Middle and high school teachers from around the state participated in the STEM Leadership Academy, a weeklong professional development workshop designed to provide teachers with the tools to teach science as a field experience outside of the classroom. The workshop, led by Audubon Arkansas education coordinator Mary Smith, took teachers through hands-on, inquiry based research projects in a variety of different habitats. The teachers participated in environmental monitoring, invertebrate studies, species identification, mapping skills using GPS and topographic maps, and were taught to use a wide array of field tools including insect traps, field guides, and seines.
Each specific project was centered on one of the many different habitats located at the Audubon Center. Teachers went through glade, succession forests, wetlands, oxbow lakes, and grasslands. Experts in the fields of entomology, limnology, ornithology, botany, and forest ecology gave lectures and led the teachers through these specific habitats and guided them through the research activities. These activities, lectures, and use of technology enhanced the environmental literacy of the teachers involved.
One of the more important aspects of the workshop was the collaboration between teachers in different regions of the state with different backgrounds in citizen science projects designed for and by the teachers themselves. These collaborations will help create a community of likeminded educators dedicated to enhancing STEM education in the state. One Little Rock area teacher said, “One of the things I’m going to take away is the knowledge that there are other teachers out there just like me and we can lean on each other and use each other’s expertise in developing our classes.”
This workshop was funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation (Grant #9-0522) as part of the STEM Teacher Empowerment program at the Arkansas Science & Technology Authority.