Peatlands are important!
A student at Ravnanger secondary school in Askøy outside Bergen wrote the above after a five-week curriculum about peatlands. The curriculum was created as a collaboration between their teacher Målfrid Skarprud, and Lisa Steffensen and Inger Auestad from Repeat/HVL.
In October 2023, the students visited a local peatland where they observed plants and animals and measured the depth of the bog with soil probes. Afterwards, they worked in the classroom to understand how peatlands are formed and how peat mosses develop into peat soil, making peatlands an important habitat for plants, insects, and birds.
Lisa Steffensen spearheaded the development of the peatland project at Ravnanger secondary school. Photo: Inger Auestad
They used the depth measurements, along with other data, to calculate how much carbon is stored in "their" peatland and to estimate how much carbon is stored on Askøy in total. The students assessed their results and discussed the uncertainty around them.
The findings were put into a societal context, and the students discussed land use in their peat-rich home municipality, where the need for better roads has led to large road development projects at the cost of intact peatlands.
Facsimile of one of the posters that students prepared as a wrap-up of the project.
The results from the project work were finally summarized in posters. The students found joy in the practical work and in collecting their own data. They also realized the importance of peatlands both for humans and for our wild neighbours. Meanwhile, Lisa Steffensen and Inger Auestad have a paper on observations of the learning process accepted for the ICME-conference this summer. For the Repeat project, it was exciting to see how our research questions have relevant parallels also at the secondary school level.