# @edutopia on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CVIl9gkNQU5
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/20303635-edutopia-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/143f731197.jpg
- **Posted:** 2021-10-17T15:10:23.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Edutopia (@edutopia) — https://gondola.cc/edutopia

## Caption

“Everything in our school is designed towards developing stewards of planet Earth and healthy, effective citizens of the world,” says Buffy Cushman-Patz, the executive director at the 6-8 School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability (SEEQS) in Honolulu, Hawaii. 

In addition to regular classes, students enroll in a year-long, project-based, interdisciplinary course that’s designed around a sustainability question relevant to Hawaii. Past topics include, “How do humans and the oceans impact each other?” or “Why harness energy, and how?” 

Teachers of different disciplines, such as math and English, support students in each step of the student’s project, whether to use geometry to calculate measurements of an irrigation system or  collect and analyze water quality data using basic statistics.

When students looked into “What does it take to feed a community?”, for example, they first set the goal of feeding 100 people by the end of the semester. They started by transforming a parking lot into a field to grow different vegetables, learning how to pickle things and make vegan meals, which are real-world applications of what they learn in multiple subjects. 

In the past, student project work has also included the construction and maintenance of rain gardens, raised garden beds, aquaponics, and the cultivation of a butterfly garden to protect the endangered monarch butterfly. These projects culminate in student-designed portfolios and a defense of the project to a panel that includes members of the community, like experts in energy conservation and sustainable food production. 

“Ultimately, we need students to understand the complexity of these environmental issues that we're facing as a planet and as a society,” says Cushman-Patz. “When we try and simplify it, we do an injustice to the complexities of the problems and to the capacity of middle school students to understand them.”

#EnvironmentalEducation #PlaceBasedLearning #InquiryBasedLearning #HighSchoolTeacher #MiddleSchoolTeacher

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## Tags

placebasedlearning, middleschoolteacher, inquirybasedlearning, highschoolteacher, environmentaleducation

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