STUDY ABROAD COSTA RICA
bankstreet.edu/cps/study-abroad/costa-rica
BANK STREET l AN INVITATION
We invite you to experience the rainforest in a field-based, 15-day course that explores the Costa Rican rainforest—The Delicate Connection of People & the Biology of the Rainforest: Implications for Curriculum (Grades 2 – 8). Through hands-on investigations, discover its unique environment and the community and the culture of the people who live there. Our goal is to learn how to construct a meaningful, unsentimental, and accurate curriculum on rainforest ecology and the issues surrounding rainforest conservation and climate change. With Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s concept of “Young Geographers” in mind, we will meet with local people, such as conservationists, farmers, hotel owners, artists, and teachers to learn from them and understand their stake in saving their environment. We will also meet with expert biologists for hands-on experiences with bats, birds, insects, butterflies, monkeys, flowers, and plants. Most of all, you will learn practical and thoughtful ways of teaching children about nature and social studies through inquiry. You will also learn how to teach children about faraway places so you can explore and teach about the rainforest through an interdisciplinary perspective in your own classroom or museum setting.
We invite you to learn more about our Long Trip to Costa Rica and consider joining us there this summer.
ABOUT THIS BOOK l STUDY ABROAD This book celebrates Bank Street Graduate School’s summer study abroad course, The Delicate Connection of People & the Biology of the Rainforest: Implications for Curriculum (Grades 2 – 8). As such, this book is also a celebration of Bank Street faculty member Marian Howard, who envisioned and designed the course in 2004. Rooted in Bank Street’s progressive history and pedagogy, the course follows in the traditions of Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s Young Geographers and the Long Trip, and embodies Bank Street’s stance towards integrated curriculum built around authentic inquiry and social action.
HISTORY l STUDY ABROAD
In Young Geographers (1934), Lucy Sprague Mitchell urged teachers to base curriculum on experience in the world. She wrote, “a geographer is an investigator of some aspect of the earth’s surface. He does more than collect factual data. He thinks in geographic relationships” (p.4). Trips enable students to have first-hand experiences of the “human geography” of a place. Students explore authentic questions through observation and interaction, asking why and how, and considering the environment together with the complexities of the different perspectives of the people involved. The Long Trip was an outgrowth of this work. Originated by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the Long Trip took place each spring from 1935-1952 (excluding the years of World War II). “Faculty and student teachers would travel together to encounter the complexity of a distant environment and confront its social and political issues: the labor movement, poverty, conservation, government intervention programs, race relations—and the consequences for children, their education, and their families. [The tradition was]
revived in 1996 by Fern Khan, then Dean of Continuing Education, and Carol Hillman, a Bank Street alumna and former Board of Trustees member” (“The 2018 Long Trip: History”, n.d.). “When speaking to...teacher educators, Lucy Sprague Mitchell (1941) posed two questions: ‘What can we do to enlarge the groups to which student teachers belong?’ and ‘What can we do to enlarge the groups to which their future school children will belong?’ She believed the Long Trip offered an opportunity to move beyond ‘merely knowing about’ people to actually ‘knowing them.’ The Long Trip grew from the aims and curriculum of the Bank Street teacher education program, with its focus on the total development of the teacher as well as the child. Based on Deweyan beliefs in education through experience and the social-political aims of education, the Long Trip reflected what Lucy Sprague Mitchell believed was important for teachers: studying children and the world in which children grew—as it was and as it might be....[Mitchell] was convinced that ‘learning that comes from first-hand experience has a smiting quality…’ With the optimism characteristic of the progressives, she believed that empathy, caring, and commitment would grow from seeing the world from another’s eye. With the hindsight of over half a century, across years of work and family life, many of the students who attended the Long Trips have confirmed her belief” (Vascellaro, n.d.).
