Piloting Green-Wood Cemetery’s Urban GreenSpace Program
Client: Green-Wood Cemetery | Location: Brooklyn, NY | Funding: Institute for Museum and Library Services
We explored teachers’ and students’ experiences in Green-Wood Cemetery’s new Urban GreenSpace program focusing on environmental education.
OVERVIEW
In 2022 and 2023, we partnered with Green-Wood Cemetery to evaluate their new Urban GreenSpace program, which focused on environmental education programs for local middle school students.
As a new pilot program, we focused on exploring which aspects of the program were successful at supporting and expanding students’ interest and learning in environmental science as well as which aspects of the program might need to be changed to better support students and teachers.
APPROACH
We conducted naturalistic observations of the programs onsite to capture an unobjective account of students’ and teachers’ experiences and captured teachers’ feedback through post-program written reflections as well as in-depth telephone interviews. In 2023, we also designed an open-ended reflection guide to capture students’ experiences and feedback about their experiences onsite at Green-Wood.
CLIENT TAKEAWAYS
We found that the Urban GreenSpace pilot programs were purposefully designed to help develop students’ skills in data collection, experimentation, and critical thinking. The programs were also successful at positively influencing students’ perceptions of cemeteries and Green-Wood as an environmental resource in the community. Teachers were quite appreciative of the programs’ flexible design and that program staff readily adapted programs to suit the needs of individual classes.
However, Green-Wood also learned that students did not always make real-world connections during programs and that these connections could be strengthened through pre-visit materials that reinforced real-world environmental connections. Teachers provided useful feedback about program logistics that Green-Wood used to adapt programs along the way, including more opportunities for interactive discussion (e.g., pair-and-share, small groups, etc.) and individual student reflection. Teachers also desired more intentional planning to adapt programs to the needs of their diverse student populations. For instance, because teachers have students for whom English is a second language as well as low-level readers, they suggested using more visuals and interpreting materials in Spanish.
Check out the full report here.
