Educators Onboard for Learning

Each summer on one of the Great Lakes, 15 educators set sail for a week on the Lake Guardian, an Environmental Protection Agency research vessel, where they work side by side with scientists and fellow educators, growing their knowledge and confidence in bringing Great Lakes science to their students.

The Shipboard Science Workshop is the centerpiece project of the Center for Great Lakes Literacy, a collaborative of education specialists from Sea Grant programs in the region and funded through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. Since 2006, 207 educators have taken part in this adventure.

The hands-on, immersive nature of this experience fosters a broader and deeper understanding of science—the educators onboard are developing research skills as they engage in real world scientific investigation. They also expand their “treasure box” of lessons, teaching strategies, and network of like-minded colleagues. Participants of the workshops have described them as once-in-a-lifetime professional development opportunities.

Educators from every Great Lake state shared their experiences, describing how participating in the Shipboard Science Workshop has impacted them and their students. Here are some of their stories.

"I think more than anything I've ever done, teacher-workshop wise, that workshop on that ship really made it clear to me that we teachers are life-long learners. We're always curious about everything, and we should be actively learning with our kids all the time, so that's kind of what I've done ever since.

It kind of turned my approach to environmental learning—in the sense of learning about the environment around you, where you live. We have a little pond next to our school. Over the years, we've found frogs and wood ducks and all sorts of crazy stuff. It’s nowheresville to most people, but we've done so many science projects on that pond.

I teach ESL—English as a second language. Since the Lake Guardian, I do most of my collaboration with science and ESL. I think it's a great way for kids to learn English because the language is so immediate and relevant and genuine. We're not practicing grammatical drills, we're actually trying to find the words to describe what we're seeing and to show what we've learned.

I've taken on roles like coach for the regional science fair. I'm the guy that runs Trout in the Classroom—we’re raising 300 rainbow trout from eggs. We have a school garden that I started and I don't even know anything about plants! But I thought, let’s do it! Then I find out lots of teachers actually know a lot more about it and they are excited about it. It's been really kind of a fun community building thing that we are still working on year after year.

I didn’t really try to do it, but I’m bringing fishing into the classroom. There's so much science related to fish and fishing—for lots of kids it's one of the biggest outdoor things they do. It's something they have some knowledge about and they can teach you. It’s become a kind of a touchstone, a point that you bring in when you're talking about water quality or what's going on around the lake or in the lake. The kids can go “yeah I know because we saw that stuff at this one lake.” I guess in the bigger picture, I think there are ways that we can bring the kids’ lives more into what we're doing in school—making more of that connection."

"The Shipboard Science Workshop has made me more confident. When you’re in college you learn things from a textbook, it’s just information that you are memorizing. When you actually go on a ship and apply it—it’s the real thing—you know what you’re doing after the experience.

Whenever you get to be a scientist yourself, I think it just elevates your ambition to share it with children. I want to be able to bring kids something that is real and meaningful and it helps when I can draw from real experiences. It is more inspiring to kids to see someone else has actually done it rather than just seeing it in a textbook. It provided a real-world experience for me as much as it does the kids now.

My job is to go into schools and work with teachers to create environmental education curriculum. As a result of the Lake Guardian experience, I got involved with Sheboygan Area School District, which is our largest school district area. The cool thing about it is that they are right on the shore of Lake Michigan, so I worked with the 6th-grade teachers to create a field experience and a classroom program about Lake Michigan. We’ve been able to meet with the students at Kohler-Andrae State Park where we do three different activities. In the past, they’ve learned about Arctic ecosystems, which is all really cool, but it’s not what’s in their backyard.

There are now kids in my area finally learning about Lake Michigan. They are now connected to the place they live in. The more they learn about it and go there, the more they are going to want to take care of Lake Michigan. They are going to be more involved in the decision-making processes later on."

"Being on the Lake Guardian was such an eye opener for me as a non-scientist—to see what science research really is all about—the intricacies, the painstaking calculations, and data collection that goes into it. Until I actually participated in it and worked with scientists, I didn't have a good understanding of this.

Through the work with scientists on the Lake Guardian, I was able to enrich my curriculum with high school and college students. We developed a semester long Great Lakes-based course for college students and incorporated this science into our existing high school programs in Lake County. The contacts made on the Lake Guardian were valuable in developing the curriculum.

