in comparing notes, finished written projects, and oral presentations? (Can they use Google Translate on both?) What unexpected outcomes might we find? Am I trying to teach something curriculum based and then see if they get it, or am I leaving things open to observe what happens? (In setting up this study, to what extent do I want them to learn from me, or me to learn from them?) I thought we should first compare methods separately. On a first trip, I’d take them nature journaling. Then on the second, I’d let them use only cameras, microphones, etc. Then, for the third nature experience, ask them to pick one method they prefer or use both methods in any way they want and see what happens. Then I started thinking that perhaps it is misguided to be comparing the two methods to see if one is “better” than the other. Maybe more interesting would be to see if, or how, kids mix media techniques learned through both traditional and technology supported methods of observation and presentation for all three trips. But this might not give me time to train them on the technology in time. In any case, what would all of this say about or changing interaction with our surrounding world, and especially outdoor spaces with and without technological devices? Do they affect our perception of nature? How would we know? What other data could be collected? We might measure and compare the amount of time a kid spends observing a particular natural phenomena with journal vs camera/video device. I don’t think there will be any surprises there. But how would the shortened interaction of snapping a photo affect a child’s perception of that phenomena, measurably? When cameras are used, how will kids record their three observation prompts in the moment like they would with a journal? Voice recordings, digital notes? Paper? Then, will the final presentations of their products be more language intensive or less with the integration of technology? Can kids learn more and write more about their drawings, or about their photos/videos? What would happen if they photograph their drawings? What would happen if they draw their photographs? Can web searches yield more based on student’s photos, or drawings? Which will be a bigger motivator? Can kids really perceive more about nature in a prolonged sit down experience in the first place? How would structured lessons around observation in the field affect outcomes? What do I want to see as evidence of kids’ perception? Zoom ins? Linear details? Verbal or visual? Connections? Connections between what? Also, how will my instruction potentially sway the results one way or another, due to my own biased desires for a particular outcome? (Not trying to pretend to be too scientific here.) What is nature? What do kids think nature is? And for a third grader, developmentally speaking, how can we expect to measure perceptiveness of the kinds of things I might expect them to? How will their reflections be unexpected, insightful, ignorant, etc? In short, how will growth be measured and what is growth?
4 Comments
Megan Burton
9/16/2019 10:05:37 am
It's interesting how our life journeys impact our thinking processes. I enjoyed reading about your childhood, adult life, and your wonders. As I'm in my mid-40's, I can understand your reluctance to incorporate technology in your life. I've learned to more or less find balance between using technology to support my teaching and my life... not letting my life suffer as a result of technology use. I look forward to seeing where your Essential Question takes you, as I'm also intrigued by how outdoor spaces impact student growth.
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Jeremy Smith
9/16/2019 07:35:36 pm
You are brave for having read all that, Megan! (if you did, ha ha) Yeah, I'm trying to like the tech more and I think this project will take me a long way toward that goal. I'm finding some pretty interesting articles on how to do it, and based on that reading I hope to focus in my big question. In talking about this with my dad he brought up the need for balance and I think that is a good path as far a tech and non tech learning goes.
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Joel Kriner
9/17/2019 07:34:45 am
Thanks for sharing, very interesting information and I love your idea for the EQ. In my opinion science should be the favorite subject in school to learn but due to teaching practices, curriculum and time restrictions it often becomes one of the least favorite classes. I think your science and technology exploration is very necessary and I look forward to hearing about your findings and possibly use some of your suggestions in my own classroom. If you would consider coaching me through a few of your lessons, I would love to give my students the experience of journaling or another activity. Do some of your outdoor science activities related to our school curriculum? Can they be used in conjunction? Very interesting information and stories.
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Jeremy Smith
9/23/2019 07:38:28 pm
Thanks, Joel. Just invite me to Marin Headlands again! So, for science, in the absence of a school wide curriculum, we have been doing Mystery Science. Animals are part of it. Animal reports are a big part of our third grade plan. We present them to the other classes. Mine will be about the local species we find/study this year.
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AuthorJeremy Smith teaches third grade at Calistoga Elementary School. Archives
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