Preparing for Student Co-creation of Virtual Contexts for Exploring and Learning In And About Local Places in Environmental Education

Abstract:

While a virtual field trip cannot substitute for the physical experience of being in a place, virtual and physical learning environments can complement each other in significant and enriching ways. During the summer of 2020, a group of 11 teachers at grades 5 and 7 took part in a six-week online workshop on teaching students about the co-creation of virtual contexts for exploring and learning in and about local places. We define virtual contexts for learning as virtual spaces in which students are actively engaged in planning and making decisions about generating a product for a specific purpose. The teachers were part of an environmental education program in which they were to take field trips with their students to local sites in the spring and fall of 2020—until the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted those plans. To adapt the program in a way that maintained its goals while responding to the need for online instruction, a team that included the authors worked with the teachers to develop ways in which they could use virtual contexts to explore the attributes of the places that they and their students were to visit (and hopefully will visit when that becomes possible). This presentation will describe the workshop series, which made use of Google Tour Creator as the creative platform and connected the creation of the virtual contexts to concepts of place-based education, systems thinking, environmental education, media design, and other elements. We focused on using the virtual platform as a context for students to work in groups to collect and assemble media, in order to interpret natural and cultural elements of places, and express their own senses of place. The presentation will outline practical aspects of classroom co-creation of virtual contexts, such as connections to curricula, as well as approaches to instruction and assessment. We will show features from virtual products created in the project that illustrate the interconnections among scientific, societal, and personal place meanings.