• The goals of the Earth Curriculum Project are: 1) to help students learn how to learn direct from Nature; 2) to help students learn how to build integrated understandings (or models) of Nature making effective use of digital technologies as both analytic and communications tools; 3.) to develop an understanding of the broader societal, cultural, and ideational context of the scientific enterprise through interdisciplinary extensions. All of the above goals are in the interest of creating an educational culture in which science education is directed towards producing an understanding of the Earth with all of its complexity and challenges.

• Students typically learn about the Earth from teachers, or from human artifacts such as books, computer tutorials, videos. The Earth Curriculum demonstrates that a fundamentally different mode of learning is possible: People (including students) can learn direct from Nature. Learning direct from Nature is the essence of what scientists do.
  • Learning from Nature is important for humanity, because what we learn helps guide the way that we organize, build and change our values, economies, and societies.

  • Learning from Nature is inspiring, because it shows that it is possible to add to the total store of humanity's collective knowledge. Scholarship is not merely the process of shuffling used ideas from one person to another. Scholarship is not a zero-sum game. Progress is possible.

  • Learning from Nature is important for individuals because it helps us understand ourselves. Armed with an understanding of Nature at all her scales, a person can situate him or herself in between the small scale processes of which the human body is made, and the global processes within which humans have evolved and exist.
    
  
  
• Certain problems and processes function on a global scale. Finding solutions to these problems and better understandings of these processes are crucial tasks for individuals and for humanity; all people must and do contribute to this endeavor.
  • Many of these important global scale problems and processes span multiple disciplines of science, social sciences, and humanities. Such problems and processes cannot be solved or explained by understandings of Nature that are derived from biology alone, chemistry alone, economics alone, or any other discipline alone.

  • Similarly, such important global scale problems cannot be solved, and such global scale processes cannot be explained, by simply scaling up understandings that derive from small scale observations and experiments.
    
  
  
• Students typically learn about natural objects and natural processes in isolated modules, lessons, units and courses--which themselves often focus on objects and processes within certain scales, and less often across scales. Drawing on insights and techniques from the field of system dynamics, the Earth Curriculum encourages students to focus on the interactions among natural objects and processes, as well as on the objects and processes themselves. If Earth processes are analogous to verbs, and Earth objects are analogous to nouns, the Earth Curriculum seeks to teach students to uncover the "grammar" by which nouns, verbs, etc. are built up into an integrated whole that is more than the sum of its parts--like a poem or a story.

• The grammar of which the Earth's stories are made consists of natural objects and processes that span many scales and many disciplines. The Earth Curriculum encourages students to integrate their understandings of natural processes at all scales, from the microscopic to the lab-bench scale, all the way up to the planetary scale. The Earth Curriculum encourages students to integrate their understandings of life processes, chemical processes, physical processes, and human processes.

• The two goals of the Earth Curriculum are intertwined and synergistic:

• The knowledge of how to learn from Nature -and the experience of having done so -helps the model builder (or integrator, or storyteller) insert accurate slices of Nature into the model (i.e., (s)he uses good grammar and vocabulary).

• A good model (or integrated understanding) produces predictions that match observations derived by learning direct from Nature. Nature is the final arbiter of the quality of the model.

• A good model also accurately represents the interactions among the slices of Nature in the model, just as a good story captures the essence of different types of real human interactions through fictional characters. The ability to dream up an accurate portrayal of Earth interactions is a high-level cognitive skill sometimes called "geological intuition" (which we now generalize to "Earth intuition"). No one really knows how to teach such intuition, but extensive experience learning direct from Nature is certainly an important building block.

• Conversely, Nature favors the prepared mind--the mind that comes to the conversation with Nature equipped with good questions. Models are an efficient way to identify important questions, and to formulate them in answerable ways.

• This interplay between questions, observations, hypotheses and modeling is at the heart of the scientific method. Together they form a spiral, as models and observations lead to more questions and hypotheses (in addition to answering questions and confirming/refuting hypotheses), which in turn lead to more observations and models.
  

• The two goals of the Earth Curriculum (learning from Nature and building integrated understandings) have long been embedded in the best Earth science teaching. However, we believe that the time is ripe to expand the reach of these goals to many more students. It is both possible and imperative to do so. It is possible because new technology brings data, data visualization, model building, model testing, and system dynamics into the reach of the average student and school. It is imperative because complex, global scale problems demand a population that is prepared to understand the Earth as a system, and require us to make difficult choices that can only be made responsibly when armed with such an understanding.

• However, the total amount of knowledge that is required to understand the Earth as a system is far too much for any one person to learn. It is the belief of the Earth Curriculum project that, in precollege settings, it is better to err on the side of teaching fewer topics in greater depth.

• Additionally, in the endeavor to learn from and build models of Nature, it is essential to have respect for the learner.

What tools and thought patterns do students need to learn in order to know how to learn direct from Nature?

