The students, teachers and staff of YES! 2004.

YES! students explore the Trinity River basin close-up, examining flora and fauna.

YES! students learn about the local island habitat – its ecology, biology and cultural history – through exploratory kayak trips.

YES! students perform a scene from William Shakespeare’s Othello

YES! students explore the Galveston Bay aboard field research vessel Seagull II

YES! students gain first-hand knowledge of marine life found in the Galveston Bay

Division I:
Schools & Undergraduate K-16 Education

Division I

    Director: Pamela Diamond, MFA

The aim of this Division is to offer programs in both high quality bench science and fully integrated environmental education as a model for Texas schools (K-12) and to support programs that provide “hands on” experience in environmental science research for undergraduates. The K-12 Program principally focuses upon the schools of the Galveston Independent School District (GISD).

Programs

    1. YES! Youth Environmental Studies Laboratory School

A principal goal in creating this school was to give an intense, passionately taught, language-rich (lots of books!) small class environment to children who had fallen through the cracks of the present school system. If their basic language skills were poor or non-existent, we had no hope of students doing well in science. Moreover, as a long-term goal, improving the academic performance of students at Central Middle School would perhaps increase the number of minorities who could take and do well in advanced placement (AP) courses at the high school level. But these things would be eventual outcomes; as the school was designed to be process- rather than product-oriented. The reason for this was that the single score evaluation system of accountability in Texas schools (TAKS) meant that the art of teaching was being subsumed by the constant pressure in winter months to meet single score goals. Texas schoolteachers commonly refer to this as “teaching to the test.” The teachers who took part in the creation of YES! asked that they and their students be allowed to explore our natural laboratory together—that the teachers could engage the children with the art of teaching, and through the presence of high-quality books and equipment. The teachers of YES! wanted to show their students the world and assumed, rightly, that this would prompt a high motivation in students to ask the usual curious questions that an intellectually stimulated student can—the basis from which a teacher can steer this curiosity into further passionate study of literature, math, environmental science or social studies.

YES! students are taken on one field trip per week on the pattern of concentric circles to study the environment. All lessons in environmental science, math, reading and writing and social studies coordinate around the environmental theme of the week. For example, only by walking over to the bay side can students see the context for that week’s lessons in environmental science class by studying food webs, ecosystems, or bioaccumulation. In social studies, the same week might integrate the history of environmental impact from the early European settlers along the upper Texas coast. For the purposes of the environmental literature and writing classes, a neighborhood walk is used to prompt an intense writing session. In these writing sessions, students are asked to “report” on their environment using the newly acquired vocabulary and more precise descriptive skills using the accurate names of flora and fauna as well as particular historical sites. Meanwhile, basic academic skills are kept to high standard. Silent and oral reading for one hour is a daily part of YES! and the students’ books, a high-quality list created by the academic and teacher cohort, are “bought” by the students—by reading a previous book on a system of remuneration that encourages an individual's love for literature. Every YES! student is taken fishing in small, rise-at-dawn groups and go kayaking into the local marshes. These adventures spawn other writing, science and math activities. Caught fish are dissected, fishing line is measured, field guides are on hand in buses and vans for immediate reference and, all of this new intellectual wealth that the students produce for themselves is theirs for the keeping. In this integrated view of their environment, the study of “lead” poisoning makes sense (“Oh, it’s in the paint from the old houses”), the assessment of air quality becomes memorable after a visit to a BP refinery that is followed by a kayak trip along the bay.

The curricula of YES! is perforce a living curricula, an accumulation of experiences that enables the individual student to relocate him- or herself in the natural and built worlds and discover the riches and challenges that man’s exploitation of the hydrocarbon in a historical context has created—challenges that are real, that he or she can imagine taking on as a student, an adult, a citizen, a future poet or scientist. Modest in its design, the YES! laboratory school is the natural companion to a state-of-the-art research center. Today’s important biologically and humanly relevant questions about man and his environment—questions of toxicology and molecular biology and social life that may not be solved by the present generation of scientists and political and academic scholars—will be, the COEC believes, taken up by the next generation if the complexities of science and social life can be taught in the kind of total environmental context that YES! was designed to offer.