Each summer, the Sciencenter welcomes a cohort of youth employees, who spend sixteen to twenty hours a week delivering hands-on activities and facilitating animal encounters on the museum floor. The program has focused primarily on job skills and work experience rather than content, but our Education team saw the potential to more deeply engage these high school students in developing science and leadership identities through meaningful project-based learning. The perfect opportunity to do so came through a LENE-funded Connected Learning Grant led by Nadia Harvieux of the Finger Lakes Institute at Hobart and William Smith (FLI). The project envisioned a two-pronged approach to engage Ithaca area teachers, non-formal educators, and high school youth in a community science initiative to monitor local water quality and stream health and understand its connections to climate.
Educator Professional Development
In mid-May, Nadia led a training introducing eight local educators to FLI’s Finger Lakes Stream Monitoring Program protocols and highlighting additional GLOBE Hydrosphere resources from NASA. The grant also covered the cost of all supplies needed for stream monitoring, which are housed at the Sciencenter and available to all educator participants for use with their students.
Direct Youth Engagement
After participating in the training, Sciencenter educators were able to weave stream monitoring into our summer programming at the museum. Early in the summer, Nadia joined us to orient the teens to biomonitoring, using an EnviroScape Watershed/Nonpoint Source model to discuss the many impacts of human activities on our stream ecosystems. Every Wednesday afternoon for seven weeks, the four youth employees headed out to the stream to collect and identify samples of macroinvertebrates and measure temperature, dissolved oxygen, and alkalinity using water chemistry kits. Each week, they were joined by a new cohort of up to three middle school students participating in our concurrent Counselor-in-Training program. As they gained comfort with the protocols, high school youth employees became near-peer mentors, showing younger students the ropes. In turn, the CITs helped to lead summer campers in a stream exploration activity later in the week.
In addition to meeting Nadia and implementing the Finger Lakes Institute’s stream monitoring protocols, some youth participants had the opportunity to attend a public presentation about the Community Science Institute’s process for collecting and interpreting stream health data. This presentation provided deeper context and new perspectives on what monitoring macroinvertebrate populations can tell us about stream health, and presented an alternate protocol for interpreting the data.
Over the course of the summer, 18 youth participants spent 64.5 hours monitoring stream health, sampling the creek seven times. This fall, they will return to six different schools. At least two of the high schoolers have classes with teachers who participated in the educator training, so they will hopefully have the opportunity to continue working with this subject matter as part of their continued learning.
This project enriched our summer offerings for middle and high school youth by providing an opportunity for them to do their own hands-on scientific explorations and act as near-peer mentors for younger learners. They got a taste of what field science can entail, and practiced following protocols, understanding and identifying variables, and working with others.
