McKnight teacher helps develop sustainability curriculum for college and seventh-grade students
September 2, 2010
By Tim Pfarr
McKnight Middle School science teacher Carlie Jonas was a member of a six-person team that worked at the Fred Hutchinson Research Center this summer to design a sustainability curriculum to be used at Arizona State University.
Carlie Jonas
However, students at Arizona State aren’t the only ones who will get to learn about the subject. Jonas teamed up with McKnight language arts, social studies and science teachers to create a sustainability curriculum for the school’s seventh-graders.
In science courses, students will work on a project in which they choose local systems — such as waste-management systems — and redesign them to make them more sustainable. In humanities, students will learn about their roles as consumers, the lifecycles of the products they use and social equity, equal access to needed resources.
Jonas, who has an environmental science background, said students should find the new curriculum motivating.
“It gets them to think about the whole world,” she said. “I think all kids will be interested in wanting to improve their systems and wanting to design systems that will still be working in 50 years.”
She said she hopes to pursue obtaining grants for the program in the future as well.
Jonas proposed the new curriculum last spring, and her colleagues quickly jumped on board.
“We’re all looking forward to working together,” said Erin Hall, social studies teacher. “I think that it’s going to be eye-opening for the kids.”
Hall teaches a lesson on how products from other countries make it to the U.S., and she said adding the sustainability curriculum will make the lesson more comprehensive.
“This is going to take it just that next step further,” she said.
Language arts teacher Beth Hanson will incorporate sustainability into her courses when her students read “The Giver.” The book has themes of sustainability, as characters in the book work to control their environment.
“I feel like this is the first time that we’re really doing cross-curricular work,” Hanson said, adding that having students explore similar themes in multiple classes will help with understanding.
“I think it’s important that they’re aware of what’s going on, and they’re going to grow up and have jobs where it’s affecting them,” she said.
The summer program
From July 6-30, Jonas and five other Western Washington teachers worked to design the sustainability curriculum with Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell, who will retire from his position at the facility this fall to take a position as a professor at Arizona State. In his new position, he will instruct a sustainability course for education majors.
“He was very fun to work with, very humble and inspiring,” Jonas said. “I feel very honored and lucky to be part of his experiment. It’s extremely inspiring and motivating.”
On any given day, Jonas said Hartwell and the team would discuss concepts, resources and current issues related to sustainability, and spend several hours working independently on designing sustainability lessons. After the independent work, the team would reconvene and share the new lesson plans.
“I became re-motivated about sustainability education,” Jonas said.
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