Urban Ecology and Environment: Educational Opportunities

Beginning in 1997, research fellows at the STUDIO for the Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with The Pittsburgh Children's Museum, have developed classroom activities that invite school children, their teachers and families to consider the creative opportunities offered by brownfield sites. In 1999, the STUDIO team received a grant from the State of Pennsylvania State Department of Education to create education modules and reference materials for teachers. We chose to focus this project on urban watersheds to meet the educational needs of a wider audience and build on the environmental standards of the State of Pennsylvania.

We believe that urban *brownfields and other vacant spaces offer a unique learning opportunity to build on a students awareness and understanding of their immediate surroundings. We have developed specific themes, such as watersheds, streams, land, sustainability, etc., to explore at depth, using an inquiry-based method. We are designing the activities so that students are given the time to see, observe and discover first. We build the content on their discoveries. The content is guided by the proposed Pennsylvania State academic standards for environment and ecology. The activities are be described as self-contained modules on the web, with directions to teachers interested in adapting them in their art or science classes. For each activity, we will explain how it corresponds to the standards and describe how to set it up and guide the students in discovery. We also provide complete lesson plans structured around the activities.

* Brownfields are post-industrial sites. They are the places that have been abandoned by steel and other industries. They are often best described in comparison to greenfields. Greenfields are undeveloped lands like fields and forests, which are often beyond the suburban edge. Redeveloping brownfields reinforces the function of cities and takes development pressure off forests and farms. There are many current and former brownfields properties in Pennsylvania.