Silent Spring Donation Project
Introduction
Literacy is one of the most crucial and door-opening skills required for success in nearly any career or life path our students decide to take after high school. Building literacy requires an extensive amount of practice across all content areas. One of my biggest goals in my chemistry classroom at Manual Arts was to help my students increase their levels of scientific literacy. This goal also served a dual purpose of linking topics covered in class to real-world concepts. However, due to a shift in standards and a lack of funding in my school and department, my students did not have access to authentic scientific textbooks and literature. Building science literacy is a specific skill set, which my students and their families had not been exposed to proper people, programs, resources, and connections necessary to develop. While I could bring in many scientific articles, a deep dive into a specific topic was difficult to achieve.
For this reason, I turned to an outside opportunity to find resources to provide my students the access to the materials necessary to close this gap and provide them with the best education possible. As a class, we designed and posted a fundraising page on the website Donor's Choose to obtain a classroom set of Rachel Carson’s novel Silent Spring. This novel changed the face of science and founded an entirely new branch of the field—environmental science. This donation and the classroom projects that followed opened doors to students by fully exposing them to the transformative text that launched the environmental movement. An understanding of the environmental movement and its origins are crucial knowledge every student should have as a citizen of the world in the 21st century. Students can leverage this knowledge as they progress through the rest of their educational journey and their eventual careers.
Identifying the Need
One of my primary goals in my science class at Manual Arts was to increase my students’ level of literacy for scientific texts. The vast majority of my students were English language learners, or below grade level for reading. We had a saying at Manual that every teacher, regardless of content area, is an English teacher. Students needed to practice their English language skills in all of their core classes—it would not be reasonable to expect them to close this gap in knowledge in their English class alone. Furthermore, literacy for scientific texts requires a different skill set with a different vocabulary. This particular skill set is not taught in a typical ELA curriculum. For this reason, I strived to provide my students with authentic opportunities to access various current and historical scientific texts to help them develop this skill for their personal tool kit.
The need for this particular access opportunity arose due to the transition from the California State Standards (CSS) to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The Los Angeles Unified School District had all of its science teachers make this transition before textbooks were even written to align to the new standards. While Manual technically had texts for compliance purposes, my class never once used them because they did not align with what students were supposed to be learning. This transition eliminated the primary source of literacy and reading in my classroom. To make up for the missing text, I frequently presented my students with scientific articles, but this still left something to be desired in terms of depth of literacy. I decided that it would be helpful to get a classroom set of a historical, scientific novel that students could read that would align with a part of our curriculum.
The Origin of Species
book cover
The Double Helix
book cover
Silent Spring
book cover
What is Life?
book cover
The Cosmic Connection
book cover
I began this process by researching some of the most impactful scientific novels of all time. I eventually narrowed down the list to the following five options: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin,The Double Helix by James D. Watson, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, What is Life by Erwin Schrödinger, and The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan. Each of these novels forever changed the scientific field at the times of their publications and each could be aligned with an area of the NGSS. Once I compiled this list of options, I turned to my students to help determine the specific novel that was of the most interest to them. I gave students a brief synopsis of each book as well as a short description of why the novel is historically significant. We then had a vote in each of my classes to determine which novel they most wanted to read as a part of our course.
There were 312 students across my eight sections of chemistry. Eight students did not participate in the vote, only three students voted for What is Life, 51 students voted for The Double Helix, 62 students voted for The Origin of Species, and there was a tie for first place between Silent Spring and The Cosmic Connection with 94 votes each. At first, I was not sure what to do in the case of a tie—then I turned to my advisory to help. My advisory consisted of 44 students—each of these students was also in one of my sections of chemistry. I decided to treat this smaller group as a focus group because between the 44 of them all eight class periods were represented.
Breakdown of votes for each potential novel
I presented this dilemma to my advisory, and we had a class discussion about which of the two remaining novels to select. One of my female students made an excellent point that there is a severe lack of representation for women and people of color in STEM—especially in chemistry. She mentioned that chemistry felt like learning about an "endless parade of old, dead, white guys." At the time of this discussion, we were learning about the development of atomic theory, and I had to admit that I agreed with her. She argued that we should select Silent Spring because Rachel Carson was the only female author and scientist on the original list of options. Carson fundamentally changed the way we view the world and essentially founded an entirely new branch of science. Also, the point was raised that Manual Arts did not offer an environmental science class. This novel would be my students’ only exposure to arguably the most important branch of science in the 21stcentury. The original plan was to take a vote at the end of our class discussion. However, it was clear that there was an overwhelming majority in favor of selecting Silent Spring.
