Twenty- five middle and high school teachers from all over the country will participate in an intensive two-week summer workshop at SFI designed to prepare them to introduce their students to complexity science.
The 2010 workshop, June 27-July 10, is themed “Demystifying Complex Systems by Thinking about Networks: From Metabolism, to the Genome, to Social Conflict.”
The selected teachers come from math, science, computer science, the social studies, and other fields, says workshop coordinator Paige Prescott, herself a Santa Fe-area science teacher and program coordinator of SFI’s Project GUTS (Growing Up Thinking Scientifically) after-school program for middle school students.
Last year’s SFI teacher workshop, the first of its kind, focused on the emergence of life. This year the theme was expanded to include a broad study of complexity through network structure and dynamics, she says.
“Network science is getting a lot of press these days and teachers need to be able to explain it to their students,” she says. “We now have computer tools to see patterns in networks we wouldn’t have been able to see 20 years ago, and researchers in many branches of science are using it to better understand complex relationships. It will only continue to grow as a research field.”
Paige says textbooks typically available to science teachers are decades old in terms of their science content, and most teachers have not been trained in complexity concepts and so they have a dif cult time teaching them to students.
“They are in need of current information,” she says. “The workshop helps teachers revitalize their lesson plans and helps keep them inspired.”
Project GUTS facilitators worked directly with SFI researchers to interpret and distill scientific concepts into the professional development material that will be used in the course. Paige says scientist/educator collaborations of this sort present a provocative template for teacher professional develop- ment and student engagement.
The workshop is supported in part by SFI Science Board Chair Emeritus Harold Morowitz through a National Science Foundation Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research (FIBR) grant.