Science time.
I am going to highlight a project I have done in grade 7 science, but I am sure that it could be modified for other grades. I was looking online for an assignment on the environmental impacts of using oil or natural gas and I came across this website.
Both sources describe a town hall style meeting to discuss allowing oil companies to lease land for fracking natural gas, with the students being given roles within the scenario (oil and gas company representatives, government representatives, First Nations representatives, resource workers, community members, environmentalists).
I loved the idea of making a town hall meeting and so I explored how I could use this project and make it specific for my needs. I used many ideas from the above sources with some minor modifications. To be as relevant as possible, I wanted the task to be based on a real life scenario. The Climate Justice website used a fictional town in BC, but I was hoping to find a current issue on which to model the town hall. Also, one of the groups represented in the fictitious town hall was a First Nations group, and I wanted that to remain in my project. I began researching for active fracking projects in BC with First Nation reserves close by and I came across LNG Canada. At the time of this task, LNG Canada was seeking permission to access natural gas through fracking in Kitimat, BC with hopes to export the natural gas to Asian markets. This seemed perfect. I spent a lot of time on the LNG Canada website reading about their goals for the Kitimat site and the benefits they hoped to achieve, and I began to put together a student handout. You can access my handout here.
The IB rubric that I was using for this assignment has the following requirements:
- describe the ways in which science is applied and used to address a specific problem or issue
- discuss and analyse the implications of using science and its application to solve a problem, interacting with a factor (moral, ethical, environmental, economic, social, cultural, political)
- consistently apply scientific language to communicate understanding clearly and precisely
- document sources completely
I knew that the second and third strands would be easy to assess in a town hall meeting presentation, but that the first and fourth strands would be difficult. The students needed to research their roles to prepare for the town hall, and so I created a Google Doc research organizer for them. I had them research the issues, prepare their arguments, and anticipate how they would rebut the arguments of others. I also prepared an area for them to debrief after the town hall. I used their preliminary research to assess the first and fourth strands. You can access a pdf of the research organizer with the assignment handout in the link above.
When presentation day finally came the students were both excited and nervous. I had booked the school boardroom so that we could use it for the town hall for each of my two grade 7 classes. I loved seeing the students immerse themselves into their roles in both the way they dressed and the way they spoke. I expected each person to briefly speak and I did not think there would be any issue finishing within each of our 45 minute periods. However, I did not anticipate the in depth rebuttals that the students had prepared and how enthusiastically they approached this task. The end of each period came and unfortunately I had to cut off the discussions.
It is worth noting that the year this was done was quite unique in that I only had 11 students per class. I still needed to double up some of the roles, but I would not recommend doing this with too large of a group. If you need to make two groups within one class, then perhaps another teacher could do an activity with one half of the class while the other is conducting their town hall. Alternately, you could come up with two different scenarios and each half of the class could be an audience for the other.
