UAF class charts young children’s environmental engagement

March 30, 2020

Photo courtesy Kelly Kealy. Kelly Kealy poses with her teaching assistant, Mr. Tree. Kealy and fellow UAF graduate student Maggie Blake worked with children at UAF’s Bunnell House.

Young children may not have learned the term “environmental stewardship,” but they still practice it.

In a unique University of Alaska Fairbanks course, “Children as Cultural Change Agents,” six graduate students worked to tease out some of the ways young children engage with and steward their environment. The participatory research projects in the course involved preschool, kindergarten and high school students in the communities of Fairbanks, Kenai and Scammon Bay.

“The project is geared towards equipping educators to engage children in environmental stewardship,” explained Carie Green, a UAF associate professor of graduate education. Green taught the fall 2019 course and participated in the research.

Researchers worked to understand children’s views on environmental stewardship in their community. Two of the students in the class are schoolteachers in Scammon Bay and Kenai, which led to the involvement of local schools in those areas. A third teaches in Fairbanks, and the other three are nontraditional educators and researchers. They collected data in the forms of spoken-word surveys, drawing exercises, playacting, observing the students outside, and photos and videos.

In Kenai, several topics came to the fore among graduate student Sara Boersma’s kindergarteners at the Kaleidoscope School of Arts and Sciences, which included animals, picking up trash and caring for each other. During a snowy walk outside, graduate student Emma Heslop observed one child protecting a sapling from footfalls, and another pushing snow off stumps so classmates could sit down.

“What really surprised me and touched me was stewardship for the environment but also caring for each other, which is part of environmental stewardship, thinking of the needs of other people,” Heslop said.

In Scammon Bay, kindergarten students answered questions, drew, took photos and acted out scenes of themselves interacting with the environment. While the site was overseen by graduate students Kyle Farris and Holly Williams, the actual research was conducted by five high school seniors as a project for their capstone class. The students also presented the results via videoconference to an audience in Fairbanks.

“It was my first time doing research, but then I was also trying to teach the seniors how to do research,” said Williams, who is the high school students’ teacher. “It was really cool to see them step up and really take ownership of it.”

In Fairbanks, graduate students Maggie Blake and Kelly Kealy didn’t have an embedded instructor for their project at UAF’s Bunnell House, so they invented their own. “We did have a co-researcher come in and help us: Mr. Tree,” explained Kealy, referring to a coniferous hand puppet. “It just got them interested and excited, a fun thing.” They also observed helpful actions among the young students, such as spontaneously shoveling snow to clear their play area.

Photo courtesy Holly Williams. Scammon Bay kindergarten students take part in a playacting exercise as part of the “Children as Cultural Change Agents” course project.

The class was supported by the Alaska National Science Foundation Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (Alaska NSF EPSCoR), which provided travel funds for Green, Heslop and Farris to participate in the local research projects firsthand.

“It was awesome,” said Heslop of her journey to Kenai. “I got to actually meet her kids so that when I’m looking at the videos, I know the whole story and the whole perspective and what was going on and what we said and what prompted them.”

Green and the students plan to meet again for an academic writing workshop geared toward producing a research article based on the class project.