PCEP Update: July 2016

FEW LOTS – In”still”ing a Making Mind-set

Beginning April 26, 2016, the University of the South Pacific (USP) in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) partnered with the RMI Public School System and PREL to conduct training on solar water distilling technology. This training is funded by Food, Energy, & Water: Leveraging and Organizing Toward Self-sustainability (FEW LOTS), which is a supplemental grant to both PCEP and Water for Life—a broader project funded by the National Science Foundation focusing on informal STEM education around water. Dustin Langidrik, who leads the sustainability efforts at USP, along with his colleagues and students worked—and played—with the FEW LOTS Energy Course faculty, Reagon Gallen, and students from Life Skills Academy who are in the FEW LOTS program. Carpentry students from the Marshall Island High School (MIHS) also joined in the training.

After learning how distillation works—essentially, the water cycle in miniature—students broke up into groups to design modifications to the current hoop system still design as presented by Dustin. This designing and exploratory activity encourages divergent thinking and creativity. Participants also practiced communication skills, measuring and calculating, and cooperation. After only five lessons, the participants completed their first solar hoop system still. Click on this link to access a Public Google Drive folder containing a 15-minute video (and two trailers) detailing the design, construction, and use of the solar stills. The video was produced by the FEW LOTS collaborators Christian Sebastian and the students of the Media Club at the College of the Marshall Islands. They have partnered with PREL on other projects, including PCEP, WfL, and Successful Early Eco-literacy Development (SEED).

Each solar still can desalinize 3 to 5 gallons of freshwater from 12 to 15 gallons of seawater, depending on the weather. Over 2 weeks, this dream team will build and install five hoop system solar stills on the MIHS campus. A symptom of anthropogenic climate change is unpredictable weather including extended drought, thus having simple and appropriate technology to generate fresh water in the RMI—and the Micronesia/Pacific region—is crucial. This training not only taught STEM content and skills to students, but it also may save some lives in the long run.

Teachers Train with Hawai‘i School Garden Curriculum Map

From June 6 to 9, 2016, 30 teachers trained with the Hawai‘i School Garden Curriculum Map (HSGCM) at the Kū ‘Āina Pā Summer Intensive program held at the Kona Pacific Public Charter School (KPPCS) in Kealakekua, HI. Nancy Redfeather (The Kohala Center) Amanda Rieux (Mala‘ai: The Culinary Garden of Waimea Middle School) and Dr. Koh Ming Wei (PREL and PCEP) successfully led the event, with PREL and PCEP colleagues Evelyn Joseph and Dr. Emerson Odango in attendance.

The HSGCM is the culmination of 7 years of collaboration among Dr. Koh and her colleagues, including educators in the Hawai‘i Department of Education (HI DOE). When developing the map, the co-authors reviewed many exemplary frameworks including PCEP’s K–12 Science Climate Education Framework (CEF): Climate Science Concepts and Skills for Pacific Island Students. Some of the learning outcomes of the CEF were included in the HSGCM. This was the fifth cohort of the Kū ‘Āina Pā Summer Intensive. The overarching goal was to help teachers learn to navigate the HSGCM and create a standards-based garden program.

The map provides a scope and sequence for a school garden program, especially one that might be aligned with various HI DOE and US National standards. The map provides topics, learning outcomes, garden activities, and classroom extensions for grades K–8, organized around four themes: A Sense of Place, Living Soil and Plants, Nourishment, and Nature’s Design. Each day of the Intensive focused on one theme in the above order. Dr. Koh distributed copies of the PCEP books Our High Island Home and Pacific High Island Environments to the participants to use as curriculum map resources.

The intensive was an important opportunity for teachers to learn from the leadership team and from each other. A resounding theme throughout the 4-day event was the importance of sense of place, especially since all of the participants live/work in different places. Day 1 allowed the participants to learn more about the immediate place where the KPPCS is located. Kumu Keala Ching from Ke Kula ‘o ‘Ehunuikaimalino shared the mo‘olelo (place story) of the ahupua‘a (land division from uplands to the sea) in which the KPPCS is located, thus merging culture, history and scientific observation—all in the context of learning gardens.

Finding Cross-Cultural Connections in Planning for Garden Learning

Day 3 of the Kū ‘Āina Pā Summer Intensive program (see above story) focused on the theme of “Nourishment.” I had the opportunity to reflect with Evelyn and her colleague from Marshall Islands High School—master gardener Dako Nating (originally from the Solomon Islands)—on how composting in particular can be made relatable to students from a cultural perspective. We searched for connections to composting beyond just sustainable gardening and science-technology-engineering-mathematics (STEM).

We realized that composting can be framed in the broader idea that through the death/decomposition of a living thing, more life will be produced afterward. In searching for stories or proverbs that illustrated this idea, Evelyn shared the traditional Marshallese story about Tōboḷāār, the boy who was born only with a head and no body, who would then die and become the coconut tree. This story immediately reminded me of a nearly identical Mortlockese story that was shared to me from a member of the Mortlockese community in Pohnpei—in some versions, it is a boy with no body, and in others, it is a túróópwon (moray eel). This was a realization of similar story/plot elements within the Micronesia region.

Immediately thereafter, I summarized for them the Tagalog story of alamat ng niyog, which is the story of a mother with several children, who then died and became the coconut tree, thus providing sustenance for her children. It was an amazing moment in which I saw that I as a Filipino have something in common with Marshallese and Mortlockese communities—not just through recurring story elements, but also through the words themselves: Marshallese ni, Mortlockese nú, and Tagalog niyog all mean ‘coconut tree.’ Those words are also connected to the language of the place of the training: Hawaiian niu (coconut tree). Teaching composting in a school garden can provide opportunities to teach about languages and cultures—sense of places…in this case, Austronesian places—alongside agroforestry and chemistry. These and many more realizations sprouted from the generative, fertile space that was cultivated throughout the Kū ‘Āina Pā Summer Intensive.