This month 20 secondary school science teachers from around the country are attending an SFI workshop to learn the latest on the chemical origins of life and the development of modern genetic code. They then will take the ideas, tools, and inspiration from the workshop back to their students this fall.
The July 5-18 workshop, “Emergence of Life: From Geochemistry to the Genetic Code,” is the outreach component of an SFI-led research project of the same name. Both were enabled by a ve-year National Science Foundation grant through its Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research (FIBR) program. FIBR supports multidisciplinary research as a way to explore the great unknowns of biological science.
Workshop coordinator Paige Prescott, a secondary school science teacher in Santa Fe, describes another of the workshop’s goals. “We’re trying to enable them to help their students see science connections across different disciplines,” she says.
Teacher-led sessions complement the researchers’ lectures. Discussions focus on the project’s findings as well as its biochemistry, computer simulation, genetics, geochemistry, microbiology, and physics components.
“Often, science is taught without context,” says Paige, who is writing the workshop’s curriculum. “We are encouraging teachers to help students understand scientific concepts within a greater scheme.”
Paige is no stranger to incorporating multidisciplinary philosophy into her own and others’ science classrooms. She also serves as facilitator and regional coordinator of the SFI-hosted Project GUTS (Growing Up Thinking Scientifically), a science, technology, engineering, and math program for middle school students in New Mexico.