Sustainability with Strive Prep
My CCESL Student Scholar project involved working with a charter school within DPS to teach lessons surrounding sustainability to a class of high school students with some degree of learning challenge. This class was co-taught with my fellow senior Student Scholar, Megan. Megan and I also work at the Center for Sustainability so were able to pull from our experience at the Center and within Environmental Science to build lessons that we felt would be interesting and informative for our class. Our Graduate Fellow and Mentor, Derek, helped us to make these lessons as accessible and engaging as possible for the students. Throughout our project, we taught lessons about community gardens, recycling, climate change and natural resources.
Project Artifacts
One of the goals of this project was to introduce themes of environmental justice and injustice to the students. One way we did this was by teaching the class about food deserts, specifically in Denver. We encouraged conversations about where the students may have seen food deserts before, and why this is an example of something socially unsustainable.
Another important goal of this project was learning how to teach complex topics in a way that was concise and easy to understand. Derek was essential in teaching Megan and I how to change our language so that our students did not get lost in our explanations. In our lesson on climate change, we tried to use examples that the students would recognize without needing to explain any of the complicated science.
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Something important that we learned from Derek was the importance of including different types of media in our presentations. Using a combination of videos, text and hands-on activities made the content more enjoyable and digestible. Some of the hands-on activities we led included potting vegetables, sorting trash, and using play-dough to represent Earth's processes.
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