OOS 3-1
The importance of ecology education at a community college
Ecology education at the community college level needs to be relevant to community college students. Students often arrive without a science or math background, and with unpleasant experiences from previous science classes. Community colleges are in a position to involve these students in ecology, encourage promising individuals to enter environmental fields, and provide ecology knowledge and skills to those who follow non-environmental paths. At the Community College of Vermont (CCV) we teach ecology through hands-on in the field experiences. Students engage directly with landscapes, ecological puzzles, and ecology questions. This approach does not require equations or mathematics and can occur in both in-person classrooms and online learning environments. It is therefore is accessible to all students. Direct experience combined with hypothesis-testing dialogue shows students how to observe, what to look for, how to question, how to seek evidence, and how to analyze information.
Results/Conclusions
Many students who take an ecology class at CCV report shifts in perception about how nature functions and how scientific knowledge is formed. They leave the course seeing the functions of the whole and the interactions between the pieces, rather than simply the pieces in isolation. They see science as a rigorous troubleshooting process rather than a linear progression leading to fixed knowledge. All of this matters because community college students become citizens who vote on localissues, representatives who create local policy, and more. People are more likely to act in favor of conservation when they are personally familiar with the natural features of their place, and reasonably knowledgeable about the importance of intact natural communities for human well-being. Ecology learning at CCV ripples out in many directions. CCV students do their hands-on homework assignments with their children, start conversations about ecological issues with family members, use their ecology knowledge to make decisions about land use on their properties, and discover the peace that comes from visiting a wild place. Our graduates become classroom teachers, early childhood educators, business professionals, designers, and computer programmers who can promote eco-literacy and act on behalf of the environment in their professional lives.