Integrating Biodiversity into Urban School Grounds through Transdisciplinary Curriculum Design

Abstract

As a teaching ecologist and doctoral candidate in Educational Sustainability, I work with science teachers who want to use place-based learning in their classes. Place-based learning ties ecological concepts to “real world” situations where students can act to help solve wicked problems like biodiversity. After surveying middle and high school teachers, I decided to create a curriculum, the Schoolyard Biodiversity Community (Schoobio), to provide transdisciplinary activities culminating in students envisioning their ideal ecological schoolyard and advocating for it with their school and community leaders. The curriculum is global in scope, with the goal being increasingly biodiverse school grounds and, by extension, more biodiverse public spaces throughout neighbourhoods. It also aims to increase understanding of different cultures present in cities through activities exploring human-nature interaction through the experience of cultural traditions and how they could be reflected on school grounds. The method used to develop the curriculum is Universal Design for Learning, which is similar to universal design in landscape architecture in that it provides many ways to participate in the activities regardless of ability or preferred learning style. Instructional strategies encourage opening the classroom to urban planners and landscape architects to learn best practices from those professions. Students lead the way in integrating nature into the built environment that is their school and school grounds, restoring biodiversity to their neighbourhoods through activities designed from their point of view. The Schoobio tools help students 3-D model their current and ideal future school grounds, resulting in presentations to school and community leaders that have more impact than typical PowerPoint presentations alone. By involving school landscaping staff as well as professionals outside the school, student plans are rooted in the real world of school policies, budgets, and need for shared use of the school grounds. Teachers using the curriculum report that students have increased their capacity for using data and mapping to inform their understanding of biodiversity and how its loss affects not just the urban environment but also human health and appreciation of nature for its intrinsic value. Schoobio is ready to be scaled up and used by more cities and schools to increase biodiversity.