Benefit of the Expedition to the Teacher
The PolarTREC expedition places the teacher in the role of student. All aspects of the expedition ask the teacher to stretch her mind and reach beyond her comfort zone. This stretch presents itself to the teacher in having to learn new technology, new science, new presentation formats, and meet, live and collaborate with new people. During the expedition, the teacher will learn to overcome her own limitations and learn to walk through the learning process much like her own students experience back in the classroom. After a PolarTREC expedition, the teacher can share more than the science with her students, she can share the rich experiences she has had with the people, the place and the natural world. Her enthusiasm will hopefully inspire and motivate her students to pursue interesting science related careers, and even a career in field research.
Description of My Activities
Each day during my expedition, I learned new tasks both in the field and back in the lab. I learned how the CiPHER and DryPHER research sites were set up to include replicates and controls. Most importantly, I learned how carbon flux was measured to quantify carbon release from microbial respiration, as well as carbon uptake from plant photosynthesis. I learned how to measure and record the changing depth to the permafrost and the depth to the water table. In the lab, I learned how samples and equipment must be prepared, maintained and properly processed and stored.
The expedition experience was not all work! To truly understand the outstanding experience of a PolarTREC teacher, I must include the my recreation and relaxation. August is berry season and brought young grizzlies to our site, which graciously loped past us without stopping to sample the blueberry abundance while we worked. Our blueberry picking yielded home-made cobblers, muffins and even jam. We hiked in Denali National Park, enjoyed an outdoor BBQ, attended a local blue grass festival and many evenings of good food and good company.
Summary of How to Link This Experience in My Classroom
The field experience has encouraged me to set up lab and field experiments with my students that will simulate many of the same parameters that I measured in the tundra ecosystem, but within a high desert system, instead of a polar system.
What I expected to learn during my experience
I expected to learn how an experiment is set up, carried out and how data is collected and analyzed. The CiPHER project provided me with ample opportunity to learn and participate in research to understand how a warming, drying climate will impact the subarctic tundra system. The CiPHER team taught me the importance of experimental design in collecting and measuring the data that the scientists are interested in, especially data collected in a long term experiment, carried out over seven years.
Concepts I would like to teach "better" or differently
The carbon cycle is a concept that my students do not seem to fully grasp. The movement of carbon through the atmosphere, pedosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere are critical concepts for understanding climate change. I am hoping that with the bottle biology project using soil decomposition experiments with varying temperature and moisture conditions, that the students will more easily understand the carbon cycle. Implementing better experimental protocols, and extending the project over a long period of time should help them begin to grasp and better reinforce the “unseen” carbon cycling.
Activities post expedition that the public should know about
The most important concept that I hope to share with both my students and with the public is how carbon cycling and climate change in the arctic connects to their lives in the desert. Activities that help me transfer this connection will be the focus of my outreach. I hope that the use of the probes and decomposition columns will engage and help the public see the carbon release. In addition, I hope to use graph interpretation as a key skill in developing student science analysis and so will emphasis this skill in the presentations that I make to other teachers and colleagues.
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This program is supported by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed by this program are those of the PIs and coordinating team, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.