Friends,
Now that I’ve started as director, we want to take this blog in a little different direction. Instead of me writing about the happenings at IISG and beyond, we thought we’d take the opportunity to share the perspectives—and voices—of the people who make this program great. So Renie Miles, our strategic communicator, and I are going to sit down with IISG staff and talk about some of the amazing work they’re doing. We’re calling it Sea Grant Chats, and we’re excited to get started.
For this first post, we’re talking about our education work with Kristin TePas, IISG’s Great Lakes Literacy and Workforce Development Specialist, and Janice Milanovich, our Great Lakes educator. Thanks for reading, and take it away, Renie!
-Stuart Carlton
Renie: Stuart, how has being a former teacher influenced and informed your perception and insights related to Sea Grant education efforts? What are we getting right?
Stuart: First, it has given me unbelievable empathy and respect for people who are successful teachers. That might be the hardest job in the world. The people who can do it, well, I just have unending respect for them.
When I was teaching I realized that teachers have few resources and some hard limits. Two big limits are time and budget: there are never enough of either, right? What I think we do really well is help teachers who have limited time and limited money have cutting-edge, world-class resources.
Another great thing is that our resources are trusted. Educators know they can trust Sea Grant because we have a 40-year history of providing excellent products. They know they can use them because they’re high-quality materials that have been reviewed by scientists and educators and the standards have been aligned. They know it fits their budget because we rarely charge and when we do, it’s the bare minimum. Teachers are superstars and so what we can do is help these superstars continue to do good work.
Also, we can provide them with materials that they might not otherwise have. A great example is the Limno Loan program where we loan out data sondes. Or we loan out fancy water quality testing tools. We do this through our aquaculture program as well and we do this for the low, low price of zero dollars.
I think that’s a really great thing and so when I think about my time as a teacher, if I’d had resources like these high-quality, vetted, trustworthy, affordable resources, it would have made my job a lot easier. I still wouldn’t been a superstar, that wasn’t in the cards for me, but I would have been appreciative.
Renie: The Shipboard Science Immersion that took place this summer on Lake Michigan is an incredible professional development opportunity for educators to work side-by-side with scientists. Why do you think these sorts of opportunities are so important for educators, but especially for their students?
Kristin: I think the experiential piece is what is so important—the educators are actually helping the scientists out with their investigations. We’re not having them out there doing activities just to go through the motion. All of this makes the educators feel like they are real scientists, which they are. I think it gives them more confidence in their understanding of what it’s like to do research and in the scientific process, and thus gives them more confidence in teaching their students. The experience also gives them more credibility in their students’ eyes.
Renie: And so how does this translate to be beneficial for students?
Kristin: I think for the educators the experience modeled how it feels to be a student. They realize what it’s like to be learning all these new things and feeling a little uncomfortable. It’s just how their students might feel so I think it brings a new perspective for the educators when they get back to the classroom. It also increases the educators’ interest in doing “inquiry-based learning” because they realize during that week of research how much they’re learning organically by investigating different questions. That’s something they can do with their students. The immersion provides a model for how to bring this back to the classroom at a smaller scale so the teachers feel more comfortable doing it.
It also just reignites their passion for science, which helps when they’re teaching it—they get all jazzed again about how cool science is.
Janice: Thinking back to my most favorite teachers, they were always colorful and had the best stories. I feel like storytelling is such a great way to teach. If the educators can share their real experiences with science with their students, it can help illustrate that a particular principle, which might seem pretty mundane, is important, through this real-world context.
Renie: Let’s talk about the Center for Great Lakes Literacy (CGLL) and the opportunities that come from that. How has having this group of Sea Grant educators, Great Lakes wide, working together been good for teachers, students, and sharing of information?
Stuart: I think you just started in the exact right place, which is this network of people. What’s great about CGLL is that it brings together all these education specialists at the different Sea Grant programs. There are 25 education experts throughout the Great Lakes and they’re all coming together to talk about these issues.
If one person who is working on one education issue in one area becomes connected to the group, all of a sudden, the knowledge base is expanded, the support network is expanded, and the impacts are expanded. To me that is a key thing behind CGLL.
The CGLL meetings—their webinars are the best ones that I sit in on. They’re so well-run and positive. It’s like a spiritual hug every three months. The group is super experimental in the way they run the meetings and are always trying out new ideas.
They’re doing what in the programming industry they call dogfooding—they’re eating their own dog food. They try out techniques in their webinars before they share them with educators.
Kristin: Everyone brings different skills so it just expands your access to different skill sets. Some people are from a formal background, some people are non-formal. Some know a lot about invasive species or water quality or marine transportation and so we can leverage each other’s skill sets but also resources. If one state develops a lesson plan, we all can use it. Instead of just having an education team of four we have a team of 25.
Janice: There’s an interesting anecdote about an Illinois educator who, through CGLL, found out about a workshop in New York and traveled there to attend New York Sea Grant’s professional development program over the summer. Also, I want to mention the new CGLL website that showcases the resources that Kristin was mentioning. Educators can filter and sort and find just what they need.
Stuart: I would add the development and focus on Great Lakes literacy principles, which are adapted from the ocean literacy principles. The Great Lakes has 10,000 miles of freshwater coastline and six quadrillion gallons of water, but it still feels, in a lot of places, including the science classroom, that the Great Lakes are kind of an afterthought. And so, thanks to CGLL for developing these resources and aligning them with both standards and these literacy principles; it really helps teachers harness this amazing freshwater resource.
Renie: What is on your mind as Sea Grant education work goes forward?
Kristin: I think we are evolving as education evolves. We had all these previous lessons, but now with the Next Generation Science Standards and learning new teaching methods, things are changing. We also realize that teachers more and more have less time so how can we increase our support?
One approach is offering them small funding opportunities so they can buy supplies or cover field trip costs. We also do check-in calls, at least with the shipboard folks. Our workshops are not just one-offs—we are trying to support those educators more and more because they have a lot more barriers.
Janice: Future focus using the sustained engagement model, right? It’s keeping folks evolving and helping each other and being a conduit to share new ideas amongst each other. I think that’s a constant in education. They say don’t reinvent the wheel—here use this and learn from me—so how can Sea Grant help facilitate that?
Kristin: Yeah, it’s like community of practice.
Stuart: Generally speaking, the best teachers are the ones who are constantly adapting. What’s so cool about what y’all do is that you are adapting with them. You are helping to interpret and make sense of new approaches and facilitating a broader community of practice for teachers who, again, are superstars, as they continue to adapt. And it’s important to prepare for what’s next because education is constantly changing because society is constantly changing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
