About Will
Will Parish is a credentialed public high school science educator with a 30-year record of innovative accomplishments in the environmental and educational fields. He taught Environmental Science at Gateway High School in San Francisco, and now serves on the board. He served on the California State Board of Education’s Curriculum Commission and then founded Ten Strands as a nonprofit organization to support California’s efforts to achieve statewide penetration of high-quality environment-based education into schools.
It’s almost the end of the year—and what an exciting one it has been for Ten Strands and our partners! Teachers are embracing environmental literacy in thousands of schools throughout California, and the momentum continues. Environmental literacy is being infused into the core subjects of science, history-social science, and English language arts. Students taught these […]
The holidays are upon us once again, and as we prepare to celebrate the season of giving I’m feeling hopeful about the coming year. There are so many good things happening out there! If you’re looking for some presents to put under the tree or alongside the menorah this holiday season, you’re in luck, because […]
Humanity is experiencing a moment in history where converging circumstances are directing us toward a new path. The use of technology in education, an increase in the scientific understanding of how human activity is harming our environmental health, and the possibility of using public schools to attain an unprecedented level of environmental literacy are all […]
We humans have a big problem facing our fragile species: our climate is changing more quickly than we can adapt. The only time the climate has changed as fast as it is changing now is when an asteroid hit the earth 60 million years ago—the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event—causing a mass extinction of some three-quarters of […]
Learning is a life-long activity, and we want to instill that drive in all students. If you can engage students by making learning relevant and fun—as environment-based learning does—then they will not only perform better in school, but they will want to become learners for their whole life. In thinking about this holiday season, I […]
Catching up on emails recently, I came across a link titled “How Wolves Change Rivers”. I thought, “Come on. How could a wolf change a river?” Well, it turns out that the video unveiled a phenomenon called “trophic cascade.” Think avalanche. It’s an ecological process of destruction that starts by getting rid of the top trophic […]
Listening to a recent broadcast of KCRW’s Left, Right and Center, co-host Rich Lowry (author and editor of the National Review) put forth a few things that concerned, or perhaps more accurately, disturbed me. He questioned how we can be certain that human activity contributes to climate change in light of evidence that while the […]
Riding the Capitol Corridor train on my most recent trip to Sacramento, I was struck by just how much I miss teaching. While it was hard to leave the high school classroom, I am happy to be involved with contributing input on the revision of the Science Framework for California Public Schools. The reason for […]
UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science recently released “A Field at Risk: The Impact of COVID-19 on Environmental and Outdoor Science Education.”