What are experts doing to educate high schoolers?

[danielaz]

One thing that I'm a little concerned about is that high schoolers don't have enough knowledge or exposure to deal with fire science. What can we do to educate and inform high school and even college students about the usages of fires, and especially the dangers and precautionary steps. Any relevant information can be great - I just think that high schools don't teach students enough about these real life topics. I do own a SAT resource with a forum that allows me to keep in touch with various high school students.

Any comments or insights would be very helpful. I'd like to hear your opinions.

[Joe Roise]

(08-10-2011 03:23 AM)danielaz Wrote:  One thing that I'm a little concerned about is that high schoolers don't have enough knowledge or exposure to deal with fire science. What can we do to educate and inform high school and even college students about the usages of fires, and especially the dangers and precautionary steps. Any relevant information can be great - I just think that high schools don't teach students enough about these real life topics. I do own a SAT resource with a forum that allows me to keep in touch with various high school students.

Any comments or insights would be very helpful. I'd like to hear your opinions.

Your concern is the same as most of us who work in the forestry, prescribed fire and wildfire arena. What the high schoolers don't learn is reflected in what the general civilian population doesn't know. It is not as if we are not trying. If you check out the August Issue of Fire Lines (the Southern Fire Exchange news letter) the headline message is about a public education campaign, One Message, Many voices. This is a great program, see if you can get involved with it in your state. Every individual makes a difference, big our small.
I would like to hear more opinions on how public education and educating the public can work.

[SEMoore4]

(08-10-2011 03:23 AM)danielaz Wrote:  One thing that I'm a little concerned about is that high schoolers don't have enough knowledge or exposure to deal with fire science. What can we do to educate and inform high school and even college students about the usages of fires, and especially the dangers and precautionary steps. Any relevant information can be great - I just think that high schools don't teach students enough about these real life topics. I do own a SAT resource with a forum that allows me to keep in touch with various high school students.

Any comments or insights would be very helpful. I'd like to hear your opinions.

I'm not familiar with the One Message, Many Voices public education campaign but what I would say regarding high school education is that teachers are likely to incorporate new topics into their curriculum where there are lesson plans available that tie to their state education standards. If these lesson plans exist, and someone in each state can do the correlations to the state's standard course of study, then it's time for free teacher workshops to show teachers how to use these lessons! We do summer teacher academies in forestry in NC and we have had a lot of success with our teachers incorporating forestry into their classrooms once they learn about forestry (so they are comfortable talking about it) and the lesson plans are provided/demonstrated. We use PLT curriculum but also many other available free teacher resources. Again, though, the key is showing the teachers where it correlated with their standard course of study (required state education standards.)