Even though we had to greatly adapt this lesson due to moving locations at the last minute, there were still opportunities to have open discussions about individual values around water. Before jumping into the macroinvertebrate activity, we held small discussions about the students’ pre-existing values. I had a hard time getting my group to engage in the lesson. This mainly had to do with how we split up our students. I was able to have each student at minimum share out how they ranked the five values (educational, ecological, recreational, economic, and beauty) related to water. For the most part, ecological, educational, and recreational were ranked highly. I think there is a chance that the students were answering in a way that they thought I wanted them to. I’m guessing if they were to be asked this question when they were not in school the educational value would have been ranked lower for a few of the students. Another idea to motivate more honest responses could be asking students to provide an explanation and justify their rankings. Requiring my students to expand on their answers may elicit less biased responses.
I tried to push a few of the students by asking them why they ranked certain things as their most important value. One of the students talked about how important water is when he goes hunting with his family. Another talked about OLS and how the lakes are important for educational purposes. If I could go back, I would have been a little more forceful when asking the students to share out in the big group especially on why they ordered their values the way they did. What I heard had a lot to do with values that they inferred from school or values from activities they do with their families. I wish I could go back and have the students think about whether their values would align with their family’s values or with their school community values, or even the Woodland Park community values.