Anne Thomas-Abbott had a “profound” experience this October as she observed students taking part in a National Park Service curriculum about trees and carbon sequestration. The power of the lesson came from the real-life, hands-on engagement in the forest, as students measured trees in the Look Rock area of Great Smoky Mountains National Park to find out how much carbon specific trees could capture and store, pulling greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.Though the students receiving the lesson on this particular day were in college, the curriculum is typically used for seventh graders. During her day at Look Rock, Thomas-Abbott saw how powerfully the outdoor lesson demonstrated practical uses of geometry and the Pythagorean Theorem as students measured the heights and diameters of trees, calculated their mass, and ultimately estimated how much carbon they were sequestering.“Through this curriculum, seventh graders can understand a concept about how trees add mass to themselves through photosynthesis that I didn’t understand until I was out of college,” Thomas-Abbott said. “I could balance a photosynthesis equation, but I had not put together that trees use photosynthesis to store carbon, which is how they add mass to themselves. That’s my story to illustrate the power of taking learning — which is more and more relegated to an inside space and so conceptual that it’s hard sometimes for kids to really understand what they’re doing — out into a place where it’s actually being used.”In her newly created position as Smokies school coordinator at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, the park’s experiential education partner, Thomas-Abbott is working to ensure that ever-increasing numbers of students have access to these kinds of learning opportunities. Since her hire in August, she’s been working to build relationships with public school teachers and administrators in Tennessee’s Knox, Blount, Cocke and Sevier counties, helping them understand the various environmental education opportunities available to them. Thomas-Abbott then works with teachers to identify the programs that might best fit their vision and capacity and …
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