LaURGE: A PROGRAM FOR IMPROVING GEOSCIENCE LITERACY OF LOUISIANA HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE TEACHERS

Few geoscience courses are offered in Louisiana high schools. Instead, the Louisiana high school curriculum integrates geoscience content standards into biology, chemistry, and physics. Nevertheless, due in part to the limited geoscience background of high school science teachers, most high school students in Louisiana graduate without any exposure to earth science. To remedy this problem and also help recruit undergraduate geology majors, Shell Foundation and the National Science Foundation sponsor a program that works to increase the geoscience content knowledge of high school teachers called Louisiana Undergraduate Recruitment and Geoscience Education (LaURGE). Teachers participating in the four-day LaURGE workshops are taught geoscience concepts from Louisiana’s Comprehensive Curriculum and presented with lesson plans and materials that not only promote interest in the geosciences, but also follow the learning cycle and problem based learning models. These workshops are mostly intended for high school biology teachers and cover the topics of evolution, geologic time, and biogeochemical cycles. The LaURGE program begins with a field trip to an Oligocene exposure near Byram, MS with abundant shark teeth, mollusks, and echinoids. While in the field, the teachers learn basic fossil collecting and sampling techniques and also record their experiences to develop a virtual field trip for their own students from photographs shared among all participants. The classroom activities build on the field experience. For example, the field trip samples are used to illustrate collecting and taphonomic biases in the fossil record. The collected shark teeth also are sorted, identified, and compared to other shark fossil assemblages as part of a broader activity on fossil succession and patterns of evolution in the fossil record. The second half of the workshop covers geologic time and biogeochemical cycles using material available on the internet (e.g., GGS, SERC). To date, our workshops have been held at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and Centenary College in Shreveport during the summers of 2008, 2009, and 2010. We anticipate a continuation of these workshops at LSU and Tulane in 2011.