PROJECT MAMMOTH PARK: CONNECTING SCIENTISTS AND TEACHERS

Project Mammoth Park is an NSF-funded professional development project that engages science teachers, science teacher educators and scientists in an authentic scientific inquiry that examines the nature of Pleistocene environments of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The purpose of the project is to model for teachers the ways in which scientists go about developing and implementing scientific research as an integrated interdisciplinary team as they encounter a novel scientific environment. In addition, the project intends to model the ways in which nature of science that is the focus of school science is embedded in the research endeavors that the scientists carry out as they determine the nature of the past environment of a particular site. Science teacher educators act as the bridge between the work of the scientists and the world of the K-12 classroom teachers, highlighting the relationship between the nature of the scientific work that the scientists carry out and the science content and inquiry activities that the teachers carry back to the science classroom.

The project is based on a cognitive perspective that examines the nature of the environment that teachers construct in order to engage students in inquiry in science. Here, the science teachers were placed deliberately in the role of students, as they were required to act as curious agents trying to make sense of the environment in which they found themselves. The dilemma of the science teacher to create a learning environment that was “reasonably rich” (Simon, 2001) was an explicit issue that was highlighted repeatedly throughout the two week summer session and throughout subsequent workshops. A “reasonably rich” learning environment is one in which the curiosity of children is encouraged by structuring experiences in such a way that sufficient information is included in the activities to facilitate observations and during which new stimuli are not continually forced on children so that they are overwhelmed. The science teacher educators sought to establish a context and experiences that modeled the ways in which the teacher struggles to provide an environment that provides students with the initiative to look for patterns and develop questions while balancing the perceived lack of information. Case studies of the participants communicate the issues that arose.