—From Young Geographers, Lucy Sprague Mitchell
HISTORY l COSTA RICA COURSE In 2004, Marian Howard began to envision a course based on the Long Trip experience. It would engage teachers, aspiring teachers, and other educators in learning through experience in the rainforest of Costa Rica. Marian Howard and Bank Street faculty member Don Cook started planning the course— in collaboration with Bank Street’s Division of Continuing Professional Studies—with input from a group of 20 teachers from around New York City. It took two years to develop the course and recruit the first cohort of students. In August 2006, the first trip took place. Since then, every year (except 2015) a new group of students has traveled to Monteverde, Costa Rica to explore, research, play, and create. In true generative fashion, the Costa Rica trip has sparked the development of new study abroad courses. Currently students can experience the same model of integrative, immersive learning in Morocco and Cuba.
“The Costa Rica curriculum provides learning through direct experience, and our students learn the same way we want them to teach—to use the experience itself as a basis for learning.” —Marian Howard, Ed.D, Advisor and Faculty Member, Bank Street Graduate School of Education, Museum Education Program
STUDY ABROAD l COSTA RICA
ABOUT THE COURSE For two weeks, students on the Costa Rica trip engage in a rich range of activities including lectures, hikes, explorations, and experiences offered by the Monteverde Institute and created collaboratively between Monteverde and Bank Street College. Students experience the connection between the natural environment and local residents and study the complex intersections of geography, biology, history, economics, culture, and politics. As Marian Howard describes, “This is a course that is built purely on experience. We find something that puzzles us and we go see what the experts say. And sometimes the experts disagree. Different biologists have very different ideas of why things are happening the way they are happening. We are like children again, thinking about what is this going to be like for our students? Well, what is it like for us? We have a direct experience of a phenomena that we have not had before in our lives. Which is what children experience. It is a way for us to get into children’s heads because the experience is our own.” Nikki—fourth-grade lead teacher at Graland Country Day School in Denver, Colorado—reflects on her experience in Costa Rica: “Bank Street is all about the doing. What does it mean to be a learner? Experiencing that for yourself before you take on the perspective of teacher. And I think that is what this trip is all about; we are acting as learners and reflecting on what might that look like as a teaching experience. We do that daily and also in the long term...It is a really long field trip. We are getting out there and seeing what it is like. It is the experience of place-based education. That experiential piece is for me what is always at the core of Bank Street.”
OUR PARTNER l THE MONTEVERDE INSTITUTE
The Monteverde Institute (MVI) is an international education and research center that is committed to study abroad, applied research, and community service. Originally started by the local Quaker Community, MVI serves many scientists and student groups that come to live, learn, and work in the cloud forest. Marian Howard, as a part of her doctoral studies in anthropology, lived with and studied the local Quaker community and participated in MVI’s creation. MVI is located high in the Tilaran Mountains of Costa Rica. Its 38-acre campus forms part of the famous Monteverde Reserve Complex, an area of natural preserves that protects more than 65,000 acres of endangered tropical forest. This location underlines the importance of MVI’s commitment to sustainability. The institute’s programs are based on the belief that in order to achieve sustainability— both locally and globally—a combination of environmental, social, cultural, economic, and technological factors must be carefully considered. To that end, MVI fosters a synergistic approach that blends international study abroad, applied research, and community engagement. Its programs focus on sustainable development, ecotourism, Spanish language and culture, conservation biology, community health, land use planning, integrated water resources, and social justice (adapted from http://www.monteverde-institute.org/about-us.html).
EXPERIENCING NATURE TAKES ON A CENTRAL ROLE
“To be immersed in the cloud forest, with the mist coming in, and the sounds of the frogs and the birds and the suck of the mud on your boots… it is a very different kind of situation students are not used to.” —Nikki
“You were surrounded by nature, by ‘natural nature’. You smelt it. You felt it. You woke up to the same sound of Monteverde Bellbirds every morning.” —Imani
THE CURRICULUM l PLACE-BASED INQUIRY The curriculum of the trip is grounded in inquiry: the asking of important questions, conducting authentic research, synthesizing new information, reflecting, and asking new questions. This models an approach to curriculum design and engagement for the educators who participate.
