Advancing the REVOLUTION: Using Earth Systems Science to Prepare Elementary School Teachers in an Urban Environment

Journal of Geoscience Education, Sep 2004 by Hall, Frank R, Buxton, Cory A

* Create a learning environment that positively promotes teachers' perceptions and attitudes towards science and science teaching through contextualizing science within an Earth Systems paradigm;

* Provide teachers with examples of best teaching practices in all required science content and pedagogy courses;

* Provide teachers with opportunities to practice their craft through peer teaching and practicum placements prior to required student teaching assignments; and

* Provide teachers with adequate preparation in the application of state and national science education standards and benchmarks in preparing lesson plans.

Our approach builds on the NSTA's concept of the spiral curriculum. We reintroduce Earth Systems concepts over a series of four courses. By presenting these ideas in ways that are layered and articulated, we are providing the students with competencies necessary to effectively understand science concepts, while also modeling for them an approach that they can use in preparing their own lessons.

Within this article, we discuss the:

1) Collaborations we have undertaken in the hope that this will prove useful to faculty in other universities who are at the initial stages of such collaborations;

2) Outcomes of our program to date - encouraging initial results we can point to in terms of student attitudes, beliefs, and practices;

3) Areas where our collaborations are still in need of strengthening (including barriers we have faced); and

4) Plans for the future, both in terms of our teaching and our research in this arena.

Attaining our collaborative goals necessitated programmatic changes, including the design of three new physical science courses that specifically target preservice elementary school teachers, and the redesign of the teaching methods course. All of these courses model the same inquiry-based instructional practices that we wish our students to use in their own future classrooms.

While not formally team-taught, these courses model faculty collaboration to our students, as science and science education faculty often participate in each other's classes and spend time in each other s buildings. We cannot overemphasize the importance of this cooperation. We provide the students with a sense of community as they come to see science and science education practitioners as partners interested in their learning in a holistic way, not just within the confines of one particular course or one particular department. We also recognize that for our teaching to be effective, our students must find the content relevant to their lives, and they must see explicit connections between what they are learning in content and methods courses. Therefore, we have organized these courses around a single theme: the environment of the Lake Pontchartrain region (Figure 1), emphasizing an Earth Systems approach.

CONTEXT OF THE PROJECT - LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN BASIN

Located on the southeastern end of Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta System, New Orleans rests between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain with University of New Orleans located on the south-shore of the lake (Figure 1). The proximity of Lake Pontchartrain, within easy walking distance from any building on campus, makes it an excellent natural laboratory for learning science. Lake Pontchartrain is actually a shallow, brackish-water estuary with fresh water from bayous, rain, and run-off mixing with saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico.