PBSE is a flexible process.

Background research helps youth better understand the issue. This research can take place before and after (even during!) the field visit. You can also incorporate student voice 🗣 into the research by creating topic teams. Youth can then choose the research focus that interests them most.

🦸‍♀️️🦸‍♂️️Here is the packet Rogers City Middle School students used to organize research related to local threatened and endangered species investigations at Thompson's Harbor State Park.

Yoder's Community as a Context for Learning Curriculum (shared as a resource during PBSE 101, Week 1) offers guidance and forms for helping students consider and select projects.

Google sheets can be useful for compiling, organizing, analyzing, and sharing data.

🦸‍♂️️🦸‍♀️️ Biotic (living) water quality monitoring is a flexible PBSE effort (and a meaningful watershed educational experience!) that can take place in both the field and classroom.

This video features one of our AMA (Ask Me Anything?!) Community Partners, Georgia Peterson!

🦸‍♂️️🦸‍♀️️The MI Vernal Pool Patrol is a community science opportunity to help monitor these seasonal wetlands.

We have already shared Michigan Dept. of Education's 📚Characteristics of Career and College Ready Students.

This is another way to deepen the impact of a PBSE learning experience through both curricular connections and career/college explorations. In fact, community partners collaborating in your PBSE efforts will easily reflect a variety of career and college/training organizations. Students themselves - as evidenced in NEMIGLSI evaluation PBE: Engagement from the Student Perspective - value career explorations as a core benefit gained through their PBSE experiences.

Addded College- /Career-Ready resources:

• College- and Career-Ready K-12 Standards (US Department of Education)

• Integrating Employability Skills: A Framework for All Educators (American Institute for Research)

• Four Keys to College & Career Readiness (Career Vision)

📚Our Curriculum Matters is a great website and source developed by Amy Demarest exploring how place-based education strategies can add-value and enhance school change, curriculum design, and student work.

📚Place-based Curriculum: Exceeding Standards Through Local Investigations is a book authored by Demarest and is relevant to the classroom side of our PBSE conversation. A 'dust jacket' summary offers that this book: "...provides teachers both the rationale and tools to create and integrate meaningful, place-based learning experiences for students. Practical, classroom-based curricular examples illustrate how teachers can engage the local and still be accountable to the existing demands of federal, state, and district mandates."

"Reading the World, Not Just the Words" by Demarest is an abridged article from her book, published by the Green Teacher organization and journal (Spring 2015).

Amy Demarest's biography notes that she, "teaches standards-based curriculum design, authentic assessment and watershed education in northern Vermont. " (Routledge, 2014)

PBSE efforts can mean youth enhancing their own natural learning spaces on your own schoolyard grounds. More than learning, these natural areas can serve recreational and reflection spaces for students, educators and even community members. Outdoors and nature experiences also provide people (youth and adults alike) health benefits and a sense of well being.

• 🔔Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder [book summary] (GREAT READ by Richard Louv )

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offers a Schoolyard Habitat Project Guide; and often partner with schools to explore and implement ideas.

🦸‍♀️️🦸‍♂️️Thunder Bay Jr. High (Alpena Public Schools) students worked to reclaim their Outdoor Education Site by removing invasive Buckthorn and revitalizing trails. Today this schoolyard habitat supports school learning and serves as a nature trail for the community.

Nature Benefits Research and Resources:

• Covid-19 Outdoor Learning (Green Schoolyards America)

• Health Benefits to Children from Contact with the Outdoors & Nature - annotated summary of literature and research (Children & Nature Network)

• Nature Can Improve Academic Outcomes (Children & Nature Network)

• Six Ways Nature Helps Children Learn (Ming Kuo, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Published by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley

What are your local community goals?

Townships, cities, counties, regions and even watersheds develop strategic plans to guide next steps. These efforts can include community economic development goals, emergency management and hazard mitigation plans, recreation plans, and green/blueway plans, etc.

These often speak to ideas of social and economic priorities and efforts. Youth will find that these are inseparable from local environmental stewardship opportunities (e.g. clean beaches at public parks and natural resource-based tourism). They also serve as a way to research content connected PBSE projects.

Are student perspectives considered in the plans? How might youth be partners moving forward?

📚Sustainable Coastal Tourism Development in Northeast Michigan illustrates (see Case Study #1, pages 14-15 of report) how youth can (and are) supporting coastal tourism opportunities in Northeast Michigan. The Northeast Michigan Council of Government (NEMCOG) typically helps create and houses these environmental plans for many northeast Michigan communities.

Supporting Resources/Lessons:

📚Yoder's Connecting Classrooms to the Community, Guide for a Community-based Approach to Education (shared as a resource during PBE 101 week) offers guidance and lessons for facilitating student learning and engagement relating to community agencies, organizations, and governance.

• LESSON 8 – GOVERNANCE IN THE COMMUNITY

• LESSON 9 – CONDUCTING AND COMPILING A COMMUNITY SURVEY

Does it feel impossible to accomplish a meaningful PBSE experience during a class-period or even a school year?

Classes end when bells ring, buses run on schedules, and saying goodbye to your students for summer break are all real concerns - and now the unknowns of school learning scenarios in-person or virtually. How can their projects and learning continue through after school, out-of-school partnerships?

How can partnering with community youth development partners, like 4-H Youth Development, expand opportunities for your students through PBSE projects?

🦸‍♂️️🦸‍♀️️ In the Alcona Community School & Hine's Emerald Dragonfly Project, connections were made with with Negwegon during the school year, but the project with Michigan Natural Features Inventory required a summer commitment. Alcona 4-H Student Stewards Club connected the dots between formal and informal education.

Supporting Scholarship:

• Year-Round Learning: Continuity in Education Across Settings and Time Through Expanded Learning Opportunities (Harvard Family Research Project)

• 4-H Youth-Adult Partnerships in Community Decision Making (4-H Youth Programs)

• Taking a Deeper Dive into Afterschool: Positive Outcomes and Promising Practices (Afterschool Alliance)