Molly posted an update in the group Interpretation and Education (Recommendations 19 and 20) Thank you to all the fine people who have devoted their time and energy to put this draft together. It has come a long way! Thank you for the opportunity to comment on it. Here are my ideas, questions, comments. They are meant to be informational and not personal in any way. I hope they may be helpful.
Page 2
Are there 5 strategic goals or 7? Where did they come from?
Page 3, Part 3
This section could also include a mention of the Connecting People with Nature initiative of the FWS.
Page 5
What is partner engagement programs?
Quality over quantity: :))))
What is meant by blended learning experiences? (also on page 6)
What is the research that suggests 3rd-6th grade is the ideal grade range to target? What are pedagogical reasons for it besides our reasons of convenience listed?
I think any nationally adopted curricula should correlate to the national education standards and possibly for field stations whose acreage encompasses more than one state. Field level place-based curricula should correlate to local and/or state level standards as these are progressively more specific and easier to work with.
Are the focus grades 3rd-6th or 3rd-7th? I see both on this page.
I suggest deleting or re-wording number 3 as it ascribes to doing more (quantity) instead of quality and does not promote place-based education.
Eek! What is number 4! Not place-based. These curricula have some outdoor lessons but most are indoors. Rhythms of the Refuge would be much more appropriate as a curricula to adopt nationally. It is designed specifically for the NWRS by the NWRS and is flexible enough to adapt to different ecosystems across the country. The “Projects” do not typically depend upon outdoor settings. They do not even whisper a mention of NWRs or WMDs. Oh please please please take us forward. Teachers can easily obtain these curricula and do them at school. They do not need to come to a NWR or WMD or NFH to do them.
Pages 5-6
The numbered list refers to “our programs.” Perhaps this should be changed to “our programs and services.”
This list mentions nothing about helping create outdoor classrooms at school settings, possibly even through the FWS’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program. Should it????
Page 6
Number 10: when outdoor experiences are not possible and more appropriately these should be done on a national level
Number 11: I think there needs to be an item that says we are going to save the “ecophobia” for older children and adults. PreK-8th grade students need to develop a love for the land before we can ask them to save it or fix it.
Some of the new audiences mentioned do understand and appreciate what Refuges have to offer. So to avoid offending some of them, I would suggest that the verb is changed to state “reach new audiences who MAY not currently understand and appreciate what refuges offer.”
Pages 6-7
A note about technology, which is great, but it should not take center stage. The outdoors is center stage, and technology could be used as a gateway activity to connect people with nature or to support that activity (like bird song apps) but should not distract from what is REAL and that is the sounds, smells, touches, sights, and wonder of what is all around you outside at a NWR.
Page 7
Goal 1 – evaluation is often short-stopped because we have been so driven by quantity of programs instead of quality. With a shift to quality, time and priority for evaluation EE should become available.
“Education planning should cross agency disciplines and include active participation from refuge leaders, managers, biologists, visitor services staff, and other employees, volunteers, and partners” – as appropriate and at the discretion of the station manager and visitor services staff. Non-visitor services staff usually do not have the post-secondary education, professional training, experience, or expertise in providing visitor services. They may have the best of intentions but can quickly lose the hearts and minds of visitors who are sophisticated enough to know when they are being bamboozled by an information overload or lack of substance or other unsuitable teaching method. Visitor services and environmental education are legitimate professional fields in their own right. They cannot be done well by just anybody who is available and willing to talk to the public, a “warm body,” per se.
So far we have strategic goals on page 2, a bulleted list on page 4, National Standards for EE Programs on pages 5 and 6, and strategic goals again on page 7 – how are these all related or connected to each other? Other than, I have figured out that both sets of strategic goals on pages 2 and 7 are the same set.
Typically an evaluation is based upon an evaluation plan framed with evaluation questions that are being investigated using evaluation tools like interviews, surveys, and focus groups. I see no mention of that in the evaluation paragraph. Also, are we talking about an evaluation of EE in the NWRS nationwide? Or at the field station level?
What is meant by this phrase at the bottom of the page? “refine metrics for
measuring effectiveness at all levels of delivery.”
Page 8
Objective 1.2 is spot-on! Logic models – and one already exists for the NWRS developed by former employee Julie Ernst at University of Minnesota-Duluth and her graduate student Britt Carlson.
Objective 1.3 -- Again, evaluation tools should be determined by the evaluation plan and questions, not by Headquarters and OMB. Whoever is writing this document should talk to Julie and/or take her NCTC course on Education Program Evaluation.
Objective 1.4 -- Any mention of evaluation in this document would be remiss if it did not include Rhythms of the Refuge which is an existing tool in helping field stations assess their program. It originated in Region 6 with Diane Emmons.
Goal 2 – why do both Goal 1 and Goal 2 talk about evaluation/assessment? Seems redundant.
Strategy 2.2B – please provide a reason for this one. (urban audiences, the first 2.2B)
I love the idea of having some national teams to form national direction for EE in the NWRS. That is very appropriate.
Strategy 2.2D – again, don’t let the digital technology drive education. Let the place, phenology, and best practices in education drive pedagogy.
Page 10
Objective 3.2 – if this objective remains in the document as-is, I would expect these staff with collateral EE duties to expect visitor services staff to also receive professional development training in their areas of expertise like biology, management, administration, maintenance, etc. In other words, I think this objective is expecting too much of other staff and minimizes and discounts the level of education, experience, and expertise required to do visitor services and environmental education effectively. Perhaps the statement “at the discretion of the refuge/district manager” needs to be included here. I also don’t see this working at a majority of field stations because it’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Objective 3.3 – The meaning of this objective is unclear to me.
Objective 3.4 – I don’t think you could make the Instructional Systems Specialist job/series requirements any more rigorous than they already are and still expect to find qualified candidates to apply. That is my position and it was extremely challenging to prove I was qualified without a 4-year teaching degree and license but with a 4-year degree in environmental education and loads of pertinent experience.
Objective 3.7. I am guessing that the author of this statement is an urban dweller; otherwise why the word choice “remote?” I would use the word rural instead of remote. To some of us who live in rural areas, it is urban areas that are blissfully remote. It might be a good idea to pair a rural and urban site for this distance learning and pair up a school from each location as well so they can compare/contrast their settings. They may be surprised to find out they have more in common than they think.
Goal 4: what is the basis for this statement? “Education programs are quickly evolving to “anytime, anywhere” platforms that allow audiences to learn at their own pace.” Also, what is the need for the entire paragraph? It seems to wax poetic but where is the substance?
Page 11
Here we go again with “remote” refuges. How about: For rural refuges most urban people may never be able to visit in person, … Still sounds depressing. That would not be the positive approach. Don’t National Parks thrive on hosting hoards of urban visitors to their “remote” parks??? How about instead talking about the convenience of a virtual visit which involves little to no travel or cost and which makes rural refuges relatively more accessible to more people? And let’s remember that the best use of everyone’s time is to experience nature outside at an urban NWR or even just your school yard. Any distance learning should pair a local NWR/WMD with a rural one and an on-site visit to the closest urban park, nature center, or refuge, or WPA should be included. Distance learning programs should be tied closely to state/national academic standards (such as letter-writing to NWRs and then hooking up electronically). The teachers we work with are really not interested otherwise and would rather take their kids out the door to see the real thing than something virtual because it makes more sense to children who more readily understand concrete (real, in-person) vs. abstract nature. Distance learning does not get kids outside (unless we intentionally set it up to). Outdoor classrooms or field trips to a local site do get kids outside, and the emphasis should be on that, not on so much screen time. I would rather see oodles of objectives written about field journaling, phenology, being a naturalist, and how to teach/learn outside than all of these technology objectives. For a document that starts out supporting place-based education, there is little to no elaboration on it but plenty on the technology side. Out of balance.
Objective 4.2 should be split into two separate objectives. The second half are citizen science efforts and these should be far more heavily prioritized for refuges with environmental education than they have been so far. You could also include e-Bird on the list and Nest Watch.
Objective 4.5 is not needed as schools are required to accommodate the language needs of learners. They typically would send an interpreter or paraprofessional to assist these students if needed.
Page 14, Attachment
This should be called an Addendum instead of an attachment, to avoid confusion to readers.
Please number this list for ease of discussion.
2nd suggestion and 3rd, e-learning – should be for enhanced level only.
2nd suggestion: Delete the wording about nationally available curriculum and have a separate suggestion for all levels to use Rhythms of the Refuge. I truly to not understand and cannot believe that Rhythms has been completely left out of this document. Does the left hand know what the right hand is doing?
4th suggestion: these should be two different suggestions. Partnerships is one and recruiting volunteers to help teach is another. Partnerships is high level to me (enhanced). Those teachers you mention … I presume you mean retired teachers since practicing teachers would be at work during the school day. These volunteers will need some training, too, so please mention that. Volunteer led programs should be an option at any level at the managers discretion depending upon availability of appropriate volunteers, employees to train them, and employees to lead programs themselves. I believe volunteers’ best use in educational programs is to assist employees who are doing the teaching because teaching is a profession that is deserving of qualified, trained employees. We don’t have volunteers substituting for wildlife biologists on refuges (I hope). Also, it can get rather expensive to do annual background checks for volunteers who work with students without teachers or employees present.
5th suggestion: what do you mean by this one? Do you mean if there are state and private partners that share your natural resource and provide educational programs and services, you would inform teachers of that? Seems kind of obvious if that is it.
9th suggestion: should be enhanced level only.
11th and 12th suggestions are redundant. Combine.
13th I think this should be all levels because I think every refuge is an outdoor classroom in and of itself. A refuge is a nature discovery area. Classes can go to any areas open to the public in most cases.
15th suggestion is redundant from previous page.
16th suggestion should include: at discretion of refuge manager and as staffing/resources permit. The best experience is on the refuge, outside, not anywhere else inside. That should be our priority.
17th: every 5 years would be far more realistic. This could be facilitated more easily if the FWS developed regional or state partnerships with universities to work together with us on evaluation. Our station does not have the statistics program to run data on which universities usually provide to graduate students.
18th: again, redundant.
20th: what does this mean? Are skills things like wildlife observation, nature photography, fishing, and hunting? Because those are Big 6 uses of course and are no brainers for every level. Survival skills? Nature writing? Snowshoe making? Fly tying? Not sure what is meant here.
21st: redundant from suggestion near top of page.
This list needs to get cleaned up it seems to me.
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