EXPERIENTIAL DISCOVERIES IN GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION EDGE: A YEAR OF INTEGRATED FIELD GEOLOGY, GIS TRAINING, AND EARTH SCIENCE FOR ALASKA'S SECONDARY SCIENCE AND MATH TEACHERS AND THEIR STUDENTS

The new Alaska Science Performance Standards (Grade Level Expectations) are aligned with the National Science Standards and provide a reference for the core earth science concepts that must be mastered by Alaska's 4th, 8th, and 10th graders beginning in 2007. To support secondary science and math teachers and their students in the earth sciences and to begin providing useful job-training for Alaska's future workforce, Connor and Prakash have expanded their respective University Alaska Fairbanks and Juneau GIS training workshops for teachers to include a geological field component. This 10 day workshop was piloted in June 2005 and put teachers and GPS receivers into different landscapes to collect spatial data as part of an earth science introductory field camp. Teachers next learned to transfer this information into a GIS environment where they created their own projects with field data and analysis and gained earth system science knowledge that they could apply to their own classroom curricula.

Between 2006 and 2008 funding from the National Science Foundation Geoscience Education Division will enable us to provide these workshops for two cohorts of teachers through the EDGE project. In addition we will offer a week of on-campus summer training for promising pre-college students of these EDGE program teachers. During the following fall semester EDGE teachers and their students will return to their classrooms to plan and implement earth science projects in their communities that will incorporate spatial data and use ARCGIS software as a tool for the projects. Technical support and further content knowledge will be provided through a UA Fall online “Geology Essentials” course required of the EDGE teachers. Finally both teachers and their student will gather back at UA Juneau in March to present their projects in an EDGE Symposium. They will also attend the Southeast Regional Science Fair which sends its winners directly to the INTEL International Science Fair.