LB 18-154 - Authentic Research Experience for Teachers at Long-Term Ecological Research Sites

The goal of the Authentic Research Experience for Teachers at Long Term Ecological Research sites (ARETs@LTERs) project is to engage high school teachers who work with students from marginalized groups in the practice, process, and communication of data-intensive STEM. In this project, teachers work in partnership with scientists to explore how emerging stressors such as drought, marine heatwaves, and global warming impact communities and biodiversity across ecosystems. Four teachers are stationed at each of three LTER sites spanning critical habitat types: the arctic tundra (Arctic LTER), temperate montane forests (Andrews LTER), and marine coastal ecosystems (Santa Barbara Coastal LTER), forming a cohort of 12 teachers in year 1, joined by another 12 teachers in year 2. Teachers spend up to four weeks embedded in field and lab research during the first summer, followed by virtual collaboration with other teachers to develop and pilot authentic science learning activities with their students, followed by two weeks of field research in the second summer. A capstone in-person experience at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Center will help teachers build data skills and develop a cross LTER site data product. To kick off each teacher’s experience, they participated in the Data Literacy Using LTER Data workshop series, which was led by Dataspire Education & Evaluation, LLC, by integrating LTER data into their existing 8-part evidence-based workshop model. Our poster will present the outcomes of two of these workshop series and describe the research experiences of our first cohort of teachers. In July of 2022, we engaged 14 middle and high school teachers from across the U.S. (Alaska, Oregon, California, Wisconsin, and Puerto Rico) in the inaugural Data Literacy Using LTER Data workshop series. Eight teachers worked with Title I schools (low socio-economic status) and with students from groups historically marginalized in STEM. In a follow-up survey after the workshop series, 92% of respondents expected to integrate knowledge and practices they learned during the series into their teaching the next year. Some examples of how participants planned to integrate knowledge and practices into their teaching next year include: 1) giving students the language and examples to talk about patterns in ecological datasets, 2) on-ramping students to bridge the gap between surface level thinking to making inferences from visualizations, and 3) incorporating time to explore visualizations based on LTER datasets.