INTRODUCTION
By caring today, we preserve our yesterdays for tomorrow.
This was the lofty goal set forth by the song sparrow singing sweetly on the cover of the teacher’s guide to the Hayward Shoreline Environmental Education Curriculum. Inspired by the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this curriculum—completed in October 1976—was the result of collaboration between teachers, local government agencies, and professors at California State University, Hayward (now CSU East Bay). The curriculum’s creators hoped that by introducing schoolchildren to the shoreline early and often, students would come to understand the area’s ecological importance and be motivated to protect and preserve it. Designed for students from Pre-K to 12th grade, the units feature activities related to the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities that were meant to encourage environmental literacy and inspire students’ curiosity in the world around them.
Shoreline
Schooling
From the micro to the macro—from microscopic invertebrates to long-term, far-reaching effects of climate change—the Hayward Shoreline Environmental Education Curriculum strove to inspire curiosity in students. With units covering a wide range of topics—plant and bird life, ecology, pollution, meteorology, salt production, and historical uses of the shoreline, to name just a few—students were sure to find a subject that drew them in. Each unit sought to highlight the uniqueness of the Hayward shoreline and to stress the importance of conservation efforts. In addition to drawing on extensive secondary literature, such as CSUEB professor Howard Cogswell’s 1973 manuscript, “Birds of the Hayward Shore Area,” the lessons also reflect educators’ own personal connection to the Hayward shoreline: One teacher wrote that “the beauty of each individual creature that inhabits our shore will thrill [the students’] hearts.”1 Activities aimed to familiarize students with the many distinctive micro-habitats that make up the Hayward shoreline, from analysis of water chemistry samples between tidal ponds, to censusing massive communities of resident and migratory shorebirds, to tracking long-term weather patterns. The curriculum was designed to get students to visit the shoreline repeatedly as a means to deepen their comprehension of this complex and entirely unique ecosystem.
1 Leo Bachle et al., “Teachers’ Curriculum Guide to the Hayward Shoreline, K-12” (Hayward, CA: Hayward Unified School District, October 1976), H 1.1, ERIC Clearinghouse for Science, Mathematics, and Environmental Education.
Education
On Location
The curriculum operated on the belief that spending time at the shoreline would instill “long range values for today’s world” into any and all who visited2. Units often involved one or more trips out to the shoreline, during which students would explore, make observations, and collect data—but more importantly, they would (hopefully) fall in love with nature. In many activities, students were asked to sit quietly and observe, while “enjoy[ing] the sounds of the seashore.” In one, students were even blindfolded so that they could focus on what they experienced through the other (“lazy”) senses3. Other activities sought to tap into students’ creativity: one teacher described her fourth grade class’s experience drawing birds of the shoreline as “a mind-stretching activity … to capture this illusive beauty on paper.4” The curriculum also taught students to observe more familiar surroundings with the same curious, scientific eye: in a lesson about gulls, students made observations at the shoreline as well as on their school’s playground. Through classroom instruction, field observations, and simple experiments, the curriculum gave students more than just “book smarts”—it provided students with first-hand knowledge and direct experience at the shoreline itself.
2 Bachle et al., “Teachers’ Curriculum Guide to the Hayward Shoreline, K-12,” i.
3 Bachle et al., “Teachers’ Curriculum Guide to the Hayward Shoreline, K-12,” SP 7.2.
4 Bachle et al., “Teachers’ Curriculum Guide to the Hayward Shoreline, K-12,” HI 1.1.
A Bead
On Birds
Many of the curriculum’s units focus on familiarizing students with birds common to the shoreline. Teachers were provided with an appendix of nearly 150 birds from Cogswell’s 1973 manuscript, including seabirds, waterfowl, shorebirds, and land birds. The appendix outlines each species’ typical habitat, migration patterns, food sources, and nesting habits. Before a field trip out to the shoreline, students would complete activities to familiarize themselves with birds’ distinctive coloring (field marks). Younger students could color in basic bird outlines to illustrate the different species they might see, while older students filled out bird topography diagrams to familiarize themselves with important anatomical vocabulary in bird identification.
Bird Study – Primary Grades
This activity, geared towards younger children, familiarizes students with birds most commonly observed around the salt marshes along the shoreline. After extensive classroom preparation, including discussion of the various birds that might be encountered and birdwalks on school grounds to practice appropriate behavior, students were taken to the shoreline to make observations in small groups, assisted by an adult.
The beauty of birds
This activity encourages students to closely examine various types of birds typically encountered along the shoreline. In small groups, students spent twenty minutes quietly observing and sketching birds in three different habitats: marshes, salt ponds, and mudflats. After the field trip, students deepened their understanding of these species by making watercolor paintings and creating dioramas of the bird’s typical nesting habitat.
Music of the shoreline
This activity aims to tap into students’ creativity by creating music using the random sounds of nature they record along the shoreline. Students set up ten different tape recorders in ten different locations to record for one hour. Students then edited and “spliced” their cassettes to make a composite recording—an activity that would be much easier for students today who often have a smartphone at their fingertips!