ASKING QUESTIONS
“Upon arrival at Paseo de Stella, we were greeted by Richard who invited us into a conversation highlighting bat species and dispelling common myths. ‘What makes bats really important?’ he began.” —From Daily Journal “Follow a Teacher to the Rainforest” [http://teachingcostarica.com/daily-journal/]
“After a delicious burrito lunch in town, we ventured to The Bat Jungle. Following a walking lecture on the lives of bats, we walked into an artificial cave to see them in action. I was freaked out by the idea of bats as I have always associated them with vampires (vampire bats) and disease. Today everything I learned about these flying mammals changed my mind. I am no longer afraid and, in fact, find them quite endearing. Once I began to truly understand their nature and existence, I started to develop even more questions.” —Anna, from “Follow a Teacher to the Rainforest” [http://teachingcostarica.com/category/by-topic/ frogs/]
“Once you become aware of your surroundings, you have the opportunity to explore so many things you’ve never questioned. Opening your mind can lead you to investigate what may have always been right in front of you.” —Melissa, from “Follow a Teacher to the Rainforest” [http://teachingcostarica.com/]
RESEARCHING
“As the sun set and the storm past, we set out for our night hike. Mark lead the way, effortlessly spotting and grabbing various frogs throughout the forest. We learned about the unique frogs that appear after a thunderstorm or those who make homes out of streams. Even though it was wonderful to learn about the new species, my favorite part of the evening was the period of time when we were in complete darkness in complete silence. At this time, Mark asked us to just listen. Listen to the different levels of sound. Listen to the noise that you can’t hear with all the other background in our daily lives. It was an eyeopening experience to stand in the middle of the rainforest and not see a thing.” —Anisah, from “Follow a Teacher to the Rainforest” [http://teachingcostarica.com/category/by-topic/frogs/]
“There is a lot of hiking that happens with your flashlight off to tune into your senses. I remember it being so extremely loud. We walked down to the creek and there were so many little, tiny frogs… the smallest, colorful, slimiest, tiny frogs you’ve ever seen. It was this incredible experience of finding these tiny frogs. I remember the creek being really loud and the call of the tree frogs being really loud. It was so playful.” —Robin
“Mark provided us with wonderful lectures regarding the process involved in making the rainforest eternal and the future of amphibians in the Monteverde area. I found these to be very fascinating and informative discussions. Speaking to someone who is extremely involved in the area and feels so passionately about protecting the Children’s Eternal Rainforest is one of the best ways to gain a deep understanding.” —From “Follow a Teacher to the Rainforest”
“One thing students learn is the impact that climate change has had in Costa Rica and thus all over the world. But we see it with our own eyes in Costa Rica. As we talk to the people who live there, they tell us how each year there are less and less species of animals in a particular region as it gets warmer.” —Patricia, personal converstation
“The big takeaway from our time at the farm was seeing how many different ways one can incorporate sustainability into an existing area as an educational space (from the building construction to the pig waste methane gas stove, to the distribution of plants), and brainstorm ways one could further this mission. Our guide, Guillermo Vargas, shared his vision, passion, and wisdom with us. This Tico panel and discussion gave us all a much better sense of how rapidly Monteverde transformed from a quiet farming community of three families into a major tourism hub. The major takeaway was learning about different ways of life, understanding problems associated with rapid societal changes, and seeing how local community organizing can improve communities in powerful ways through persistence, strong leadership, and relationships.” —from “Follow a Teacher to the Rainforest” [http://teachingcostarica.com/daily-journal/]
“Taking the time to notice the things you don’t understand about your environment can stimulate questions that lead to investigation. After you’ve investigated your inquiries you’ll have new found discoveries and even more questions that can be further investigated.” —Lo Ehrhart, from “Follow a Teacher to the Rainforest” [http://teachingcostarica.com/daily-journal/]
REFLECTING, SYNTHESIZING AND ASKING NEW QUESTIONS
BANK STREET l TRANSFORMATIONS
“Teachers are on the receiving end of the style of teaching they are trying to build in their practice.” —Imani [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzpG9omaqffKWm56cW5wNld4TnM/view]