I think another very meaningful piece was meeting the scientists. They were very accessible and many of them were guests in our classroom over the next couple of years. I taught high school students informally in the summer and we went on a lot of field trips. The enthusiasm the scientists showed in sharing what they were studying with the young people was impressive. Subsequently some of my students went on to take lab-based courses related to ecology or biology that corresponded to the work that they did there, which was very cool.

Through this, the students developed an awareness of the lake, how important that lake is, and what they need to do to protect it. When the students come back to me and say things like “You know I love Lake Michigan now” or “I get very upset when I see any kind of pollution” or “I've been advocating for the lake and I go out on workdays to clean up the shore,” I know that my time on the Guardian had an impact.

Change comes through education and it’s very satisfying to be part of that kind of change. It starts with somebody, like a teacher or a scientist, who can instill in the students the understanding of why science and learning about the lake is important."

"In the past I knew that scientists were studying the Great Lakes, I knew that they had techniques to learn about these things. But to live it for a week and figure out how they know what they know, helps me understand the nature of science and the environment better. I’m much less mystified. When I set up lessons and teach students, I understand, in a lot more detail, how many samples they take and how far apart the samples are from each other. That's invaluable to me.

It’s important to re-energize me in my career as a teacher—to continue to learn and grow and fully engage my students. I think students have more fun in my science classes. The shipboard workshop, and using the Hydrolab, has been part of my progression from using a whole bunch of words in science class to having students participate, be active, and be more fully engaged with themselves as scientists.

I’m trying to break down the view of science as being elitist—that science is only for a certain group. The students I have, a good portion of them, probably don't have anybody who would call themselves a scientist or engineer in their family. Part of my drive to have them engage in and enjoy science class in high school is so they grow in their appreciation of what scientists do, and eventually become future scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. Or to just understand more about how the world works, objectively.

I also think that the opportunity for students to see scientists on the boat versus being in a lab helps to dispel the notions of what scientists look like or where scientists work. I feel like most of the people who have been on video calls from the boat have been female and they're usually dressed down and are having fun and smiling. I think that's an important message to send to high schoolers. Not denying the fact there's a lot of hard work involved and a lot of academic work that needs to go into it, but man, the students could see that these people have lives that are interesting and engaging."

"While we were out on the Lake Guardian, I had unfettered access to these incredibly talented and knowledgeable water scientists to frontload my grant-writing efforts for my middle school science class, and to have these connections moving forward when I was funded. They were passionate about hearing what I was going to be doing. They wanted to see schematics for my water monitoring buoys, they wanted to understand the level of the kids that would be doing this—just really the iron-sharpening-iron aspect of it. That was something that I walked away with—understanding more about what they bring to the table, they understood what I was bringing to the table, and it was a great way to have a meeting of the minds.

Not only are you connecting with other researchers and the team that's actually running the boat, but you're there with another 10-12 educators at all grade levels from across the Great Lakes. I'm still in touch with those teachers now.

The interconnections with professionals in these STEM careers as opposed to just hearing about it watching a program or reading a book, was very invigorating, and added the sense of vibrancy. That level of camaraderie and collaboration just fuels even more what I can then take to my students. It's a heightened level of inquisitiveness and interest from physically being there.

When the grant came through, some of my 7th grade students were so excited about the work that we were doing that they actually started coming in at 6:30 in the morning well before school started at 8:00. They then continued on as a club. One excellent experience that came from our work is that we ended up taking the students to the St. Clair Shores Municipal Water Authority meeting of the waterfront group, where they gave a presentation to 50 adults that they’d never met before. This group coordinated all these different cleanups and research and things like that across the city, and my students presented their research to these community leaders!

For me to be able to refill the well and refresh my ideas, and to be re-energized, the Shipboard Science Workshop just fueled that. And as a result, I saw my students’ engagement increase exponentially."

"With some grant money I received as a part of the workshop, I started a stewardship project with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which most of my students, although we're only less than an hour away from there, had never even heard of it, had never gone there. Every year, the entire fifth grade goes to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and they cut invasive species along the Cuyahoga River to help with the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative that the park does.

That led to a lot of other things. I did an advanced watershed program at Old Woman Creek National Estuary near Lake Erie. We got to go on a USGS research ship. It just kind of added to my experience on the Lake Guardian. The following year I got certified as an environmental educator in the state of Ohio.

