When we speak of environmental literacy for all, that “all” encompasses the vast diversity that makes up California’s 6.2 million K–12 public school population. Just as biodiversity creates more resilient ecosystems in the natural world, California’s diversity is one of its greatest strengths, and the Environmental Literacy Steering Committee engages many partners in the fields […]
In her blog post earlier this year, Ten Strands Board member Sheila Nahi provided an unequivocal yes to the question of whether we are still in a ‘Goldilocks moment’ to achieve environmental literacy in California, as first posed by Ten Strands Founder and President Will Parish in July 2015. With the active implementation of A […]
History and Development of the Get Outside Workshops In early 2012, the California State Board of Education was on the brink of adopting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—standards that would radically change how teachers would approach teaching science to their students. Anticipating the need for teacher support while transitioning to NGSS (which was adopted […]
Nearly every day we hear news that pertains to the environment, whether it’s a local, state, national, or global issue. Of course, this news is not isolated to a single moment in time, but is connected to a wide variety of choices made in the past, some of which were grounded in economics, others in […]
On July 29, 2015, Ten Strands’ Founder Will Parish published a persuasive blog entitled A Goldilocks Moment for Environmental Literacy. With Trump’s upcoming inauguration, I returned to Will’s piece with a sense of urgency to evaluate whether we indeed still have the right mix of conditions to successfully bring environmental literacy to California’s 6.2 million […]
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 […]
When I teach environmental literacy in my class I feel like I am opening a door for students to walk through. This door opens to empowerment, knowledge, and stewardship. Children want to be big thinkers. The more I challenge them with big ideas the more they rise to the occasion, and learning about the environment […]
Today my team at Ten Strands and I were pondering the bubble we live in here in the Bay Area. In general, everyone we talk to and work with seems to understand that climate change is a pressing issue that impacts us now and will impact future generations even more severely. It got me wondering […]
UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science recently released “A Field at Risk: The Impact of COVID-19 on Environmental and Outdoor Science Education.”