PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating) is a program in which formal and informal educators spend 3-6 weeks participating in hands-on field research experiences in the polar regions. The goal of PolarTREC is to invigorate polar science education and understanding by bringing educators and polar researchers together.
Alicia Gillean discusses her 2013 Arctic Ground Squirrel Studies expedition at Toolik Field Station, Alaska, and how it impacted her personally and professionally.
PolarTREC alumna Susy Ellison talks about her two expeditions and how they affected her personally and professionally. Researcher Jeff Rasic joins in to talk about what it was like to have a teacher in the field for the Early Human Settlement in Arctic Alaska 2011 expedition.
Researcher Elizabeth Webb discusses her experiences working in the field with a PolarTREC teacher. She worked with John Wood in 2011 and 2012, and Tom Lane in 2013, on the Carbon Balance in Warming and Drying Tundra expedition near Healy, Alaska. (She primarily discusses her time with John Wood since this interview was taken in 2013, before Tom Lane's expedition.)
The journal assignment involves students in current science research. Through the teacher’s journals, they will learn about how the research teams work together, design their research, tools that are needed and how they live and work in an extreme environment.
Objective
Students will be able to:
1. Understand how scientific research is conducted in an extreme environment
Working in groups, students will use common materials to create layers of snow and ice representing thousands of years of stratification. Groups will exchange their ice layers and extract core samples to analyze them.
Objective
Notice the phenomenon of stratification.
Notice that layers can tell a story of change over time.