Ecologists in residence: A GK-12 partnership program leaves no child indoors

Through the Ecologists, Educators, and Schools (ECOS) Program at the University of Montana, GK-12 graduate student fellows are showing school children and their teachers how to use an ecological lens for viewing their schoolyard. Instead of a playground and weed patch, they see a laboratory filled with organisms with interesting adaptations and interactions, gradients and microhabitats, dynamic populations, patterns of disturbance, and successional changes. As “ecologists in residence”, fellows have worked with teachers and their students over the past three years to create outdoor laboratories for learning about ecology, and they have influenced what children know about the environment through teaching and mentoring. The schoolyard expeditions have led ECOS teams into new worlds of data collection and analyses, new teaching pedagogies, and curriculum development linked to the National Science Education Standards. But this is not a one-way flow of expertise because the graduate student fellows have learned to teach from great mentors – both the children and partner teachers. This experience has improved fellows' ability to communicate about their work with non-scientist audiences. Furthermore, by getting involved in the ecological education of young children, the fellows are fostering learning that provides a strong sense of place and connection to local environments, and an understanding of ecological processes and relationships in these environments and beyond. Participating teachers at partner schools reported they had learned many important new ideas from the fellows, gained materials and resources they had not had before, and would definitely continue to use the ECOS materials in the future, thereby continuing the ECOS legacy of no child left indoors.