NATURAL HISTORY TAKES A WALK ON THE SCIENTIFIC SIDE

CLEMSON - Imagine using virtual field trips, schoolyard gardens and high-tech "footlocker" science to teach middle-school students about the plants and animals that live around them and across the state, showing how all levels of life adapt to various geographic regions. This is the natural history class of the future that is being developed at Clemson University with support of a $1.8 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and partnerships across the state.

This funding is part of $80 million in grants awarded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute this week to 44 research universities. The grants, which range from $1.2 million to $2.2 million each, all address the challenges of a rapidly changing and increasingly interdisciplinary undergraduate biology education. One of the challenges includes attracting students into the field.

"We will be able to reach thousands of students and teachers across the state," said Barbara Speziale, an associate dean in Clemson's College of Agriculture, Life Sciences and Forestry and the project's principal investigator. "If you're teaching science and math skills out of a book, too often students think science and math learning ends when they leave the classroom. If they can connect what they learn to everyday life - whether it's by tracking mud snails or measuring temperatures beneath a forest canopy - they remember."

The four-year grant builds on a previous $1.6 million grant from Howard Hughes Medical Institute that was instrumental in the development of Clemson's "SC LIFE: Natural History of South Carolina" middle-school curriculum, the biological counterpart to SC MAPS, which uses topographic maps, satellite images and folk tales from across the state to teach earth sciences.

Co-investigators on the current grant include professors Robert Ballard, biological sciences; Ed Pivorun, biological sciences; John Wagner, School of the Environment; Jerry Waldvogel, biology instruction and agricultural education; Greg Yarrow, forest resources; Tim Spira, biological sciences; Joe Culin, entomology; John Morse, entomology; and Jim Zimmerman, genetics and biochemistry.

Since field trips to distant natural history sites are a luxury for most middle schools, the Clemson group is developing virtual field trips and schoolyard gardens that can be the lynchpins of science lessons ranging from investigations of natural habitat to tracking populations of butterflies and hummingbirds. Teachers, meanwhile, will be offered opportunities as diverse as authoring their own instructional CDs to taking summer courses on natural history, taught in partnership with the S.C. parks department.

By fall 2003, students will also have access to SC LIFE "science footlockers," a high-tech lending system that puts at a school's disposal everything from instructional videos and CDs to laptops, field guides, binoculars and even global positioning satellite units that can establish precise locations for field studies.

The grant will support undergraduate student research in Clemson's College of Agriculture, Forestry and Life Sciences and three of the state's historically black colleges and universities. This research experience will give students from these undergraduate-only colleges an understanding of how research is accomplished and will provide them insight into and contacts at Clemson University, where they may potentially pursue life sciences graduate studies.

The grant also will sponsor summer research internships for students from the S.C. Governor's School for Science and Mathematics and exceptional students from other South Carolina high schools. Their work is often equivalent to that accomplished by undergraduate and graduate students and frequently qualifies for publication in scientific journals, said Speziale. Projects this summer include research into gene cloning, testing natural plant extracts as antimicrobial agents in meat and using tree seedlings as a gauge of heavy-metal pollution.

Additional information on Howard Hughes Medical Institute's funding program is available at http://www.hhmi.org/.

This is the 10th round of HHMI grants to enhance undergraduate science education and the fifth competition targeting research universities. Since 1988, HHMI has awarded $556 million to 236 colleges and universities in 47 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

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