Background

Managing Healthy Forests

Maintaining healthy forests is ever more critical for rural communities due to the increasing loss of wildlife habitat and the threat of high-severity, catastrophic wildfire. In the face of these threats and a looming climate crisis, it is critical to manage our forests for the health of our human and wildlife communities. Sound science is needed to support this action. Forest stewards, including young people in our communities, are needed to start building future forest stewards now, starting with the young people in our communities.

Our Forests Curriculum

Our Forests is a supplementary science curriculum designed for elementary students to engage in community and citizen science (CCS) on forest health in temperate forests. Utilizing local outdoor forested areas, students conduct scientific investigations to learn about pressing environmental issues and current management practices. Students connect with local land managers and scientists and use their own knowledge and understanding to help inform how our forests should be managed. 

The curriculum is designed using an approach to community and citizen science that involves students in the whole “lifecycle” of data, including data analysis and sharing their findings with meaningful external audiences like community partners and scientists. Also drawing on current research on students’ developing identity and agency with environmental science, the Our Forests curriculum supports opportunities for community-based stewardship such as habitat restoration and invasive plant removal. The benefits of doing this work are:

• Students learn science through real-world issues that their generation will be required to address and that are currently affecting their community.

• Students learn science through collecting, analyzing, and sharing their own forest ecology data.

• Students build a sense of place by getting outdoors and engaging with the natural world.

• Students use their natural curiosity to drive learning through observations, asking questions, and carrying out investigations.

Backed by Research

Researchers and educators view CCS as a strategy to facilitate meaningful engagement by young people in authentic scientific inquiry and investigation of place-based phenomena (Harris et al., 2020). This is in part because effective science education reflects the ways scientists actually work (Bell et al., 2009), and participation in different science practices may spur different forms of science reasoning and sensemaking practices (Hayes et al., 2020). CCS projects can provide opportunities for students to participate and contribute to their community, fostering scientific literacy that is inclusive of and extends beyond the K-12 settings (Roth and Calabrese Barton, 2004). When students see the scientific work they have done on a CCS project get taken up in conservation efforts or policy, this can influence the degree to which some participants experience stewardship learning outcomes (Ballard et al., 2017b).

We hope you use the Our Forests curriculum to help students steward their forests now and in the future.