We plan to establish and support a community of schools and universities organized to facilitate student investi gation of the Earth system, laying the foundation for the formation of regional research consortia. We have developed curriculum through on-going implementation, observation, experimentation, evaluation, planning, and regional relationship-building around classroom activities at Gonzaga. Systematizing this curriculum development process at the community scale begins with fellow faculty. Systemization will require introducing new faculty to the curriculum through immersion. The breadth and depth of the content and the technical nature of the learning environment, however, will require on-going faculty professional development and support. This can only be achieved by providing scientific, technical and social support to faculty and students in the classroom, so that they can manage their investigation of the content and advance their local academic environment. We propose to establish several support programs with NASA, NOAA, and AGU to enable faculty to link scientists, database managers, and technical support staff with student teams.
In order to enable this human infrastructure, we will develop an evaluation-driven information and communication system which supports these activities and enables the community to rely increasingly on its own resources and experience to solve problems.
Developing such a system will involve intensive and comprehensive evaluation and coordinated technology development. The challenge is to develop a support system which will operate with a minimum, distributed bureaucracy, can be decentralized and ported to other locations to achieve self-sustainability or can be commercially maintained in a technologically underdeveloped education system, including schools, universities and museums. These activities define the ESSCC testbed.
We will:
Our goal is to eliminate unnecessary seams in order to provide students with a clear educational pathway from high school and university to post-graduate work, marked by the continuity of the curriculum and the increas ing challenge of the content. Working together as a community will enable us to develop a scalable, seamless curriculum. In Year 1, beginning in August, 1994, six high schools (including Gonzaga College High School) and two universities will participate. Participating schools and universities have invested themselves in a rigorous solicitation, application, and selection process. Participating faculty and their home institutions have helped to formulate the goals and objectives of this proposal and have committed themselves to this program. Year 1 participants represent a socio-economically diverse community of public and private academic institutions which spans the countryÊ.
The participating schools and universities must comply with several requirements in order to be selected. Participants must agree to implement the curriculum for the duration of the grant and release participating faculty from teaching one class in order to support students and meet the evaluation and development requirements of the collaborative curriculum devel opment process. Participants must relieve faculty of one additional class for two years at no loss of pay to provide faculty with time to fulfill their development, evaluation, and planning responsibili ties. They must also implement the curriculum as a fully accredited course as part of the science curriculum for at least five years. Schools must provide classroom facilities, furniture, and pay for basic utilities and maintenance needed to establish an ESS Laboratory. Schools must present a five-year strategy for providing technical and financial support, for maintenance and security, to the class.
Faculty responsibilities include teaching, learning, evaluating, communicating, and planning activities. Faculty must participate in a three week summer immersion project conducted in July-August of each year. Travel costs and stipends will be provided by the grant, if required. Faculty must have at least two years of classroom experience teaching science or math. Because it is almost impossible to have expertise in all as pects of the fields addressed by ESS, faculty of biology, chemistry, physics, Earth science, applied mathematics, and other sciences are qualified to teach the course. Faculty must have executive support of their department chair and an executive administrator documented in a letter of commitment to ECOlogic. With the school or university's support, faculty are required to make a presentation of their findings with their students at a site off of the campus, such as a local museum, library or public science agency. As part of an ESS community-wide effort, in Year 1, participating faculty will conduct a thorough formative evaluation of the project. Faculty will seek to involve members of their community in the classroom and evaluation process. In Year 2, faculty will work with their science and math departments to develop a five-year strategic plan for science and math education in their school. Faculty will seek to involve members of the broader, regional education community in the classroom and evaluation process, such as their superintendent or state education evaluator. In Year 3, relying on the relationships and experience developed in the preceding two years, faculty will develop a plan to establish regional research consortia.
Each year for the next two years of NASA funding, we will introduce four U.S. high school faculty and two university professors to the community and the curriculum development process. We intend to include both public and private schools which have been traditionally underserved or unnecessarily isolated from mainstream educational reform, as exemplified by our initial participants. Although the NASA program only provides funding for three years, all schools and universities must agree to participate in the program for a total of three years. Schools and universities who enter the program in year two will only receive funding for two years and will be responsible for funding themselves for one year. We have already received letters of intent from high schools and universities planning to participate in Year 2. Faculty who enter the program in year three will only receive funding for one year and will be responsible for funding themselves for the remaining two years. In the application process, these institutions must clearly identify their sources of funding and present a five-year strategy for providing the required technical and financial support to participating faculty. The highest cost to participating schools and universities in the three year program are associated with the establishment of an ESS Laboratory in their first year. Thus, the cost to the schools in the out years of the program will be significantly less to participating schools and universities. This cost sharing plan provides schools with an incentive to begin the process of building relationships locally and regionally and start down the road to systemic reform. The gradual increase in the financial responsibility of participating schools and universities recognizes the accomplishments in curriculum development by the community in preceding years and systematically moves the community toward decentralization and self-sustainability.
By the end of their third year in the program, participating faculty will have worked with their colleagues in the ESS community and their regional community to develop a strategy for achieving self-sustainability. This will involve an ESS community plan to decentralize or commercialize the critical support and development services of the ESS community. The ESSCC, its supporting information and communications system, and attendant software applications will have already been ported to the information infrastructure at the Earth System Science Laboratories at the participating schools and universities. This will reduce the technical responsibilities of ECOlogic in the context of an increasing user base, and distribute network traffic to regional hubs, minimizing bottlenecks. By the end of the third year of the ESSCC test-bed, new faculty will be able to participate in the community and implement the curriculum at their home institutions, relying largely on ESSCC accessibility over the Internet. The community will have defined in the curriculum development process an ecology of widely-distributed, fully-integrated community activities and support services.
In addition to the NASA-funded participants, we plan to introduce other high schools and universities to the ESSCC testbed so long as their participation will contribute to the community investigation and they are willing to provide their own funding. This will provide us with data to study commercialization options and further present our findings to the community. The same responsibilities, provisions, and quality standards will apply to all new members. However, we are pursuing a gradual three-year scale-up process in order to learn how a research community can and should organize themselves, apply technology, understand the needs of our user base in the scale-up process and achieve a specific set of academic, professional and social goals. In the case of ESSCC testbed, these goals revolve around facilitating student investigation and achieving self-sustainability, which is, ultimately, what we are proposing to study.
The Earth System Science Community Curriculum Testbed
keeler@jacks.gsfc.nasa.gov