Sources of Inquiry Questions from Outside of the Community of Learners

1. Environmental Influences
Recent research suggests that educators involved in long-term, self-directed, self-organized peer-group professional development are more likely to implement their learning in their practice, to become creators of learning resources, and to articulate the purpose of their practices using a deep theoretical base. An increase in violence against and between students, educators, and other members of schooling communities is a cause for concern. As well as a provincial push to make schools safe places to learn, there is also a recent focus on using education as an agent of peace and tool to increase solidarity between young people and educators. Increasing affordability of technology and improvement of online instruction, as well as a strong, local concern about the negative influences of institutional schooling means that more students are enrolling in distance and distributed education.
Questions
- How have professional learning communities contributed to ecoliteracy research? Is the chosen formative assessment tool an exemplary model of this process?
- How will this school-level ecoliteracy assessment enable learners to develop relationships with a wider network of people and living systems?
- How well will this assessment contribute to the dialogue between educators and community members about the benefits and costs of home learning in early primary years? (In other words, will they use it to compare and contrast different kinds of competencies which arise from different learning environments and learning groups?)

2. Mandated Changes
Several changes to Integrated Resource Packages(NOTE: referencing British Columbia Ministry of Education Documents) have been made in an attempt to green the curricula, such as added Prescribed Learning Outcomes in the portion related to the human/environment relations. Both myself, many teachers and community members, may not be caught up on these changes and their implications for classroom practice and changing focus in learning product and process design. Additionally, parents and caregivers are now allowed to choose the school which the children in their care attend. This has influenced both schools and districts to be more proactive in writing vision statements, establishing missions, and designing new programs or launching initiatives. Some of these relate to ecoliteracy, sometimes with a warm reception but other times with hostile remarks fueled by misunderstandings of what the importance of ecoliteracy means. Finally, a ministry change to fund education on a per capita basis and falling enrollment rates mean that many rural areas now have multi-age classrooms. A focus on differentiation has also been met with suspicion by some community members.
Questions
- What key curricular documents does this assessment reference: is the main purpose of the assessment to evaluate students' understanding of curricular concepts or the impacts of facilities, social climate, and community change?
- Who is the audience of the ecoliteracy survey? Are we making students cater to the needs of a larger community? Can we justify this?
- Will the data collected include student names? grades? Will it measure progress over time, i.e. do the questions need to become static? If data is collected about certain age groups, will the learning activities and facilities be consistent for the whole group or will they vary?