Osl poster

The University of Georgia Office of Service-Learning

Service-Learning and the Outdoor Classroom: Designing Living-Learning Spaces for Engaging At-Risk Students

ART

ART EDUCATION

ENT ENTOMOLOGY

LAND Landscape Architecture

HORT HORTICULTURE

Graffiti art titled “Choice” was painted by Hunter Lea, Classic City High School student.

Project Overview

Project Partners

Shannon O. Wilder, Ph.D., Director Office of Service-Learning Marianne Robinette, Outreach Program Coordinator Department of Entomology Pratt Cassity, Director Center for Community Design and Preservation College of Environment and Design David Berle, Associate Professor Horticulture Department Elizabeth Duval, Science Teacher Classic City High School, A Performance Learning Center

Community Partner

• Classic City High School, A Performance Learning Center • Created in 2003 to address the significant drop-out rates in the Clarke County School District in Athens, GA • Developed as a partnership between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Communities in Schools, and the Clarke County School District. • 1 to 15 teacher-student ratio with a charter for up to 120 students. • Non-traditional, voluntary high school with computerbased NovaNet curriculum augmented by service-learning and internships. • Monday-Thursday classes from 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM • On-site child care early learning center

Building on a continued service-learning partnership between the University of Georgia Office of Service-Learning and a local school, this project aimed to design and construct an outdoor classroom for the Clarke County School System’s Classic City High School, A Performance Learning Center (PLC), a non-traditional voluntary high school in Athens, Ga. The outdoor classroom will provide a needed space for teaching and learning in many subject areas.

Participants and Project Design

UGA students and faculty members from entomology, landscape design, art education, and horticulture worked with PLC students to develop concepts for the outdoor classroom focused on the theme of “community identity.” Participants attended special lectures together, worked collaboratively on the site needs analysis, and met informally with decision makers at the high school and school district. All aspects of the project were closely integrated into existing courses taught by UGA faculty members Marianne Robinette, Pratt Cassity, Shannon Wilder, and David Berle. Entomology students helped design an insect garden; landscape design students created the outdoor classroom master plan during a design charrette; art education students taught an art class at the school; and horticulture students developed plans for an organic garden. The plans for the outdoor classroom and gardens include an aquatic garden, insect garden, teaching area, pathways around the gardens, and an art garden.

Objectives

• Provide a learning space to give both the University of Georgia (UGA) and Classic City High School Performance Learning Center (PLC) students an appreciation for the natural world and increase overall student interest in science, the arts, and community. • Develop resources and lesson plans for entomological, biological, and environmental science education that can be adopted in other schools in the Clarke County School District. • Promote interdisciplinary service-learning projects in order to create a model for responding to complex community needs.

A Profile of Athens-Clarke County: Facts about Poverty

According to data presented by OneAthens, a community-wide initiative designed to address the issue of persistent poverty in the county, children and youth of Athens-Clarke County (ACC) are most affected by the county’s extremely high poverty rate: One in four children in ACC live in poverty. | Athens-Clarke County is one of Georgia’s 91 persistently poor counties, as determined in the 2002 publication of the Study on Persistent Poverty in the South | Athens’ poverty rate is the 5th in the nation for counties with populations of 100,000 or more. | In Clarke County, the poverty rate is 28.3 percent, which equates to over 26,000 Clarke County residents living in poverty, and nearly 11,000 households. That is the 8th highest rate in the State of Georgia (out of 159 counties), and more than double the state’s rate of 13.0 percent. | A more realistic indicator of the poverty that exists in Athens-Clarke County is 150 percent of the federal poverty threshold. At the 150 percent poverty rate, 39.3 percent of Clarke County residents are poor–equating to over 36,000 individuals. That is nearly double the state’s 150 percent poverty rate of 21.6 percent. | 33% of Athens-Clarke County high school students did not graduate on time in 2006. | 19% of ACC’s adult population has not completed high school. That equates to nearly 10,000 county residents over the age of 25 without high school diplomas. If those 10,000 residents somehow could obtain a high school diploma, an estimated $70 million could be added to the local economy in the form of personal income.

