Educational Concern of Inquiry Teaching: A Study on the Amherst Curriculum Project

This paper presents the design, implementation and assessment of the Columbia River Basin Environmental Research Project (CERP) curriculum. CERP is an online inquiry-based, regional geographic curriculum designed to improve technology skills and content knowledge about water quality and watershed-level processes. Student attitudes and knowledge gains were assessed over a three-year period in a freshmen level general education inquiry class using pre- and -post surveys and work sample analysis. Results show students gained content knowledge, and Internet research and graphing skills. Our findings suggest that the CERP curriculum is effective in improving student understanding of complex environmental issues.

This paper draws on practitioner inquiry and participatory action research methodologies to recount how five K-12 educators, who inhabit a range of positionalities and levels of teaching experience, engage in a collaborative professional development program, called Teaching Out Loud as they draw upon critical literacy theory and practice to reimagine educational spaces in ways that make schooling more just, humanizing and student-centered. Specifically, we document how these educators name oppressive circumstances, deconstruct power relations, and reconfigure their practice through innovative, critical curricular projects, arguing that alternative conceptions of professional development that center criticality, intergenerationality, and participatory forms of knowledge construction have the potential to transform teacher learning in neoliberal times.

SUMMARY This article argues that a ‘humanly‐constructive’ critical theory of environmental education called ‘a critical ecological ontology for educational inquiry’ provides a necessary complement to the ‘socially‐critical’ perspective. This humanly‐constructive curriculum theory focuses on our individual and collective ‘being‐in‐the‐world’. It invites learners, teachers and researchers to study how their ‘lived experience’ of socio‐environmentally problematic circumstances is shaped and stretched globally by various economic and technological imperatives. In so doing, ‘a critical ecological ontology’ highlights the personal politic required for a socio‐ecological praxis. Of particular relevance to the socio‐ecological politic ‘for being’ are interpretations of postmodern agency that emerge from three practical applications of ‘a critical ecological ontology’. This dialogue of theory and practice is necessary in the critical curriculum project of environmental education