“It is a very rich experience to get to know and experience the cloud forest and the people. It is especially rich for educators as they get to appreciate what it is to live in another culture. To be new to a place, a culture and trying to integrate and understand the multiple relationships that make the particular place.” —Fern, MVI educator
“The trip allows students to see education in its multiple shapes: Museum, educator guides, environmental guides, the different kinds of schools, the different educational activities and experiences. These create multiple ways of connecting [to] and learning and teaching about the cloud forest. Something especially powerful about this course is that nature and human aspect are integrated in a way that helps students see the deep and complex relations.” —Fern, MVI educator
APPLICATION l FINAL PROJECTS The final project for the course is a plan or curriculum the students can use in their classrooms or museums. Teachers bring back to their classrooms ideas and projects that are born from the excitement of the personal experience. Personal stories about the discoveries and feelings, rich descriptions and understandings of the interconnectedness, multi dimensionality, and richness of each problem and environment. Students have created a wide range of projects based on their experiences in this course. Students created curriculum around specific animals, about climate change, or applied the experience on how to learn to topics of their interest. As Marian Howard explains, “My immediate environment at home and school is a city, near a river, park, stores, and apartment houses. I would take a group to investigate the park, the fauna and flora. I would spend some time looking at the river to check out the salt content since it is close to the basin. I would look at the people who live in the apartment houses and look at the kind of stores that are in the area. [...] Although we have been exploring our Monteverde environment, this focus can be incorporated throughout various surroundings.�
RAINFOREST STEAM AFTER SCHOOL CURRICULUM
“This past fall I taught a Rainforest STEAM afterschool program with ages four to seven at Manhattan Country School, and attached is some of their work. The kids absolutely loved the topic. The curriculum was play-based and I stuck to projects that lended themselves to storytelling and imaginary play. This included but was not limited to wearable wings inspired by birds of the rainforest, Toucan puppets, themed storybooks, and ant robots. Each session opened with the reading of a rainforest-themed picture book.” —Lo, participant
THIRD/FOURTH GRADE CURRICULUM: THE QUETZAL CONUNDRUM —Eric, participant The simulation in this lesson is designed to have students attempt the difficult and complex work of environmental activism. “The resplendent quetzal, endemic to only narrow swaths of Central America, is predicted to be one of the species most threatened by climate change. Adult quetzals are fruit-eaters, particularly eating various species of wild avocado. In Monteverde, Costa Rica, for example, quetzals migrate between five life zones, in synchrony with the fruiting of the avocado trees. Quetzals have special adaptations to allow them to swallow the avocado, which is often larger than their skull. They digest the avocado in their stomach over the course of around half an hour, then vomit up the pit. This is one of the only methods of seed dispersal for the wild avocado, which in the evolutionary past relied mostly on dispersal by (now extinct) megafauna. As the climate changes, the timing of the avocado trees’ fruiting has begun to become disrupted, and the zones that the avocado can live in are moving up in elevation. However, quetzals and other fruit-eating birds are not necessarily moving the seeds of the avocado to these new zones. To add to the quetzal’s woes, the toucan, which used to live primarily in lower elevation zones, has been moving up into the quetzal’s territory as temperatures increase—and sometimes eating the quetzal’s eggs. And, much of the quetzal’s habitat has been deforested for farmland. Thus, the narrowing of the range of the avocado will lead to the narrowing of the range and the possible extinction of the resplendent quetzal.”
CHILDREN’S BOOK FOR EIGHT AND NINE-YEAR-OLDS: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS IN THE RAINFOREST —Vandana, participant “Close Encounters in the Rainforest is a children’s book that describes the array of biodiversity present in a tropical rainforest. The book is designed for eight and nine-year-olds because its content is aligned with that age group’s interests and curriculum themes. Close Encounters in the Rainforest is written in a first-person narrative format in which a red-eyed tree frog is telling the story of the different animals and plants one can encounter in a Costa Rican rainforest. The text and vocabulary in the book are based on the science content and reality of the tropical rainforest. The book can also be viewed as a field guide to some of the most important plants and animals, and dynamics, found in the rainforests of Costa Rica. The content of the book can also be informative for adult readers.”
