Maryville College sustainability students design interactive teaching tools for local fourth-graders
Nov. 15, 2022
Area elementary and intermediate schools will soon be the recipients of Maryville College gift boxes, courtesy of a recent grant awarded to the institution by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The $100,000 grant was awarded in September and will allow MC students to create “Out of the Box Community Sustainability” packages that will be provided to fourth-graders in select East Tennessee schools.
“In a nutshell, we’ll be providing them with a series of boxes, each of them centered around environmental education and regionally connected to our area and Appalachia as a way to educate them about environmental issues,” said Adrienne Schwarte, a professor of Design and the coordinator of the Sustainability Studies minor at Maryville College.
“We wanted these ideas to be fun and educational for students, and it’s really important that the things in them are turnkey, so that when a teacher would like to add in an environmental education activity to enrich the class, they’re ready to go, straight out of the box,” she added. “It’s meant to be able to serve as an additional support mechanism for instructors, particularly around environmental education.”
The idea, Schwarte said, came from a class that she and Dr. Mark O’Gorman, a professor of Political Science and coordinator of the College’s Environmental Studies program, team teach each spring semester. In their Introduction to Environmental Issues and Foundations of Sustainability course (ENV/SUS 101) they were looking to integrate a project or assignment into the class that would allow the students to activate classroom environmental and sustainability knowledge in a more tactile and interactive way.
“We talk a lot about being change agents, and how they can be change agents around issues for the environment,” Schwarte said. “For our last project in the class, rather than having a more static individual, written assignment, we started off by having students come up with short little charettes/activities they could put together to educate others about an issue related to the environment.
“That first year, students got into groups, came up with concepts and ideas and had to write a proposal. We had some small community engagement grant funding each year to support those activities, so we bought the materials, and our very first year, we did these boxes as an activity on campus.”
The boxes run the gamut, Schwarte added, and include specific, concrete ways in which students can use the contents to make an environmental difference. One box, for example, contained all the materials along with instructions for making soap in a safe, effective and sustainable way.
“It’s about addressing the challenges of environmental problems, and although there are a lot of new technology materials used to tackle environmental problems, it’s also about implementing ideas that have existed for many decades, including no-tech and simple ways from Appalachia that can be sustainable,” Schwarte said. “There are lots of skills and knowledge around environmental efficiency and conservation we can bring back or at least make sure that shared knowledge is available for everybody, so they can be thinking of those things as well.”
A project to encourage critical thinking
That first year, Maryville College faculty and students provided environmental education to students at Clayton-Bradley Academy in Maryville; the success led to reaching out to a second school during year two, and it became an annual project among the Sustainability Studies and Environmental Studies students.
“The students enjoyed it, and they learned something about the process because it made them feel stronger as change agents in their community,” Schwarte said. “When the opportunity for the grant came into play, we thought it was a really good opportunity to expand the program and offer it to more schools.”
To expand the “Out of the Box Community Sustainability” project, Maryville College will partner with Keep Blount Beautiful, Schwarte said, to generate and distribute the boxes to regional public schools, “targeting economically distressed and underserved communities in Blount and Loudon counties,” according to the grant application.
“These stand-alone environmental education units, created with materials and curricula to encourage critical thinking, will focus on issues specific to East Tennessee, such as air, water, and soil quality, ecosystem health management, food security, and climate change,” the application goes on to state. “The project will reach 960 fourth-grade students in East Tennessee and the Appalachian region … by designing and building portable, sustainable, and reusable environmental learning units, this project will inspire and motivate youth and community members to become active stewards of East Tennessee’s unique natural resources as well as increase the number of K-12 classrooms teaching environmental education and meeting the Tennessee Environmental Literacy Plan.”
The grant will provide funding for the project through 2024, Schwarte added, and organizers have a target date to begin distributing boxes in January, with another drop in April and in the fall and spring of the 2023-24 academic year. Schwarte and O’Gorman recently sent out a campus-wide notice seeking four MC students to serve as paid interns to carry out the project, which will give them experience in working with both local classrooms and an area nonprofit.
And, she added, the development of a hands-on learning tool that promotes active engagement will help both the Scots assembling the boxes, and the students who will be their recipients.
“That active engagement is so important in putting together the boxes, be it a demonstration of how something works so students can see that through physical, visual, real-time engagement in the process to game-based activities that students have designed,” Schwarte said. “A lot of these are just sort of the reminder of the importance of everyday activities we can do to reduce our emissions and have a positive impact on the environment. With sustainability, we must continue to teach that we all share the planet, and when we take these measures, we all win. That’s what’s so great about all of this.”