Conservation Education Partnerships in Schoolyard Laboratories: a Call Back to Action

Finding ways to reconnect people to nature, through relevant experiences in school, work, and recreation, is a critical challenge for conservation biologists in this new century. Throughout the world, citizens and community leaders are being asked to make increasingly complex and difficult decisions related to problems of environmental degradation, development, and the use of publicly and privately managed natural resources. Effective solutions to environmental problems require the active participation of scientifically and technologically literate citizens—people who can deal sensibly with issues that involve evidence, logical arguments, quantitative considerations, and uncertainty. The question is, what can we do, beyond the work we do behind our academic doors, to improve scientific literacy? We can form educational partnerships with local schools in areas where conservation and research occur ( Brewer 2002) and where we live. The National Science Education Standards (National Research Council 1996) underscore the potential role and responsibility of “sciencerich” institutions in meeting the challenge of developing and sustaining scientifically literate citizens. Many readers of Conservation Biology are affiliated with science-rich institutions, and we can bring the expertise and resources of our institutions of higher education, government, research, national and state parks, museums, zoos, botanical gardens, and nature centers to collaborations with teachers in our local schools. Many of our institutions already have partnership programs with local schools that we can join. Why is it so important for conservation biologists to get involved in partnerships with our colleagues in pre-college classrooms? Consider the following: although 70% of biologists think the world is undergoing the fastest rate of extinction of species in its history, less than 50% of science teachers believe we are in the midst of a mass extinction, and only 38% of these teachers describe themselves as being very familiar with the concept of biodiversity (Ayres 1998). Our role as conservation biologists is greater than simply defining the term biodiversity and providing a generalized figure from a textbook that compares rates of extinction through the last 500 million years. We can take teachers and their students outside to their schoolyards, collaborate on approaches to teaching that model what conservation biologists do, and immerse ourselves (teachers, scientists, and students) in ecological investigations in the schoolyard laboratory. Through such authentic experiences, teachers and students discover what most conservation biologists have learned through their own explorations of nature: science is not only a corpus of knowledge, but also one way of knowing the world around us. And even a short outdoor learning experience can have a positive influence on the future environmental attitudes of children ( Bogner 1998). Schoolyards as Local Outdoor Laboratories