Hearing words such as infection, death rates, and disease and seeing pictures of scary vectors posted on a board may be intimidating, but it is actually a new project produced by Miles Munding-Becker, the AP Environmental Science teacher at Ojai Valley School.
The “Emerging Diseases” project is a poster board project where students research a disease that is becoming more prevalent due to changes in climate.
This is the first year that Mr. Munding-Becker is teaching the AP Environmental Science class at Ojai Valley School, and the first year that the Emerging Diseases project is taking place. Mr. Munding-Becker wanted to give a more visual idea of some of the biggest diseases present in the world, and so, this poster project began.
“I believe the most important thing about this project was learning about the spread of diseases and how they are transferred among people,” said Mariana Thacher, a senior student in the AP Environmental Science class.
Students presented their poster boards to the entire class after working hard on making it have the information necessary to provide their peers with a deeper understanding of the diseases that they may or may not have heard about before.
Some disease information that was presented were based on diseases such as Lyme Disease, Salmonella, and Rabies.
“I think this project is a good opportunity to tie students into environmental epidemiology,” said Mr. Munding-Becker. “It’s an important topic on the AP exam to study disease origins and how they migrate with a warmer climate.”
Although this project went well information-wise, Mr. Munding-Becker would like to see more organization in the future poster-board projects.
“I assumed that the students were familiar with the visual part of how to make a poster board,” said Mr. Munding-Becker. “Next year, I’ll make sure that students are pretty well versed in how to do this.”
Mr. Munding-Becker assigned this project so that the students can use some of these examples of transferable diseases when they take the AP Environmental Science exam in May.