A Model of Teamwork: Learning Expedition in Estonia
24 Oktober 2001
Team building and organizational skills, added to learning of technology, math, and science by 14 Estonian students, paid big dividends recently for 230 GLOBE teachers, scientists and students from eight countries in the Nordic/Baltic Region of Northern Europe.
The hardy 14 formed a student organizing committee that spent months planning the GLOBE Learning Expedition (GLE) at Kaariku Sports Centre in Southern Estonia. For three days in late August, the 230 participants worked and lived together, taking and discussing GLOBE measurements in what is certain to become a lifelong memory. The event served as an opportunity for teachers and students from the region to meet each other and form relationships that will lead to other intra-national and international collaborations with GLOBE projects.
Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the United States sent representatives.
"The success of this learning expedition really belongs to the fourteen boys and girls who made up the organizing committee. They made it happen," said Estonia Country Coordinator Ulle Kikas. "Each of them has at least three or four years in GLOBE. The skills they learned through the program helped them acquire the talent to make the idea of this learning expedition into the splendid reality that it became."
On the first day of this newest GLE, students presented summaries of their respective schools' GLOBE activities and their own research projects. The second day, participants divided into 10 international groups, then fanned out into the Estonian forests and nearby lakes where they collected GLOBE data on hydrology, atmosphere, land cover and soil. Later students performed laboratory analyses on samples collected in the field, compiled the data into reports, then posted the data on the GLOBE website.
With adult help, the 14 student organizers designed the GLOBE exercises that participants executed along the area lakes and inside the local forests: competitions on pH, phenology, height and distance measurements and the satellite game. On the third day all of the students participated in these exercises and prizes were awarded to winners.
The student organizers also created teams of "GLOBE reporters and editors," students who took notes, pictures, conducted interviews and wrote and posted stories to a special web page created by a 16-year-old organizer named Martin, a student at the Suure-Jaani Gumnaasium in Estonia. Visit the GLE site at http://globe.kolhoos.ee
The team even designed color-coded tee-shirts: bright red for the student organizers, warm orange for the adult organizers and sunny yellow for the dozens of winners of GLOBE games-- student competitions on environmental issues. The shirts sported a GLOBE logo on the front and a circle of the participating nations on the back.
"We got many ideas for our own GLOBE Learning Expedition in Norway this year and we will invite everyone to a regional GLOBE expedition in Norway next year," said Karl T. Hetland, Norway's Country Coordinator,
"The GLOBE Learning Expedition was a great way of updating us in the GLOBE protocols," said a teacher from Norway. Added a student: "It was great to meet people from so many countries."
Since Estonia joined the GLOBE Program in 1995, the impact countrywide has been impressive. For example, former GLOBE student Arko Olesk -- now a reporter at the Estonian newspaper Postimees -- wrote a full-page story about the Learning Expedition that included color pictures of students and an interview with a GLOBE scientist who attended the expedition. (Olesk said he remembers as "amazing" his own attendance in 1998 at a GLOBE Learning Expedition held in Helsinki, Finland.)
The Expedition's success was also the result of extraordinary cooperative efforts among the Estonian Ministry of Education -represented by Kikas of the University of Tartu; the US Embassy in Tallinn; and the Nordic/Baltic Regional Environmental Office at the US Embassy in Copenhagen. The expedition - including student and teachers travel and expenses-- was partially funded by a grant from the State Department fund for Oceans Environment Science Initiative (OESI).
"I hear students from different countries talking about cooperating. I hear teachers talk about cooperation and collaboration long years into the future. That to me has made this a great success," said Paul Thorn, an environmental specialist at the US Embassy in Copenhagen.
Monika, 16, and her friend Justyna, 17, from XI Liceum Ogolnoksztalcace im St. Konarskiego in Wroclaw, Poland arrived tired after a 20-hour bus ride to Kaariku and wondered who they would meet. They soon met Laura, a student from Estonia, and the three became friends and reporters. Said Justyna, "It was great. We've met teachers and friends and everybody said we were very clever."
Added Monika: "We met one of the professors from Norway and he was really nice and he tried to help us. We interviewed him, a teacher of math and science, and wrote an article and put it up on the Web."
"Talking with students indicates to me that these learning expeditions and in particular the GLOBE Program overall is a valuable learning experience and promotes science as a communication tool," said U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 Scientist Thomas E. Davenport, who addressed the gathering. "Where schools are collecting the data for our volunteer monitoring efforts there would be benefits to linking with the GLOBE Program."
Outgoing US Ambassador Melissa Wells has been so impressed with the Globe Program in Estonia that she chose the GLOBE Learning Expedition closing ceremony as her last official function in Estonia.
"I thank you all for helping to make a difference," Wells told the students sitting on a grassy slope. Born in Estonia the daughter of a famous singer, Wells said that as a little girl she had dreamed of one day being an ambassador. Then, after more 50 years, Wells' dream became a reality: she was appointed US Ambassador to Estonia.
"There is nothing more wonderful than being a grown lady and looking back and seeing that your dreams came true," Wells told the students. "Be it with the environment or whatever else you have in your heart, stick with it!"
As email and mail addresses were exchanged, hugs traded and backpacks loaded onto buses, a large group of Norwegian and Estonia students and teachers left Kaariku to tour Tartu Univesity and Soomaa National Park. The next morning, the group would travel to Abja Gumnaasium in Viljandimaa, where Estonian teacher Leida Lapland had long planned for townspeople and students to greet and fete the Norwegian teachers and students with whom her students have been collaborating on phenology studies for more than a year.