Donor's Choose Page
Moving forward, I passed the majority of the primary responsibilities to my advisory students. I allowed them time to research various online resources where we could post our project to try to find donors. They selected the website Donor's Choose. I created a teacher account on the website and students were then in charge of drafting the project description for the donation page. Once the students’ draft was completed, shown in the document on the left, I edited the description to make sure it was professional and grammatically correct. We then submitted the project for evaluation. Unfortunately, it bounced back after our first submission. The editor informed me that descriptions needed to be written by the teacher, so I edited the point of view of the page and resubmitted. The final donation page is included in the document below. With this second submission, our project was successfully approved, and we needed to raise $1,116 to fund this door-opening access opportunity fully.
Original text for our Donor's Choose website
After the donation page—shown in the document on the left—went live I left my Donor’s Choose account logged in on the desktop computer in my classroom. Students were welcome to check the computer to track our progress. I also had a progress bar shaped like a thermometer drawn on the whiteboard on the sidewall of my classroom to monitor the progress toward our goal. Personally, I was nervous that we would not get full funding. A senior teacher at my school—who used to approve or deny projects for Donor’s Choose—warned me that if a class’ first project is over $1000 it typically has a difficult time getting funded. However, we were all shocked when we received full funding from six donors in less than a month!
Final project page from Donor's Choose website
Thank You Letters
With our books in the mail, it was time to ensure we took the time to thank each of our donor’s. Students from all of my classes created handmade thank you notes that were distributed between the six donors.
Student made thank you notes for donors
After the books arrived and we began to use them in class, I posted this official thank you on the page—closing out the project.
Donor's Choose project wrap-up thank you
Using the Books in Class
My advisory students were incredibly proud of what they accomplished through this experience. They were not only able to navigate and access to this opportunity for themselves; they were able to open doors to provide additional opportunities to their peers as well as students for years to come.
One of donated novels
Student filling out his first reading journal
Our first silent reading time
Some of my advisory students who were instrumental in getting our donation
Reading Journals
Once the books arrived, students in all of my sections of chemistry added a "reading journal" section to their chemistry binders. If a student ever finished their work early, they knew to grab a reading journal and a book and start reading wherever they left off. We also had periodic silent reading times as a class. The goal was to have all students finished with the book by the time we started the sixth instructional segment of the Next Generation Science Standards for chemistry, which deals with climate change and atmospheric chemistry. This unit would be grounded in the understandings gained from Rachel Carson’s work.
While reading, students were asked to write down any words with which they were not familiar—which they would define later. They would also include a summary of what happened on those pages. Reading journals were graded for completion as a part of students’ weekly binder check grades.
Student sample of reading journal with feedback
Teacher Reflection
This project impacted my classroom and opened doors for my students in ways I was not expecting when the project began. For example, two students who were typically disengaged in their learning stepped up and took a leadership role in organizing the donation page. Another student who was struggling in my class was so interested in this topic that she asked to check out a copy of the classroom set—she finished the entire book in one weekend. When we got to the sixth instructional segment, she was one of the highest scoring students in the class because her investment level was so high and she was willing to work to understand the difficult concepts. This sense of motivation established by the student truly door opening and is a skill she can apply in all of her classes and beyond. Many other students experienced similar levels of growth as a result of this project. This project also showed me that a lack of funding and resources does not have to stand in the way of learning. Students were exposed to this resource, which allowed them to able to develop their scientific literacy skill set. Students were also able to navigate the system necessary to obtain the donations and could use this new skill set to access additional opportunities in the future. By turning to outside resources to provide this access opportunity, my students were able to leave a lasting impact on the science department at Manual Arts. When I left at the end of last school year, I gifted the class set of novels to one of my colleagues. She sent me a picture of her students hard at work reading the books I left behind. I am glad that my students and I were able to leave this lasting mark on the school in a positive way to increase access to scientific literacy for years to come, ensuring that all future chemistry students have access to this resource to open doors for them as science learners in the 21st century.