UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The COVID-19 pandemic forced educators at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center to teach school-age children about the environment without them being fully immersed in it.
Lucy McClain, assistant teaching professor at Shaver’s Creek, co-authored a scholarly article about her experiences in 2020 and 2021 redesigning environmental education programming for use online. The article was published earlier this month in Environmental Education Research.
McClain said it was a challenge to replicate authentic outdoor learning experiences online, but the Penn State students in her environmental education class, RPTM 430: Environmental Education Methods and Materials, developed learning materials, lesson plans and a suite of programs that filled the need and showed promise.
“Environmental education is best done in an outdoor space, and you’re exploring things as a group,” said McClain, who teamed with educators through the North American Association for Environmental Education to shift toward remote or hybrid programs with the goal of maintaining their usual guidelines of excellence. “When you’re learning remotely or online, you can’t do that. It’s really hard to change.”
McClain and her students in the spring of 2020 created “Nature Activities to Go” for families and teachers.
For instance, "Backyard Birdwatch" is aimed at fourth graders and focuses on how birds use their beaks. A coloring book featuring butterflies includes 17 families of the insect found in Pennsylvania.
“It's all about getting experience teaching and teaching in the authentic environment, so how do you replicate that?” McClain said. “But you can create solo adventures. Turn off our cameras, go out and collect evidence, learn about your place. We encouraged students to look for things where they were.”
McClain said the programming also places an emphasis on exploring the community, not just the outdoors.
“We focus our educational programs at Shaver's Creek for people who are in our communities, but these resources allow us to go farther into their communities,” she said.
Tyler Kauffman, who graduated in 2021 and is now a Shaver’s Creek intern, was a student in McClain’s class in the spring of 2020. He specifically worked on a weather journal project for "Nature Activities to Go," and said the whole experience opened his eyes to a new realm of possibilities for environmental education.
Chloe Kalp was in McClain’s class in the spring 2021 semester and taught local elementary students over Zoom. She said she knew that connecting with the students would be a challenge, but the group was able to accomplish that. For one activity, they had the children find something bumpy and write about it in nature journals.
“You could see in the kids’ eyes that they were catching on to what we were saying, or they were liking what we were doing, and they really figured it out pretty fast,” Kalp said.
Kalp also said the students’ teachers were a vital part of their instruction. The teachers assisted their students in person, such as helping them show off the work they did on the camera so everyone on Zoom could see it.
“You can do environmental education online – it doesn’t have to just be in person,” she said. “That was really cool to see that we made that come together.”
Visit the Shaver’s Creek website to learn more about Penn State’s outdoor education field lab and nature center. Shaver’s Creek is a Penn State Outreach service.