• People can learn direct from Nature using their own senses. The fully-expressed Earth Curriculum will offer many and varied opportunities to learn by direct personal observation of Nature and natural processes in the lab and in the field. Whenever possible, the Earth Curriculum's exploration of a given phenomenon will begin at the human sense scale, and from there build upward to the planetary scale and downward to the microscopic scale.

• However, human senses can only sense a limited range of Nature's phenomena. Electromechanical sensors can be a proxy for human senses:

• They sense phenomena that are too small or too large--such as molecular reactions and climate patterns.

• They sense characteristics of Nature we are insensitive to--such as ultraviolet radiation, high frequency sound, carbon monoxide, and radiation.

• They measure with accuracy and precision.

• They can work 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

• They can observe in many places at once.

• The measurements can be archived and transmitted, enabling us to compare and contrast what was going on at different places and at different times.
  

• The Earth Curriculum facilitates the conversation between students and Nature by offering students easy access to a library of data collected by a variety of electromechanical sensors (proxy "senses") in a variety of environments. The pilot Earth Curriculum focuses on data gathered at the Black Rock Forest and Biosphere 2, but will expand to other sites as well.

• In addition, the Earth Curriculum offers powerful but intuitive tools to analyze and visualize these data. The current incarnation of the "Data Harvester" permits students to visualize and manipulate data as time series, as spatially organized maps, or by exploration of one parameter against another (scatter plots).

• The Investigations posed by the Earth Curriculum require that students manipulate data, observe and describe the patterns and trends that emerge from the data, and suggest what processes might have shaped those patterns and trends.

• Earth Curriculum students present their interpretation of processes as a model (which could be a simple "word-model," a.k.a. explanation). Then they return to the data to test the predictions of their model. The advent of word processors has made it practical for English teachers to require that students go through multiple cycles of write/edit/rewrite. The advent of accessible data libraries and data visualization tools makes it practical for science teachers to require that students go through multiple cycles of examine/interpret/model/test/reinterpret.

• "The present is the key to the past." Also, the present is where we live, where our senses work, and where our problems unfold. The Earth Curriculum will eventually grow to encompass earth history, especially those aspects of earth history when an important earth process was shaped by different boundary conditions than at present. However, the Earth Curriculum will remain rooted in an examination of today's Earth.

What tools and thought patterns do students need to be able to build integrated understandings of Nature?

• As in poetry or creative writing, there are formal rules and definitions regarding the "grammar" of systems that model builders must use in order to build good models of Earth processes. These rules have emerged from different sources, and together make up what is now known as the field of system dynamics or systems science.

• The rules of systems science enable model builders to define the structure of a model's objects and processes, and evaluate the model's behavior, in consistent and precise ways. A model can consist of natural objects and processes only (such as a model of predators and prey in an ecosystem), human objects and processes only (such as a model of microeconomic competition), or a blend of both natural and human objects and processes (such as a model of population growth and natural resources use). With the rules and principles of system dynamics, model builders can therefore build models that span across many disciplines and scales. The Earth Curriculum teaches students how to use the principles of systems science to build their own models of natural objects and processes.

• But model building is somewhat like writing a story in which each sentence or paragraph is written in two or more languages. Model builders must use a "universal grammar" (system dynamics) to integrate the grammar and vocabulary of different disciplines into a coherent "story" or model. But model builders must also know a lot of grammar and vocabulary from the particular disciplines of which their models are made.

• In particular, basic knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology, and how they are linked together, is a necessary foundation that all students must have in order to build integrated understandings of Nature. Knowledge from many other fields is also required, but the pilot Earth Curriculum focuses on developing students' knowledge in and across physics, chemistry and biology.

• The human mind is the only known object in the universe that can dream up good models; the ability to make models is perhaps the most unique trait of human beings. However, the human mind is not very good at solving with precision the many mathematical equations that must be solved simultaneously, again and again, during the simulation of any model.

• Therefore model builders need tools that enable them to set up, run, and explore the results of their models of natural, human, or natural and human objects and processes. Computers, with their powerful computational capabilities and the ability to "compress" space and time, enable model builders to do all of these things in ways that were not possible before computers existed.

• The Earth Curriculum uses special software, Stella II, that enables many types of learners (students and researchers) to build, run, and explore models of natural systems. The software, while computationally powerful, is also intuitive and easy to use; computer programming is therefore omitted from the process of model building, making this endeavor accessible to non-programmers.

• The software and systems thinking skills enable students to gain a dynamic understanding of the world. Students learn that ideas evolve, and that processes, objects and whole systems change over time

• Beyond the grammar of systems (universal and discipline-specific) and tools for simulating them, there is additional knowledge that bears on the effort to build integrated understandings of Nature. In fact, many other intellectual traditions -some of which predate science as we know it -have endeavored to answer many of the same questions that we seek answers to today. Knowledge of these traditions -philosophy in particular -places the modern scientific enterprise into an illuminating context. These traditions force us to ask, "what is unique about the scientific enterprise, relative to all other domains of inquiry, that gives it unique power to inform our human situation?"

Return to the Earth Curriculum Home Page