Archaeology graduate student Laurie Giandomenico teaches a "minicourse" on ancient culture and archaeology in Betsy Edwards' sixth-grade social studies class at Newfield Middle School on May 29, as part of the Public Service Center's Graduate Student Outreach Program. Here she helps students Eric Singleton, left, and Matt Grimes make rubbings from valuable copies of medieval gravestones. Charles Harrington/University Photography
This spring, sixth-graders in social studies classes at Newfield Middle School have been analyzing Mayan pottery shards from Central America, and Ithaca High School biology students have been conducting phytochemistry experiments with tent caterpillars to gain a better understanding of the potential medicinal uses of plants and how plants can control pests.
Leading these activities, and lending the resources needed to conduct them, are Cornell graduate students participating in the Graduate Student Outreach Project, an innovative program based at Cornell's Public Service Center. The program was established in 1993 by Cindy Kramer, the center's assistant director for school programs, and Jeff Kidder, a former high school biology teacher now pursuing a Ph.D. in zoology. They distributed a survey to gauge graduate students' interest in the proposed project, and the response was swift and strong. Five years later Kidder said, "I'm still struck by the passion and the zeal of the graduate students regarding this program. They are so anxious to share what they know, and they love the challenge of sharing it with students at a level very different than their own."
Each spring, graduate students teach approximately 20 "minicourses" in Tompkins County elementary and secondary schools. Typically offered one class period a week for eight weeks, the minicourses have included "Geologic Narrative" (South Seneca Elementary School), "The Magic of Magnetism" (Northeast Elementary), "Stuff and Nonsense: Silliness in Shakespeare's Plays" (Newfield Middle School) and "Slavery in the African American Literary Imagination" (Dryden High School).
The goals of the outreach project include sharing graduate students' knowledge with area youngsters and making that knowledge accessible; providing role models; and exposing teachers to new ideas and activities that they can incorporate into their own curricula. The project is meant to be collaborative, with graduate students and teachers working together to implement the minicourses. Kramer added that the minicourses can enhance graduate students' teaching skills and foster their commitment to future school-college interactions and that the outreach program can serve as a model for other institutions.
John P. Berry, who is conducting his doctoral research on the chemical ecology of mountain gorillas in Uganda, taught a minicourse this spring titled "Monkeys, Apes and Other Notable Chemists of the Plant Kingdom" to Advanced Placement (AP) biology students at Ithaca High School. His students conducted experiments on the plant diets of tent caterpillars and other insects and learned how to screen various plants for potential drugs.
"I was especially eager, for several reasons, to have the opportunity to present the course to an AP biology course," he said. "First, having been a teaching assistant for Cornell's introductory biology lab course, largely focused on first-year college students, I thought this would give me a chance to experience the future enrollment of this course.
"Like many graduate students, I would love the opportunity to continue teaching as a professor someday," he added. "The minicourse allowed me to develop my own ideas about teaching and, specifically, to construct 'blueprints' for future teaching in my field. It provided a chance to experiment with approaches and directions that I envision for the future of education in biology."
Ridenour said the minicourse was "a wonderful experience in enrichment, because [Berry] was able to share with students lab techniques that we don't usually do in the classroom for lack of resources. This is all very up-to-date research, and I think it is extremely important for students to see that this research has real applications."
Laurie Giandomenico, a former professional engineer now pursuing a master's in archaeology, taught a minicourse on ancient culture and archaeology to sixth-graders at Newfield Middle School. She brought many valuable items to class, including Mayan pottery shards and other artifacts that she had uncovered from sites in Central America with Cornell anthropology Professor John Henderson.
"I took pictures of our dig and put them on a poster board," she said. "I also gave each student a pot shard and asked them to try to draw the pot it came from; that's what we have to do as archaeologists with the cultural materials that we dig up."
She said her experiences in both the natural and social sciences inspired her choices for the minicourse.
"This whole confluence of science and humanities really had a lot to do with why I wanted to go into the public school system," she said. "I wanted to show students that you can do both; you don't have to pick one or the other."
Giandomenico also wanted to demonstrate to girls in a rural community that women can and do excel in science.
"I wanted to show them that gender doesn't have to play into deciding what you want to do," she said. "The girls' eyes kind of widened when they saw a woman doing these kinds of things."
For Newfield social studies teacher Betsy Edwards, the best aspect of the minicourse was in being able to "sit back in the class while she was speaking and watch my students learning from a different angle."
She added, "I'm not an archaeologist; I haven't had the experiences [in the field] that Laurie has. She just made things so relevant for the kids."
For information on participating next spring in the Graduate Student Outreach Project, contact Cindy Kramer at 255-0255.