I took a group of kids on a 3-night trip to Traverse City to go on the Inland Seas Research Schooners and collect water quality data like real scientists. They got to visit three Great Lakes—Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Erie. We stopped at Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, then we stopped at Old Woman Creek where the kids got to do water sampling and use microscopes, and then we stopped at Maumee State Park. We talked to naturalists at all the different places. I had a student that was handicapped, he has spina bifida and is in a wheelchair. His mom drove behind the charter bus the whole trip so he could participate in everything that the other kids did, which is amazing in itself.

I usually have about 130 5th-8th grade students every year in my afterschool science club. The kids definitely are a lot more engaged. It's not just academic learning, but there are also all the other learning aspects—social, emotional, leadership—everything has been incorporated.

Their younger siblings who are in elementary school, are already excited about science before they even get here. Along with the younger kids, is their parents. They're just as excited about what their kids are going to have in middle school. That's what it's all about--getting kids excited about learning. They're learning and they don't ever realize it because they're just having fun and getting outside.

It really all started with the Lake Guardian. I can't say enough about the experience and how it just made me a lot better teacher. And it makes the kids a lot better students because they're more engaged and more excited about coming to class every day. But, it's not just the kids, it's a community. It's a total buy in from the whole community."

"Because I live near Lake Erie, I sort of wanted to experience a different Great Lake. But going on Lake Erie after all, I think that turned out to be one of the coolest things because I really got to experience, literally my backyard, from such a different perspective.

Every time I go out to the park, every time I see the lake, I think about my experience on board the Lake Guardian, how much science actually exists in the water. When I'm at the beach—seeing people play in the water and paddle boarding and jet skiing and those kinds of things—I think there's really a whole other world under the surface there.

For me, probably the most influential science aspect of that cruise was harmful algal blooms. Lake Erie is the shallowest lake and has the biggest opportunity for those algal blooms. I see them in the news, I see the swimming restrictions and notifications. Having an understanding about science and what's happening and how events contribute to those blooms, for me, has really opened my eyes and changed my behaviors—whether I fertilize or don't fertilize my lawn or buy single use plastic, things like that. And I probably annoy all my friends when I tell them things like that too.

The collaboration with professors and research scientists aboard the ship was really meaningful and I’ve stayed in contact with a handful of people that were on board with me. As educators I feel like there's a sense of community after spending eight days and seven nights together on a research vessel. It really is an experience that is unlike any other.

I'm not any longer in a classroom, I provide professional development to teachers. Through that, I try to impart environmental knowledge wherever I can, it's definitely a passion of mine. I feel as though connecting with other people who have that same passion is important. It’s also important for students to see careers and potential opportunities, and see adults modeling that same passion.

I would say it really exposed me, having spent my whole professional career in K through 12 education, it opened up the perspective that there's so much more to education outside the doors of a classroom."

"The biggest impact from my time on the Lake Guardian is an expanded network of people with whom I can share and glean information from about the Great Lakes—it's the scientists and teachers and other folks in EPA and Sea Grant. You have this rich assortment of folks that you can tap if you have questions or if you want to carry out some sort of work on your own.

The other thing is making that connection for students. Every year I set up an opportunity for my kids to actually Skype with the scientist. The kids always have really good questions. Anytime you can put kids together with real scientists, it gives them a really authentic learning experience.

I had a student who wanted to do her senior thesis on algal blooms, and I was able to put her in touch with a scientist from the ship. Any senior interested in any Great Lakes science pursuit for their thesis, they come to me and I'm able to tap this network of folks and provide a connection.

The idea of lifelong learning—that's another really great thing that the shipboard science opportunity gives teachers. It's modeling for our students that we all have a lot to learn. I think it's important that they see that as educators, with regards to the things that we're passionate about, we try to learn more all the time. It’s all about asking questions and figuring out our relationship to our world around us. I think that's really fun for the kids to see.

The knowledge that I've gained about processes that affect the Great Lakes—that is invaluable to the curriculum that I teach and my ability to speak to all of those things. I think that my kids recognize the interconnectedness of us and our resources. My experience with the shipboard science workshop served to reinvigorate my desire to communicate that connection and make it a richer connection for kids."

This project was conceived by Kristin TePas and produced by Irene Miles, both with Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant.

Contributors:

Christina Dierkes, Ohio Sea Grant

Marie Zhuikov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

Allison Neubauer, Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant

Hope Charters, Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant

Photos and video courtesy of Allison Neubauer, Irene Miles, John Weimholt, Sarah DeZwarte, Susie Hoffman, John Gensic, June Teisan, Dave Murduck, Hannah Evans, Sandy Smith