BRINGING TEACHERS INTO THE FIELD IN ORDER TO BRING FIELD-BASED PALEONTOLOGICAL RESEARCH INTO THE CLASSROOM

A primary barrier to entry into geosciences professions is a lack of exposure at the K-12 level. In particular, prospective students are often inspired to consider geoscience professions if they have had experiences in the field or handling real rock or fossil samples. Even in primary and secondary schools that offer Earth or environmental sciences courses, however, it can be difficult to make experiential learning a part of the curriculum when faced with obstacles related to location and/or funding. This problem is particularly acute in urban settings, and disproportionately felt by underrepresented groups in science: Black, Latino, and female. In response to documented discrepancies in field-based Earth sciences opportunities in New York City public schools, we developed the Earth science Reciprocal Learning Year (EaRLY) Program which seeks to take teachers working in high-needs middle and high schools in New York State into the field and facilitate the development of paleontology-focused field- and specimen-based experiences that can be administered in the classroom. Participating teachers spend time at different Paleozoic outcrops in New Jersey and New York State, with the primary focus on a visit to Penn Dixie Fossil Park and Nature Reserve, a non-profit site with abundant and well-preserved Devonian marine fossils. Following the field excursions, the teachers bring a selection of students to the American Museum of Natural History for a hands-on experience that directly connects the material the teachers collected with their scientific value. Specifically the students break open rocks to recover fossils, and identify and tally them in order to quantitatively describe the ecological community. Students are also taken on behind-the-scenes tours to see paleontological research in action. Over successive iterations of the program, as well as iterations of the same exercise in classrooms, a large number of students will have participated in a multi-year research project. The museum-based component is a key element in the development of novel specimen-based research experiences for the classroom: teachers are able to more meaningfully engage students in subsequent classroom activities because they are based on personal field experiences and have the potential to contribute to paleontological research.