The Blog

The following excerpt is from an article by Barbara Moran published in The Boston Globe on January 22, 2012.

---

The man who crushed the Keystone XL pipeline

On November 6, 2011, Bill McKibben arrived at Washington, D.C.’s, Lafayette Park to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, designed to carry oil 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. McKibben, a Vermont writer and environmentalist, had been one of 1,252 people arrested in front of the White House in August and September, protesting the same pipeline. He’d spent two nights in the district’s Central Cell Block, and now was back with thousands more people and a bold new plan.

“We can’t literally occupy the White House,” McKibben had told his fellow protesters, “so the next best thing is to surround it.” And that’s what they would do, encircle the White House in a “giant hug” to remind President Obama of his campaign promise to “end the tyranny of oil.” McKibben wasn’t sure how many people he would need to “hug” the White House, though, and was worried that he wouldn’t have enough.

The Green Options Buffalo Community Workshop is excited to announce the beginning of monthly Ladies Shop Nights.

Ladies Nights will be held on the 4^th Wednesday of every month from 6 to 9 PM and are meant to facilitate a collaborative learning environment where female cyclists and others--looking for something a little different than the usual male-dominated vibe of the shop--can come to practice bicycle mechanics, share skills, volunteer, purchase used parts and refurbished bicycles, and discuss the awesomeness of all things bike related.

Open shop rules apply, therefore anyone wishing to work on a personal bicycle or project must be a Green Options Buffalo member or purchase a day pass.  Memberships start at just $25 dollars for the year and can be purchased at the shop or online at greenoptionsbuffalo.org.  Day passes can be purchased at the shop for $5.  As always learning through volunteering is encouraged and free, and volunteer hours can be applied toward earning a membership.  The Green Options Buffalo Community Workshop is located at 98 Colvin Avenue on the corner of Colvin and Linden.

Our very first Ladies Night will be held on Wednesday January 25^th from 6 to 9 PM.  As a special incentive to get your gears out into the cold we will be offering this one free of charge.  Come on out and join the fun!

Questions?  Email our Shop Manager at stacy@greenoptionsbuffalo.org or call (716) 320-0193.

This post is intended to serve as a gateway to a range of readings and other resources to support teaching about the Marcellus Shale and the larger energy system, but before simply posting a list of linked resources, some background is needed as to the types of knowledge needed to effectively teach this content.

Part 1, this post, is the introduction to the kinds of knowledge needed to teach the Marcellus Shale.  Part 2 will include a list of readings and other resources for building that knowledge.

---

What do you need to understand to teach about the Marcellus Shale? Part 1 of 2: Marcellus Shale PCK

A piece of the Marcellus Shale from Seneca Stone Quarry, Fayette, NY.

The special knowledge and skills needed to teach

Effective teaching of course requires understanding of the subject matter at hand, but subject matter knowledge alone isn't sufficient for someone to become a good teacher.  Almost anyone with a college degree has sat through enough classes to have experienced at least one smart teacher or professor who knew the content well yet was simply a poor teacher.

Most of us have experience with this before leaving high school.

In order to be an effective teacher, you have to know how to teach.  To put it in the language of the discipline of education, you have to understand pedagogy.  And, you can't deeply understand pedagogy in a way that stands apart from the content you wish to teach.  You have to understand the special skills and knowledge that are needed for teaching your subject.  That's a recognition that the skills and knowledge a math teacher needs to be effective are different from the skills and knowledge an English teacher needs, and that the difference is more than a difference in content knowledge.  In the language of education, this is Pedagogical Content Knowledge, or PCK (Shulman, 1986, 1987).

Neither an English teacher nor an engineer needs to understand the variety of ways to solve the mathematical problem, 23 x 37, but a math teacher does.  A medical researcher doesn't need to know common misconceptions related to the understanding of evolution, or how to address controversial issues in the classroom, but a biology teacher certainly does.  These are examples of PCK.

In the winter of 2010 and 2011, local environmental organizers met and interviewed some local people impacted by hydrofracking.

Here are their stories: