EDUCATORS COLLABORATE ON-LINE TO DEVELOP AN EDUCATION MODULE ALIGNED WITH A HIGH SCHOOL EARTH SCIENCE NEXT GENERATION SCIENCE STANDARD

During a two-week period, a team consisting of 1 veteran in-service teacher, 2 first-year in-service teachers, 1 pre-service teacher, 1 biology lab technician, and 1 paleoclimatology master’s student assisted a geoscience professor in the development of an Earth Science curriculum based on the Next Generation Science Standards. The team members were at separate locations scattered across the United States, and 5 were 2013-2015 alumni of the “Geoenvironmental Challenges” pre-service teacher summer research experience. The team focused on high school standard HS-ESS2-5, “Investigations of the properties of water,” with a focus on the geological features of karst and the social issue of environmental justice. The geoscience professor developed 10 on-line curriculum development assignments, and most of the actual curriculum development was by the six-member team. Team activities included individual research and materials development, sharing and peer-review, and a pair of Facebook discussions. The team created a curriculum with lessons, labs and activities that were mostly adapted from existing on-line materials.

The team created an Earth Science module that allows students to connect solubility to karst geology and apply that to historical and current social issues: environmental injustices of a post-Civil War African American community and the Flint, Michigan water crisis. The identified water property of solubility was explored in depth through lessons and a student-based lab. The historical application involved the settlement of African Americans on cedar glades, a kind of agriculturally marginal karst landscape found at scattered locations throughout the South and Midwest. In the contemporary application, the Flint water crisis lesson, students apply what they learned about solubility to develop experiments to test the corrosion of pipes. The African American cedar glades historical settlement was only local for one team member and Flint, Michigan was not local for any team members, but, in the future, team members could use their individual strengths and expertise to develop additional enrichment lessons specific to their geographic locations.