Echo

Hands-on environmental workshop offered to educators

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Many teachers may not think twice about dumping the contents of the class aquarium into a stream when the school year is through. Now, while living on an island in Lake Erie, they can learn why that’s a bad idea. The Great Lakes Education Workshop, which incorporates Great Lakes environmental issues into teachers’ curriculums, is offered for the first time in three years, thanks to a recent Great Lakes Restoration Initiative grant. It is an interdisciplinary course where teachers can take part in field work and hands-on labs, said Rosanne Fortner, who heads the Ohio State University-based program. Held at Stone Laboratory at Lake Erie, teachers meet researchers and gain access to EPA equipment while living on the islands of Lake Erie.

Echo

Bringing nature into the classroom

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The curator of natural history at Mackinac State Parks uses bones and jumps around like a kid to excite schoolchildren about natural history.

“What would be the point of preserving a forest or a bird or a watershed, if it’s something I wouldn’t care or know about?” asks Jeff Dykehouse.

The Water, Woods and Wildlife program reaches about 8,000 Michigan students a year.

Echo

Grant Will Help Educate About The Great Lakes

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(MI) Up North Live – The community will have new opportunities to learn about the importance of the Great Lakes with the help of a grant. The Grand Traverse Conservation District was awarded $200,000 from the Great Lakes Fishery Trust for a grant under the Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative. More

Echo

Farm to spork: Children see fruits of partnering schools with farms

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By Rachael Gleason
Oct. 29, 2009

At McAuliffe Elementary School in Chicago, kids are more likely to see local fruits and veggies on their lunch trays than mystery meat and greasy pizza. They also visit local farms and learn about how the food is grown. “It gives them a sense of appreciation,” said Gary Cuneen, founding director of an organization that partners schools with local farms. “We are trying to teach kids that taking care of the earth and taking care of their bodies are interrelated goals.”

Cunneen’s Chicago-based Seven Generations Ahead is among the growing number of Great Lakes programs that provide schools with local produce and nutrition education and farmers with new markets. There were just a handful of such programs in the early 1990s.

Echo

Proposed freshwater school site needs help

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(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – The final stretch of Greenfield Ave., east of S. Barclay St., hosts UWM’s Great Lakes WATER Institute, where the university might build its School of Freshwater Sciences now that the former Pieces of Eight site on the lakefront downtown is no longer an option. But the street includes huge, unsightly coal piles, a railroad crossing so rough it rattles teeth, and a crumbling former factory that’s nearly 100 years old. The neighborhood might need an extreme makeover if the institute’s 8-acre grounds are to be considered for the freshwater school’s headquarters. UWM officials and other school supporters had once hoped to see it developed at the Pieces of Eight site, but UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago dropped that proposal over control and design issues with retired business executive Michael Cudahy, who holds the lease for that site. The university is now looking for a new site, bringing attention to the institute and its immediate surroundings – an isolated area with a heavily industrial feel.

Echo

Wilderness fills Great Lakes classroom; Environmental education at Isle Royale

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By Andy McGlashen
amcglashen@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
July 20, 2009

One night shortly after Michael Jackson’s death last month, as mourners’ stereos pulsed with Billie Jean and Beat It, Emily Mugerian was on a craggy island in Lake Superior, training her ears to an unfamiliar note. “I heard the wolves one night,” said a beaming Mugerian, a pre-med senior at Michigan State University. She and 10 other students were camped on Isle Royale National Park for a weeklong outdoor philosophy course offered by MSU. “It was a whole week of personal growth,” Mugerian said.  “I’m just more aware of my actions, and I hope that continues.”

That’s just the reaction that instructors Michael Nelson and Lissy Goralnik hope for. “Good classroom experiences of any kind are supposed to change us,” said Nelson, an environmental ethicist at MSU.  “In environmental education, people say there’s something important about learning in the outdoors, with your feet on the ground, and what we’re trying to do is test that hypothesis and put our finger on what that is.”

Philosophy is “a very indoor pursuit generally,” and the challenges of organizing outdoor classes within the routines of academia make them rare, Nelson said.   Very few other universities offer similar courses, he said, Oregon State and the University of North Texas among them.