By Mary M. Woodsen, NYS IPM
Nancy Schaff, director of New York Agriculture in the Classroom, observes teachers doing soil tests at a workshop at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Schaff has recently joined with Perry Dewey and Claudia Coen to link the work of Schaff's program with that done by Coen for the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program. The team hopes their efforts lead to better environmentally conscious efforts toward pest management.
For Claudia Coen, “back to school” gained a different meaning about three years ago. That’s when she began putting together the “IPM Trunk,” a chest full of display mounts, games, magnifiers, posters, and lesson plans that brings creepy-crawlies and other critters into the classroom.
Coen’s ultimate aim: to teach tomorrow’s citizens a “think first, spray last” approach to pest problems — and fulfill state mandates to bring integrated pest management (IPM) into the K-12 educational curriculum. Her lessons teach real-world science while incorporating math, social studies, and writing into a sequential decision-making tree that meets New York State standards.
Coen, an educator with the New York State IPM Program (NYS IPM), has now joined Perry Dewey and Nancy Schaff of New York Agriculture in the Classroom. Since 1985, that project has provided teachers with materials and activities that build awareness of agriculture’s complex and critical role in this world. Both programs are based at Cornell University.
The project also provides grants and support to develop school gardens as a way to connect kids to agriculture — 275 gardens since 1998, with most gardens still active.
“The gardens are a point of entry for teaching the core tenets of agriculture and food systems,” Schaff says. “We’ve seen that when children grow food themselves, they start to grasp where food comes from — that someone worked to produce it. That’s the foundation for understanding agriculture.”
Coen points to surveys showing that teachers’ primary concern is for comprehensive curricular support. “We’re providing what teachers have told us they want,” says Coen. “We’re taking two fine programs and making them great.”
Dewey and Coen lead a team that includes curriculum developer Jan Woodworth, Cornell Cooperative educator and former teacher Jano Nightingale, and Debra Marvin, a curricular writer with the NYS IPM Program. The team is creating kid- and teacher-tested lesson plans and activities that put gardens and the lessons they teach about agriculture at the heart of a year’s worth of solid, sequential curricular materials that span multiple learning styles and subject matter.
The team will introduce the new 12-month curriculum on March 24, 2006, at a daylong workshop. The workshop is part of a Tompkins-Seneca-Tioga Board of Cooperative Educational Services (T-S-T BOCES) professional development day at Cornell University. Coen plans on piloting the program in elementary schools in the fall of 2006.
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