PALEONTOLOGY FOR PRE-SERVICE EDUCATION MAJORS AND IN-SERVICE K-12 EDUCATORS

K-12 educators have long recognized that fossils motivate student learning at all grade levels. Paleontology and Earth history are major components of K-12 education at all grade levels as reflected by national and state science standards. Additionally, related fossil topics of evolution, extinction, geologic dating, and global change span different K-12 subject area standards within each single grade level. Paleontology’s interdisciplinary nature makes it a valuable teaching context, but challenges K-12 teacher preparation. Traditionally pre-service teachers get paleontology content background through an introductory historical geology course, in which paleontology may make up perhaps one-third of the curriculum and is cursory and generalized as the course goal is to overview 4.6 Ga of Earth history. Focused paleontology courses target majors to train professional paleontologists for application and further research rather than teaching K-12 educators what and how to teach paleontology, arguably also a professional need. Some paleontology is taught in the more populated biology programs, but these tend to short-shrift the fossil record. Consequently important topics, such as organic evolution, are generally poorly understood by educators who then do a poor job of teaching the material to their students. University paleontology courses that actively target pre-service education majors can (1) provide direct advanced training regarding all aspects of fossils, (2) influence how to teach the content, (3) directly influence the paleontological lessons and delivery method at each stage of formal education, and (4) directly influence recruiting into the science workforce. The primary challenge is to recognize the needs of the clientele of the K-12 educator as a professional application of paleontology and incorporate standards-based “paleontology for the educator” components into paleontology courses that are based upon national and state science standards. Once implemented, the courses satisfy professional development requirements for in-service teachers (summer and on-line opportunities), thus expanding the paleontology audience at the home institution and provided additional service learning opportunities.