Kids, Cameras, Stories!

One of the activities in the Downstream/Upstream project is to get kids to retell the story of their water journey using their own words and pictures. Each child will create a water story book of their explorations and trips on the learning module in parks, at manholes, on the river boat ride... The idea is to use kid-friendly cameras, story prompting, and drawing/coloring to draw out what each child found interesting at each location.

In addition to each child’s book, a map-based community book, from the whole classroom will be created. The beginning of this book, called Downstream/Upstream Mapstories, was presented at the Living Green Expo Art Exhibit May 7-8. As illustrated below, the community book is a wall map made of “tiles.” Each tile is an area of the city, whose cover can be lifted up to reveal more about that place. A few starting images were shown at the Art Exhibit to give the idea, but once the project is complete, the children’s images will create thicker books beneath the path of their water journey. In addition to recording stories, the wall map will be used to chart the journey and share it with the parents and other classes.

Depending on funding, the cameras from this project will become part of a nature appreciation class kit for a nature center or similar program.

Downstream/Upstream Receives Institute on the Environment Mini Grant

February 28, 2011 - University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment Awarded a Mini Grant to gather an interdisciplinary team to develop a curriculum model based on the Downstream/Upstream demonstration project.

Excerpt from the Mini Grant proposal for
"Art, Story, and Infrastructure: A Model for Experiential Interconnection
in Environmental Education"

This Mini Grant Proposal will support a new interdisciplinary research project called “Art, Story, and Infrastructure: A Model for Experiential Interconnection in Environmental Education.” The focus on cultural sustainability in the 2010 edition of State of the World and the Institute on the Environment’s cross disciplinary efforts such as “River Life”, and “Dialogue Earth,” among many other trends, underscore the importance of integrating the tools of cultural development such as art and storytelling with scientific development toward effective sustainable outcomes and effective outreach of environmental information to broad audiences. The conveniences of infrastructure have allowed individual actions, such as water use choices, to be experientially disconnected from impacts to natural systems. However, by paying attention to infrastructure and integrating it into our concepts of the world, we can counter its invisibility and better appreciate its contributions while also better understanding the implications of its over-use. This proposal will gather an interdisciplinary team of University faculty and outside partners around the topic of how to use place-based interaction with infrastructure, interpreted through art, story, and science to create an experiential and informed sense of interconnection of our daily use of resources with the engineering and natural systems in which they interact. The Mini Grant scope lays the essential groundwork needed to develop a replicable curriculum model based on a concurrent research process and demonstration project. The work of the Mini Grant will be available for use and further development by the environmental education community, schools, and other researchers.

More Detail on Curriculum Model Grant