Cultivating inquiry-based science for UAA ecology students and those who teach in middle school and high school

A few weeks ago, UAA brought Bill Nye the Science Guy to West High for a public lecture. Later, student media on campus interviewed him about his show. Two things Nye said:

•    Science teachers have a great advantage over other teachers; they can blow things up. •    He aims his show at 10-year-olds because between ages 7 and 10, kids figure out what their passions are. Age 17-18-19? Way too late.

A week or so later, I sat with two professors-an ecologist and a science education expert-talking about changing the way undergraduates learn science, and the way middle and high school science teachers present it. As fun as Nye makes science sound, his methods apparently aren't capturing enough passionate 7-year-olds.

For the ecologist, Douglas Causey, the call for change came from decades of frustration. Rather than continue to have students learn rote facts and run predictable labs so they can regurgitate recipe science for a grade, he wanted students to do "real" science.

For science education expert Mike Mueller, changing how science is taught is about having teachers engage middle and high school students with questions that actually matter to them. When science project time comes around, he wants those students headed into their own backyards and local communities for a question or problem to work on, instead of "googling" a canned experiment from the Internet that they can simply duplicate.

Science like Causey and Mueller are interested in means real inquiry, with results that actually matter, results that might change public policy or influence a local community decision. That level of engagement takes people who know how to think like scientists. What are the actual questions here and what method will deliver answers? What do you measure? How do you measure it? How do you evaluate that answer? If it gets you nowhere, what's the next step?

This is authentic science. It's also messy and risky. Like Sunday, when Causey and a cluster of biology undergraduates and Mueller's education graduate students stood in the icy cold waters of a Portage Valley stream, trying to figure out how they could quickly learn a whole lot more about the insects flitting about as food for fish, birds and bats.

How do we do this, they asked Causey. What are the protocols? What will we measure? Will that give us the answers we need?

Causey calls this method "just in time" science. Just as students need a scientific method to deliver an answer, they learn what that method is, instead of reading about it theoretically in a textbook.

Scenes just like this one began two years ago, when Causey pioneered an exploration ecology class that took students out of classrooms and labs into the field. They partnered with scientists from local government agencies, like Jessica Ilse of the Chugach National Forest and Dave Tessler of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, who needed answers to real-world questions important to their resource management missions.

This year, the undergraduates have been joined by master's and doctoral graduate students in biology, as well as two students working toward their Master of Arts in teaching with an emphasis in science. Basically future middle and high school science teachers. They're observing inquiry-driven science at work and figuring out how to duplicate that process with their own future students. It's like a field lab within a field lab.

After listening to Causey and Mueller for a while, I asked if they thought our science education system was broken.

"It's been broken for a long time," Mueller said. "Like 300 years." In his view, the last time we had it right was when Benjamin Franklin in 1727 espoused teaching kids science in the context of the real world-"navigation, gardening, all kinds of things in their local community."

Mueller would love to see Alaska kids take on fisheries science. "Most kids dip net here," he said. "But it's never even discussed in the classroom." Mueller recently published a paper discussing how hunting and fishing could stimulate ecological awareness in millennials.

"Right now we are at the lowest levels ever for civic engagement since the civil rights movement," Mueller said, a time when "kids were organized around social norms that motivated activism and environmental awareness." Today, we're intimidated by science and assume that somehow, without us understanding how, science will solve our problems.

Causey and Mueller hope that students who learn authentic scientific inquiry will have the confidence to address questions on their own instead of expecting or waiting for an answer. With looming events like climate change or collapsing fisheries or balancing development and conservation, average citizens will need to formulate their own questions so they can make informed decisions.

"That is the process of science," Causey said. "Asking questions that you can actually address. And not any old question, but a question that has local and social relevance."

A version of this story by Kathleen McCoy appeared in the Alaska Dispatch News on Sunday, Nov. 2, 2014.