The University of Georgia Office of Service-Learning Service-Learning and the Outdoor Classroom: Designing Living-Learning Spaces for Engaging At-Risk Students

University of Georgia Service-Learning Partners future outdoor classroom site

LAND Landscape Architecture

Landscape Architecture Landscape architecture students participated in a charrette, or intensive, short-term, design session as a capstone service-learning experience. Students produced the Outdoor Classroom Master Plan for the space located on school grounds after background research and collaborative campus site visits with all project partners.

section b (see master plan)

section a (see master plan)

apiary

outdoor classroom master plan

Entomology

ENT

Insects are ideal models for demonstrating biological and ecological concepts while providing opportunities to focus on the application of biology to solve real-world problems in local communities. Entomology students partnered with PLC students to create a plan for an insect garden in the Outdoor Classroom for collecting and observing insects. Future service-learning components will engage the PLC and UGA students in community outreach programs and promote the creation of teaching collections of local insects collected in the garden.

ENTOMOLOGY

Other Entomology service-learning partnerships with the PLC: • Ongoing: Fall class at the PLC and Spring service-learning class at UGA; coordination of outreaches and annual Insect Zoo for the community. • 2006: Partner classes implemented an on-site apiary (bee colony) at the PLC. These bee colonies are tended by PLC and UGA science students and will be an integral part of the outdoor classroom. Students hope to harvest honey to sell as fundraisers for the school. • Summer 2006: a PLC student went on the UGA Costa Rica program with Entomology. Students donated insect collections to Costa Rican schools and the PLC. • Summer 2007: a PLC student and teacher participated in the UGA Costa Rica program. Participants conducted outreach programs at local schools and donated arts and crafts supplies for instruction.

entomology students

tion

truc der cons n u l a r u m

ART

ART EDUCATION

Art Education

Art can transcend the distanced formality of aesthetics and dare to respond to the cries of the world. Suzi Gablik, (1991) artist and critic

Involvement in the Outdoor Classroom project at the PLC gave graduate Art Education students enrolled in “ARED 8430 – The Civic Imagination: Service-Learning and the Visual Arts” an opportunity to explore how the arts can be integrated into a non-traditional school environment and work with at-risk students. The curriculum at the PLC focuses only on core subjects for graduation and does not include the visual or performing arts, yet many of the students in the PLC are artists, performers, and musicians with no creative outlet or access to art programs. PLC students contributed to the development of the Outdoor Classroom by developing large-scale paintings focused on the theme of community identity based on their reflections and pride about what it means to be a PLC student.

HORT HORTICULTURE

Shannon O’Brien Wilder, Ph.D. Director Tel: (706) 542-8924 Email: osl@uga.edu www.servicelearning.uga.edu

Horticulture

Horticulture students worked on GPS mapping for the design phase of the Outdoor Classroom in order to map the site for Landscape Architecture students. Future efforts will include working with PLC students to plant an organic garden in the Outdoor Classroom that will provide valuable science instruction while also promoting sustainable food products and the study of nutrition. The PLC does not provide a meal plan for students, and many students at the PLC are living in poverty and have very poor nutrition. The food grown in this garden can be a source of nutrition and education for developing healthier lifestyles while also teaching science.

Implementation

The project’s planning process has been completed but construction of the outdoor classroom is on hold until the PLC is moved to a new location determined by the school district. The outdoor art panels are temporarily hanging in the PLC’s hallways.

Funding

This project was supported by a $5,000 Scholarship of Engagement grant from the Office of the Vice President for Public Service and Outreach at the University of Georgia. The UGA Entomology department provided additional funding for the project and a community grant has been submitted to Lowe’s for additional design and implementation work. Grant funds were used to meet much of the outdoor classroom’s design goals, including purchasing supplies for the large-scale paintings and a bog garden.