Education and Professional Outreach as an Integrated Component of Science and Graduate Education

Education and Professional Outreach (EPO) is increasingly becoming a substantive and much needed activity for scientists. Significant efforts are expended to satisfy funding agency requirements, but such requirements may also develop into a mutually beneficial collaboration between scientists and K-16 educators with a minimal impact on science productivity. We focus here on two particularly high impact EPO opportunities, hosting of high school interns and the inclusion of an educational component to a graduate student's&pthesis work. We emphasize the importance of hands-on collaboration with teachers and teacher-educators, and the substantive benefits of highly leveraged customized internet-distribution. We will present two examples for how we integrated this K-12 EPO into our university-based science and education efforts, what types of products emerged from these activities, and how such products may be widely produced by any scientist and disseminated to the educational community. High school seniors offer a unique resource to university EPO because some of them can substantively contribute to the science, and they can be very effective peer-mentors for high and middle schools. Extended internships may be built easily into the schedule of many senior high school student programs, and we were able to involve such interns into a three-week seagoing expedition. The seniors were responsible for our EPO by maintaining a cruise website and video conferencing with their high school. They added substantially to the science outcome, through programming and participating in a range of shipboard science chores. Graduate theses may be augmented with an educational component that places the main theme of the thesis into an educational setting. We designed and supervised such a Master's graduate thesis with an educational component on the geochronology of hot spot volcanoes, including a high school lesson plan, enactment in the classroom and preparation of a wide range of web resources for K-12 education. While we feel that the process of EPO itself has been rewarding, it is particularly important enhance its impact by focusing on the production of high quality educational resources (illustrations, data or text) that can be (re-) used in other of educational applications. The Enduring Resources for Earth Science Education (ERESE) initiative offers such a method of archival in a digital library (NSDL) and dissemination of these materials through the use of resource matrices and rich metadata that allows discovery through web browsers.