Capstone Description

Project Environmental Education

By: Ray Vanek-Johnson

This past semester for Public Policy, we all had to do a project where we studied a societal problem and worked on developing a solution for it.  In Public Policy class, we also studied how the local, state, and national governments work, how different kinds of organizations work, as well as different political situations going on around the country and even internationally.  Furthermore, we also learned skills such as searching for information on databases like Proquest, conducting surveys to obtain data on our societal problem, finding important players in the politics of our issues, and also more interesting things such as how to calculate the likelihood that our proposed policy will work among many others.  

I did my Capstone Project as part of a team with two other students, Kory Ellis, and Caroline Snyder.  Our Capstone Project was aimed at addressing the issue of children not being connected enough with nature nowadays.  In other words, in this Modern Era, children do not spend as much time outside connecting with nature as they used to.  This is due to a multitude of factors ranging from the advancement of video games which take away the need to go outside in order to find enjoyment, all the way to the way in which state and national parks charging money from visitors deters many families from being able to visit natural wonders.  The solution we developed to this problem was to implement “Environmental Education”, or some others would also call it “Nature Connection” standards into the New York State curriculum in schools K-12.  A strategy for implementing Environmental Education is piloting an elective class on Outdoor Skills at our school, New Roots Charter High School.  The name of the class is actually entitled "Outdoor Education and Backpacking Skills”.  It is a merger between our elective and the elective of the teacher Andrew Gray, whose core class right now is math, but also likes to teach outdoor skills.  Thus, my Capstone Team and I, as well as Andrew Gray jointly teach this outdoor skills elective.  

Our Capstone Project aligns with the two SWOs (School Wide Outcomes) of “Members of an Ecosystem” and “Community Members”.  It is perhaps quite self-explanatory how our project connects to the first of these two SWOs; our class is aimed first and foremost at teaching other students how to connect with nature in a hands on way. Additionally, and to a lesser extent, we will also be aimed at teaching them about how the ecosystem works and how to protect it through a scientific perspective.  Our capstone project connects to the SWO of “Community Members” because we are doing a service to two of our communities, our own New Roots Community, and also the Greater Ithaca Community by providing an education to other people.  And, as educators, we are definitely demonstrating a social intelligence in our abilities to educate others.  This concludes my description of the most important artifact in my Senior Graduation Portfolio.