"A Simple Question: The Story of STRAW" Screening and Panel Discussion
"A Simple Question: The Story of STRAW" Screening and Panel Discussion
September 23 2010
David Brower Center, Berkeley, CA
Earth Island Presents... and the Center for Ecoliteracy will host a screening of The Bay Institute’s award-winning film, A Simple Question: The Story of STRAW, followed by a panel discussion. This 30-minute film recounts how an innovative teacher and her fourth grade class took up the challenge of saving the endangered California freshwater shrimp living in streams on private land. This is a remarkable and inspiring documentary about students and teachers taking on the impossible to restore a watershed. The unintended consequences for community and education have proven as important, and surprising, as the effort to save the shrimp.
A panel discussion will follow the film, featuring figures at the intersection of educational innovation and environmental restoration. They reveal how answers to current environmental and educational challenges are being forged now in the Bay Area.
This event is a benefit for STRAW (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed), which was founded as a joint project of The Bay Institute and the Center for Ecoliteracy.
Laurette Rogers: Director of the STRAW program, and the fourth-grade teacher out of whose class sprang the idea and model for STRAW.
Sue Holland: Miller Creek Middle School science teacher, Marin County Teacher of the Year, semi-finalist for California Teacher of the Year in 2005, and a nine-year veteran of the STRAW program.
Lucia Comnes: Now 26, she was a student in Laurette’s 1992 fourth-grade class, which pioneered efforts to save the CA freshwater shrimp on private land. Lucia is a performing violinist and ethnomusicologist.
Liz Lewis: Principal planner - Marin County Department of Public Works
Zenobia Barlow: Executive director and cofounder of the Center for Ecoliteracy, she is one of the nation’s pioneers in creating models of schooling for sustainability. Zenobia has designed strategies for applying ecological and indigenous understanding in K-12 education.
Ariana Katovich: Director of the Restoration Initiatives Fund for Earth Island Institute and the evening’s panel moderator. She won the Earth Island Institute’s David Brower Youth Award in 2000 for her work in establishing the Shoreline Preservation Fund at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
View the film trailer
