Engaging Young Conservationists in the Classroom

'In addition to bringing students to nature, we should bring nature to students.'

The humming of mosquitoes was only matched by the rumbling of cars over the bridge. As part of a green community initiative, my friends and I were picking up garbage along the streets in my town, Columbia, a bustling suburb in central Maryland. Columbia is a well-to-do and vibrant community, named by Money Magazine as the #1 Place to Live in the United States.

Photo of fishing trip
Students from Baltimore on a fishing trip organized by the Bioma Project, which engages youth in environmental education outdoors and in the classroom.

It may be a great place to live, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. The trash lining many of our roads was a testament to that. As I waded into the marshy fields flanking the highway, my boots were sucked into the mud, which was littered with different colors of garbage. From afar, it looked like I was stepping on a large M&M cookie.

Columbia was growing. As I moved from elementary to middle school, I could see how forests and streams that my friends and I used to play in were being destroyed and replaced with new development. I began attending trash picking events in 7th grade and whenever we cleaned up a trail, we would often return to find even more trash. Whatever fixes we were doing were only temporary, and a larger issue wasn’t being addressed.

It soon became clear that the issue was apathy. Very few of my classmates shared my concern. In the few times I discussed environmental issues, even local ones pertaining to them, I would see disinterested stares. I realized that for them to care, I had to bring them outside and show them what needed to be preserved. Some of the staunchest conservationists I knew were fishermen and hunters, people who spent time out in nature and saw why they had to take action. If others came face to face with the outdoors, and understood the importance of preserving the outside world, we could eventually have long term solutions. We wouldn’t have to pick up trash on the same trails again and again.

In 7th grade, I started taking groups of my friends out on nature hikes and fishing trips. Their parents were happy that they were out of the house and not playing Minecraft. Many stopped coming after the first trip, but some kept it up and even started bringing their friends along, joining me in my volunteer activities.

By bringing people into nature to enjoy themselves, I thought I’d get more people to join than if I’d simply gone right to education and service projects. The key was to combine learning and having fun, to attract the widest possible audience. The difficulty with environmental clubs at schools is to get around preaching to the choir. Often, the only people who join these organizations are the select few who are already involved in conservation works.

I realized the need to scale up my efforts to engage even more young conservationists. In 8th grade, I reached out to Philip Herdman, a teacher at my school, Clarksville Middle School. We set up the fishery science club to bring students out of their classes and into the outdoors during the school day. I contacted local landowners and set up fishing events and hikes on their property. Every week, students had the opportunity to walk outside to a farm pond adjacent to the school and learn to fish. Along the way, I taught them about local aquatic species and their niches in the ecosystem.

The fishery science club became one of the most popular extracurriculars at Clarksville Middle School, with over 50 students, even though participating meant they have to make up for any work they miss while out of the classroom. At a competitive school like Clarksville, where it’s easy to find 6th graders spending hours daily practicing piano, that meant a lot. Even students who I never thought would join an environmental organization became active members of our program.

What we did at Clarksville ultimately was unsustainable though, requiring enormous amounts of time on behalf of student volunteers and the teachers. Mr. Herdman often joked that he needed to remind me that running fishery science wasn’t his full time job. My principal too, was very supportive of the endeavor and allowed us a great deal of autonomy, but when she left, a new administrator, more worried about liability issues, made our visits off school grounds harder to accomplish. Too many people joined and there weren’t enough volunteers to write the lesson plans, fix fishing poles, and take care of our trout tank. Mr. Herdman also transferred to another school, and two years after I left middle school, the club stopped operations.

A unique intersection of circumstances allowed fishery science to take root in the first place — supportive administrators, interested teachers, and proactive student volunteers to lead and support the class. I think these three things are necessary in order for environmental education programs to succeed. When one or two of them are missing, programs decline and are eventually lost.

What we learned from our experience is that it’s important for environmental education programs to involve multiple teachers and student leaders. At the Fishery Science club, it was just me and Mr. Herdman setting the tone for the program. In hindsight, it would’ve been much better for the program’s longevity if we reached out to other students and teachers to eventually take over the program. In addition, it would’ve made a great learning experience in leadership for the students involved. I’ve found that students make the best role models for other students, leading their peers by example and increasing student engagement. Teacher-driven lessons, which make up most curriculums, often fail to stimulate students.

I also learned about how to best connect students with nature. The success of an environmental education programs leans heavily on engaging students with activities they enjoy, and tying that back into the continued health of the environment. Most environmental education programs use field trips as the primary way to expose students to nature, but as we saw with our program at Clarksville, field trips do come with their own problems.

In addition to bringing students to nature, we should bring nature to students. As most schools revolve around a classroom setting, it makes sense to introduce a slice of the outdoors into the class. The Bioma Project, an initiative that I founded in high school, brought educational aquariums, stocked with up to ten species of native fish and plants, into schools for students to learn about local ecology. Our solution was extremely scalable, currently educating hundreds of students across Maryland and DC. While student, teacher, and administrative support is still required, having nature inside the classroom requires less work than bringing the classroom to nature. Combined with a well-developed curriculum, students can connect with much of the same material without leaving school grounds.

Before any fixes to pressing environmental issues can be permanent, people must understand the values that guide conservationists. Environmental education, starting in elementary school, should incorporate a connection to nature, allowing students to interact with the plants and animals that make up their local ecosystem. Through understanding, we can find purpose, and through purpose, we can do great things, even if it’s just to clear a highway of trash.

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