New knowledge

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On Monday, I began my two-week Community Ecology class. Throughout this course, we are learning about and researching the four different communities in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem - sage brush, aspen, conifer, and riparian.

The goal of this course is to help us understand that nothing in nature exists in isolation. For example, a bird called Clark's Nutcracker is the reason why we have white bark pines. Clark's Nutcracker relies on the pine's seeds as a source of food and disperses them throughout the forest. Without the Nutcracker, the white bark pine would not have a reliable way of spreading its seeds. Another example is the beaver. Beavers create dams in riparian (water shed) areas. These dams create water holes which attract fish, insects, moose, birds, and plants that would otherwise not have lived in the area.

The idea of connections is important, not only to understand the environment, but in education as well. Teton Science Schools focuses on students connections through event mapping, e-stations, and essential questions.

One of the assessments in our community ecology class is an event map. I have decided to create my map out of tissue paper. Using this medium, I will have to represent each of the four communities we study and explore ways in which they are connected. Exploration stations, "e-stations," is an activity students participate each morning and afternoon when they come to Teton Science Schools for programming. Students are given a notebook and spend time traveling from one station to another investigating different aspects of the natural world. For example, one e-station might be two skulls - an elk skull and a mountain lion skull. Students are asked probing questions in order to connect similar and different aspects of each skull. The next station might have a speciman of a bird and a pine cone. Students are asked to explain the connection between these two natural species. Lastly, Teton Science Schools use themes to connect the events of the day. These themes are often presented as questions - students are asked to analyze these questions in different ways depending on the topic being studied.

Throughout this week, the graduate students made their own connections in class through questions, exploration, and research. The pictures above show us collecting data about the health of Ditch Creek. We are testing water temperature, velocity, the amount of dissolved oxygen and pH, collecting sample macroinvertebrates, and observing the turbidity of the water. Connecting curriculum with the goal of creating understanding is like putting a puzzle together - you begin with a hundred little pieces that eventually fit together.