This award provides funding for a new GK-12 program that will involve 8-10 Fellows and 16-20 high school teachers in two counties (one urban and one rural) each year for five years. The program will take an interdisciplinary approach to teach basic science (biology, chemistry, physics) and mathematics, while taking advantage of the Washington coastal environments and increasing ocean literacy. Graduate students will be recruited from four UW departments and a marine lab, including the Biology Department which has over 20 faculty conducting research in the marine environment; the College of Ocean and Fishery Science (COFS) which has over 200 such faculty in three departments; the University's Friday Harbor Laboratories (FHL), now its second century, hosts over 200 researchers per year, including graduate students and undergraduates. FHL offers easy access to marine habitats and organisms and is an excellent venue for teacher workshops, and for field trips from any of the area schools. The school systems selected are in Seattle (King County) and in the San Juan Islands (San Juan County), inner city to rural, with a substantial diversity of students.
The Ocean and Coastal Interdisciplinary Science (OACIS) GK-12 Program goals included training future researchers in communicating marine and environmental science concepts to high school students and to general audiences; to bring current scientific research into the high school classroom; to get high school students thinking about science-related careers and science majors in college; to provide role models of science researchers for the students; to assist high school teachers in their professional development; and to develop curricular materials that will stay with the teachers and the high schools on a permanent basis. Faculty and graduate students from four University of Washington departments and schools, and the staff of many UW programs and facilities, participated in the OACIS Program, which has completed its five full academic years of operation. On the Seattle campus, the Biology Department (College of Arts and Sciences) includes over 20 faculty conducting research in the marine environment. The College of the Environment (CoENV) has over 200 faculty in the component schools, the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences (SAFS), the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (SMEA), the School of Oceanography (SO) and the Department of Earth and Space Sciences (ESS). More than 25 faculty mentors agreed to participate, with their graduate students, in this GK-12 program and others added in later. The University’s Friday Harbor Laboratories (FHL) is the site of marine research for over 200 researchers per year, including UW graduate students who were able to develop and offer GK-12 activities as fellows in the San Juan Islands. FHL offers easy access to marine habitats and organisms and has been an excellent venue for teacher training and student workshops, and for field trips from any of the participating schools; FHL has been a major contributor to this program, along with all of the Seattle campus units. High school science classes, the locus of the OACIS Program, offer exceptional opportunities to integrate ocean and coastal science into the curriculum and to encourage students to consider science careers and college science programs. The school districts selected for this collaboration are in Seattle (King County) and in the San Juan Islands (San Juan County). These districts span true inner city to very rural conditions, with a substantial diversity of student ethnic, economic and cultural backgrounds (Appendix V). For the past five years, 5-10 fellows worked in 5-8 high schools at one time, partnering with high school teachers, and each fellow having classroom time with 60-100 students per week. A total of 30 fellows took part, 10 of them for two years and 20 for one (40 total fellow years). Eighteen high school teachers participated, with most of them doing so for multiple years. A minimum of 2400 K-12 students were engaged in the program during those five years. We designed the program so that 2-3 of the fellows would be working in San Juan County schools, and the remainder to be working in 4-5 Seattle area high schools each year. Graduate students working in San Juan County usually have been those who have ongoing research projects at UW FHL, thus their research benefitted from being in residence the full academic year. In the first three years of this project, there were two graduate students each year who chose to work in SJC; there were three for 2011-12 and there were two for 2012-13. The remained worked in the Seattle schools.
