Reflections
Spring 2009
Teachers As Change Agents
IMAGINE Summer Youth Program
Reprinted with Permission from UW News, by Robert Roseth
IMAGINE summer camp for youth emphasizes environmental stewardship and makes use of the wetlands near the UW Bothell classrooms. Student teachers work in teams that include several specialties so that they can plan curricula that encompass language arts, math and biology. One of the products of the 2008 camp was the first field guide to the UW Bothell wetlands.
"The workshops are built around three intersecting ideas," says Cherry McGee Banks, professor in the Education Program. The first week had the theme "Extinction or Preservation?" The second week was built around "Explorations in Nature," while the final week highlighted "Environmental Stewardship."
The team that led the curriculum planning included both regular UW faculty and clinical faculty, who are experts in the various disciplines.
"When kids connect to a real-world problem, they learn better," says Karen Gourd, Assistant Professor. "Also, this method of learning connects more strongly to the ways that they learn outside of school. We find that, by working on an integrated curriculum, the teachers learn how their own content connects to other disciplines. It helps them understand their own subject by applying it in another context."
The UW Bothell program is designed to give teachers the necessary experience to be comfortable in a variety of environments. One key emphasis of the UW Bothell approach is to graduate teachers who are change agents, says Assistant Professor Robin Angotti. "We want our graduates to be experimental and innovative in their approach. In whatever school environment they find themselves, they ought to be able to put together the best curricula to meet their students' needs."
Last year, a group of student teachers were discussing how to integrate language arts lessons in a session that was structured around a mathematical concept: measuring the height of a tree by measuring the length of its shadow and comparing that shadow to something of known height (such as a person). They ran through a number of possibilities, from poetry to photography to the implication of tree height (shade tree, for example) to its environmental niche.
"The experiential approach helps lay a foundation for thinking in a different way about how we educate children," Angotti says.
For most UW Bothell students in the class, this was their first experience at designing curricula. The faculty are there every step of the way, keeping them on task and supporting them. At the end of the three-week experience, the faculty helped the student teachers evaluate what they did, to see what elements of the curriculum worked and which needed improvement.
"IMAGINE has two major goals," Banks says. "We want an authenticfield experience that will be valuable for secondary teacher candidates. We also want to engage the community and bring them to campus. We want them to see this as their campus." These student teachers continued with their field work in the fall at Jackson High School in Mill Creek and Inglemoor High School in Bothell in addition to taking a teaching methods course on campus.