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 Just before the holiday season this year Acadia Partners Executive
Director Bill Zoellick and Dr. Sarah Nelson, of the University of
Maine's Mitchell Center, traveled to the American
Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco to present a paper
describing SERC's Acadia Learning Project, which engages teachers and
student
researchers in a citizen science program that collects data about the
mercury burden in dragonfly
larvae and other biota across a region spanning the coast of Maine.
The Acadia Learning project is differentiated from other research in
its focus on engaging students in authentic research, collecting data
of real interest to research scientists, while also providing a high
quality education experience. We have learned that these two
goals -- collecting useful data and providing a rich educational
experience -- often pull a project's implementation in different
directions. Our project, funded in part by the Maine Department
of Education, is both educational research and geochemical
research. The geochemical part of the program grows out of two decades of
mercury research at Acadia. Thanks to the years of work by
scientists in the park and elsewhere in the northeast, we now
understand that much of the mercury that shows up in fish and birds at
Acadia comes from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest and
elsewhere. What we understand less well is how the details of a
particular area's ecology -- the presence and location of wetlands, the
quality of the water, the life processes in a wetland -- affect the way
that the mercury enters the food web. We know that atmospheric
mercury is more or less evenly distributed across a landscape, but find
that fish in different ponds, even adjacent ponds, can have widely
different mercury burdens. Why? The work by teachers
and students is providing researchers at our partner organization, the
Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed
Research, with pilot data that can point to possible answers to this
question.
Just having students collect samples does not automatically
translate into good science education. The teachers and students
must be able to formulate and pursue questions of their own, separate
from the longer range and more complex studies undertaken by
researchers at the Mitchell Center. To support learning
objectives, Acadia Partners has developed curriculum materials to
support high school programs in earth science, health science, biology,
environmental science, and chemistry. We have also learned a
great deal about what students can do well, and where they have
difficulty. One area of significant difficulty is -- simply put
-- working with data. We have found that, apart from our program,
students often have little opportunity to work with real data, with all
its messiness and variability. Students in our program come face
to face with the fact that science is not black and white -- it is not
like science on CSI or other TV programs. It is about seeing
patterns and about refining hypothesis, rather than about
certainty. In an era where we need to train a citizenry to deal
with issues like climate change, these insights into the nature of
science are just as important as anything that we teach the students
about the chemistry of mercury.
The presentation that Dr. Nelson and Mr. Zoellick gave in San
Francisco included the following quotation from Ed Lindsey of Old Town
High School, who is one of the teachers engaged in the Acadia Learning
project. It captures both the goals and the spirit of the work we
are doing with teachers and students at SERC.
"The high school environmental and trophic mercury research
project
is different. Other student projects I've worked on have been valuable
and have gotten students out, but often amount to monitoring. The
mercury project has students ask questions that are of interest to
them, but which satisfy a broader scientific curiosity about the
behavior of mercury in specific trophic systems, and about correlations
between environmental variables and the accumulation of mercury in
organisms. There is a real knowledge void on local scales, and the
science isn't mock. With the participation of enough schools, it may be
possible to discern regional patterns, about which little is known.
This possibility on a regional scale and the authenticity of research
questions on the local scale places student work in a fabric of social
responsibility that changes the way kids think about science.
The project uniquely supports learners who value working as a team,
and who are less motivated to do school tasks for questionable
individual gain. Because it is work requiring varied talents,
individuals can contribute according to their strengths. In the
classroom, students engage in purpose-driven activities: reading
specific, non-textbook publications for targeted information; dealing
with organisms as living things and as data to be handled with the
greatest of care; graphing existing data to discern patterns and
possible influences on mercury. Hardest of all is crafting an
investigable research
question, deciding what samples to send to the lab for mercury analysis
that would address the question, and representing their findings
graphically and in written and spoken language.
It is a challenging endeavor, made difficult by school structures,
by the demands on the time of teens, and by the vagaries of life faced
by many teens. But the project has left a mark on students by requiring
constructivist learning while providing a rationale for it. Beyond the
vagaries, the project provides a way for a teen to contribute to the
construction of a larger body of knowledge taking place on a time scale
that transcends ones teenhood."
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