Ten St. Louis-area high school biology teachers are at Washington University this summer as part of an innovative research transfer program.
The program, sponsored by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), based in Bethesda, Md., involves high school teachers who work on cutting-edge research with university mentors. These clusters of university and high school teachers exist in several regions throughout the United States.
The teachers, many of whom have been away from university laboratories since their undergraduate days, are provided a $5,000 stipend for the 12-week experience, as well as $500 to provide materials for new experiments in their high school laboratories during the upcoming school year. Their goals are to learn new techniques in biochemistry and molecular biology and to transfer some of their knowledge into high school laboratory experiments and lessons.
"The program seeks to make high school teachers aware of what's happening in modern biology," said Sarah C. R. Elgin, Ph.D., professor of biology and ASBMB mentor of Todd Gienke, a high school teacher at Whitfield School in St. Louis. "There's been a revolution in modern biology over the past 10 years, and many high school teachers who graduated in the 70s and early 80s, for instance, haven't had opportunities to keep current with these techniques and developments."
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has teamed up with ASBMB this year to sponsor 50 high school teachers nationwide in the summer programs. Washington University has a full 20 percent of the recipients practicing here. ASBMB is concentrating its program, now in its fifth year, on a "cluster" concept, which stresses interaction between the 10 high school teachers in weekly meetings where they share individual projects and expertise with their fellow teachers.
"This is our first funding of a cluster group, and we're interested to analyze the impact and note the feedback from the concept," said Jack Priess, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry at Michigan State University and chair of the ASBMB educational affairs subcommittee. "We hope that by clustering teachers, more of the information will be shared and better dispersed."
Elgin said there has been much debate among science institutions that grant summer research opportunities to high school teachers over the best way to impart and spread the knowledge.
"Everyone agrees that the research experience is good for the teachers, but the concern is whether the practice of granting individual fellowships effectively gets the knowledge into the high school class room," she said. "Personally, I like a model that lasts for two summers. So much is being packed into one 12-week session -- including research, curriculum development, small group and whole group meetings -- that it's hard to get an evaluation of the program's effectiveness. I think our cluster will be evaluated as a sort of benchmark for the cluster concept."
Teachers and their mentors are working on everything from gene therapy for hemophilia to sequencing deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) to analyze a number of diseases and cellular conditions. Romona Hawkins-Miller has taught biology at Kirkwood High School for four years, and is excited about showing new techniques to her classes. She is working with mentor Arnold Strauss, M.D., professor of pediatrics and molecular biology and pharmacology, on deficient thiolase genes, which lead to a condition in infants where fatty acids cannot be broken down, sometimes causing death.
"Romona is working almost exclusively in molecular biology with techniques that were invented after 1980, some of which are less than two years old," said Strauss. "This includes PCR (polymerase chain reaction), which won its inventor the Nobel Prize just two years ago. She'll be able to take the techniques she's learning back to her students to look at gene mutations in people."
Polymerase chain reaction amplifies a small portion of DNA to make many copies of a defined region; this greatly accelerates genetic studies.
"I won't be able to introduce the actual process of sequencing genes to the students because that can be very tedious as well as demanding," she said. "However, I have in mind some experiments where the students can use PCR to look for sickle cell traits in a 'whodunit' sort of scheme. This should keep it fun and challenging. It will be something that the students can readily see and do."
The high school teachers meet every Friday to share what they're learning. From their summer experience, they hope to have a booklet of lessons put together that they can share among themselves and with other area teachers. The booklet will be arranged and printed by the St. Louis Mathematics and Science Education Center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
All of the Washington University sponsors are from the School of Medicine, with the exception of Elgin. The other cluster teachers and their sponsors are: William Brush of Cleveland NJROTC, with Kathy Ponder, M.D., assistant professor of medicine; Suellen Cedergreen of Parkway Central High School, with Joshua Sanes, Ph.D., professor of anatomy and neurobiology; James Dedds of St. Louis Priory, with David Silbert, M.D., professor of biochemistry/molecular biophysics; Mike Gluba of Union R-XI High School, Union, Mo., with Raphael Kopan, M.D., assistant professor of medicine, dermatology;
Miller of Kirkwood High School, with Strauss; Anthony Jurkevich of DeSmet Jesuit High School, with William Frazier, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry/molecular biophysics; Anne Monks of Christian Brothers College High School, with Peter Rotwein, M.D., professor of medicine; Jeff Vetter of Maplewood High School, with Richard Wilson, Ph.D., research assistant professor of genetics; Larry Wegmann, Crystal City High School, Crystal City, Mo., with Rick Wetsel, Ph.D., assistant professor of pediatrics.
-- Tony Fitzpatrick
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