Thursday, July 06, 2000
Science teachers get back to basics
Miami U. tutors on breakthrough
By Reid Forgrave
The Cincinnati Enquirer
OXFORD — With last week's announcement of the Human Genome Project's completion, DNA is one of the hottest topics among science educators.
And some Ohio biology teachers have been learning how to channel the popularity of the topic toward high school minds.
“You know when a teacher is pumped about a subject,” said Becky Heckman, a teacher of advanced biology at Princeton High School.
“Listen to us. I can't wait to start the school year, and very rarely will you hear a teacher say that in June.”
She is one of 29 Ohio high school teachers who spent the past two weeks at Miami University becoming “DNA literate” and learning to bring DNA technology down to the high school level.
Their molecular biology workshop — one of more than 100 programs at Miami that help with K-12 education — was funded by a three-year, $450,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant.
The Human Genome Project mapped a preliminary DNA makeup for the human genome — what scientists call the blueprint to human life. The teachers can't wait to bring this back to their students.
“The stuff they're doing in these labs is the same stuff that won Nobel Prizes 20 years ago, and now they're going to bring it into high schools,” said Gary Janssen, co-director of the workshop with J.K. Bhattacharjee, a Miami researcher and molecular biologist. “It's phenomenal.”
The workshop, lasting 13 hours a day for two weeks, put the high-school teachers back in college. That meant living in Miami residence halls, asking questions instead of being asked, and spending long hours in the lecture hall and lab. Starting from the absolute basics, by the end they had learned to isolate and manipulate DNA, the chemical “letters” that make up the recipe for human life.
On top of learning the basics of DNA and DNA cloning, teachers studied ways to bring this complicated technology down to a high school level.
The workshop spiraled into complicated procedures like electrophoresis (splicing DNA with enzymes) and ligation (putting DNA back together).
Program directors said high-school teachers need to bring this knowledge to their students for two reasons:
Students need to be knowledgeable citizens because DNA often will be in the news in the future.
• Students need to know DNA basics to be able to compete on a college level.
Mr. Bhattacharjee disagreed with some assertions that the completion of the Human Genome Project is the accomplishment of the century. Looking at the human health benefits likely to follow the discoveries, he said, “it's bigger than that.”
Assisting Mr. Bhattacharjee and Mr. Janssen were two master teachers, graduates of the workshop.
Holly Ruff, a biology teacher at Milford High School and a master teacher for six years, said the students get charged up over studying DNA.
“When you bring this equipment out and they're doing something their friends haven't been able to do, the students love it,” she said.
The NSF lets each teacher take more than $1,000 worth of DNA cloning and analyzing equipment back to their students.
Teachers also get three graduate credits at Miami.
For more information, or to apply for next year's DNA workshop, call the Miami University molecular biology office at (513) 529-5422.
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