FOLLOW A TEACHER TO THE RAINFOREST
Students have also created a website with information on their experience and to share with other teachers ideas for how to incorporate rainforest biology into curriculum. http://teachingcostarica.com/ PRESENTATION: FOODS OF NATURE A blog devoted to the delicate balance between the environment, culture, and cuisine of Costa Rica —Gail, participant [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1D8Tp d4RaoUf3K9TcMXi4V6nD3bijidn6tQCFZ9KtNdQ/edit#slide=id.p3]
INTEGRATED MASTERS PROJECTS Bank Street graduate students have also used the trip as a launching for their masters theses. Here are some examples: “The delicate connection of people and biology of the rainforest : implications for curriculum, a field-based science and social studies curriculum design course for teachers in Costa Rica” “This thesis describes the pedagogical rationale and design of a fourth-day field-based course for educators in Monteverde, Costa Rica about the rainforest. The course will culminate in the development of curricula or banks of resources for teachers to use back in their own classrooms.” —Susan, participant “Cloud Forest in our Classroom” “This thesis follows a teacher and her bicultural class of first-, second-, and third-grade children in the setting of a mountain-top community amidst a cloud forest in Costa Rica. It covers one school year as the class and teacher work together to create and develop a cloud forest curriculum.” —Lyn, participant “Dynamic education: the energy of inspired teachers and curious students put into motion” “This portfolio discusses the different kinds of energy that both teachers and kids bring to learning experiences. In science education, dynamic education harvests energy, promotes movement, and leads to change. When teachers develop curriculum around their passions and carefully access their students’ developmental characteristics and interests, the outcome is dynamic education.” —Robin, participant
BANK STREET l REFLECTIONS
“What potentialities in human beings—children, teachers, and ourselves—do we want to see develop? A zest for living that comes from taking in the world with all five senses alert. Lively intellectual curiosities that turn the world into an exciting laboratory and keep one ever a learner.” —Bank Street credo
Bank Street’s credo, written 100 years ago, lives in the world through experiences like the Costa Rica trip. The course, The Delicate Connection of People & the Biology of the Rainforest: Implications for Curriculum, animates our founding principles and reverberates beyond the Bank Street community to the schools, classrooms, and museums of its participants. Marian Howard reflects, “Students have testified that the course is ‘life changing.’ For some students it is their first time living in an unfamiliar culture. For some it is their first real experience of being in ‘nature.’ They return with ideas for their classrooms that are new and exciting and fun. And it is a deep ‘Bank Street’ experience—we live what we preach.”
THANK YOU Thanks to all instructors and students who shared their experiences for making this book. Thank you for your perspectives and reflections and for sharing your work, photos, projects, interviews, websites, and blogs. Special thanks to: Marian Howard Nikki Spiers Lo Ehrhart Robin Ostenfeld Patricia Mazhuera-Johnson, Imani Parkinson Rachel Lucskowski Lyn O’Hare Susan Wu Vandana Matharani Eric Fishman Gail Goldspiel Joy Ellebbane Fern Perkins Laura Zadoff Christopher Kyriakou Debra Rudick bankstreet.edu/cps/study-abroad/costa-rica
REFERENCES Bank Street College of Education. (n.d.). The 2018 long trip: History. Retrieved from https://www.bankstreet.edu/alumni/long-trip/ Mitchell, L. S. (1971). Young geographers: How they explore the world & how they map the world. New York: Bank Street College of Education. The Monteverde Institute. (n.d.). About us: Education, community, research in Costa Rica. Retrieved from https://monteverde-institute.org/about-us.html Vascellaro, S. (n.d.). The history of the Bank Street long trip. Retrieved from https://www.bankstreet.edu/alumni/long-trip/long-trip-history/