Graveyards and grocery stores can be inexpensive science education tools
A. J. Petto
A cemetery can tell science students a lot about how people lived, loved and died. A trip to the grocery store can turn into a lesson on biology, health and nutrition.
Those types of no-cost field trips are just a few examples of tools teachers can use to get kids excited about the sciences, says A.J. Petto, a lecturer in UWM’s Biological Sciences Department, who teaches classes for WisTEP (Wisconsin Teacher Enhancement Program), an outreach program for science and health educators.
WisTEP, which brings science researchers together with classroom teachers from the kindergarten to two-year college level, was honored earlier this year as one of the top 15 professional development outreach programs for science teachers (that’s out of 3,000 programs nominated). WisTEP is operated through the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but involves researchers and educators from UWM, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE).
Petto has strong feelings about the role researchers and scientists need to take to help better educate children about science. Reform efforts that started in the 1990s marked a fundamental shift in the way students learned science, he says.
“The national science education standards really changed the way we think about teaching science,” he says, with their emphasis on inquiry-based and hands-on methods. Students and teachers are encouraged to solve problems rather than just lecture, read and respond.
In the last several years, Petto has led Summer Institute workshops for teachers on bones, human variation, science and pseudoscience, evolution, urban wildlife, Internet research and writing in the sciences. Petto has also co-taught a class for kindergarten teachers on integrating the science curriculum with the arts.
Many of the workshops focus on free resources teachers can use. For example, Petto teaches a course titled “Love and Death” that shows teachers how to use the local cemetery to teach students about community history, life expectancy and disease, birth and death patterns, stylistic elements of grave markers, and the environmental and geologic factors that affect the preservation of information on grave markers. “It’s all free...all you have to do is go to the graveyard.”
Other Summer Institute classes also use the idea of incorporating free materials and field trips into science lessons. Raymond Kessel, director of the WisTEP program, teaches a class called “Salad Bowl” that shows teachers how a free trip to the grocery store can be a springboard for a variety of science lessons. A “Big Splash” class gives teachers tools to help them use Wisconsin’s lakes and streams in science education. An organic market grower leads a class showing students how to integrate a school garden or outdoor classroom into science teaching.
A key focus of the WisTEP program is to integrate new and developing scientific knowledge into classrooms. In a typical WisSTEP program, for example, the teaching team includes a research-scientist instructor and an experienced classroom teacher. The research scientist can tell teachers about the latest findings; the experienced teacher can show others how to integrate those scientific findings into classroom lessons. Teachers in the classes can practice using inquiry-based methods to learn more about the subject, sharing ideas with each other and, eventually, with teachers in their own schools.
Many of the WisTEP Summer Institute classes are taught at UW–Madison, but others are held at UWM, MSOE and in Green Bay.
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In addition to working with the WisTEP program, Petto is working in collaboration with Craig Berg, associate professor of science education in the School of Education, on a two-day workshop for teachers Aug. 24-25 at UWM. That workshop is part of a larger collaboration on science teaching between the School of Education and the College of Letters and Science called MACSTEP 3. MACSTEP3 is designed help classroom teachers develop more powerful tools for teaching hands-on science. The workshops and credit courses will also focus on helping teachers expand their scientific understanding and stay abreast of current scientific knowledge. More information on the MACSTEP 3 workshop will be available later this summer. Petto will also be a presenter at UWM’s popular Friday night Science Bag program in February 2007.
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