A $14-million National Science Foundation grant that UC Irvine
received in October will benefit teachers and students in Westside
schools. Last month, City Editor James Meier visited the school to
talk to Sue Bryant, dean of the School of Biological Sciences, about
the program the grant will pay for, as well as her work studying
salamanders in hopes of helping humans regenerate limbs and other
tissues.
Tell me a little about the Faculty Outreach Collaborations Uniting
Scientists, Students and Schools program that the $14-million
National Science Foundation grant will start at UCI.
The FOCUS grant is a joint effort of the science deans and the
Center for Educational Partnership, which is the outreach of the
campus. What its goal is, is to create more teachers better for
science. The whole of the FOCUS program is to improve math and
science education at targeted schools, lower-performing schools. The
three school districts that the money is for are Compton, Santa Ana
and then the Westside schools of Newport-Mesa.
We've been interested in the Newport-Mesa district partly as
parents -- that's how we got interested in the first place -- but we
realized when we did get interested that Newport-Mesa didn't have
science fairs for their kids. That's how we first started it. We
started a science fair in Costa Mesa, which quickly expanded to
Estancia. It's grown phenomenally. Last year, more than 1,000
students were involved.
The reason I like science fair is it's hands-on science
experiences. I think it's like trying to teach painting without
giving anybody a paint brush. A lot of the experiences that students
have in classrooms are dry lab, with descriptions and books. They
don't actually get to do much. Sometimes you have exceptional
teachers that really can do that. But I think modern science is
intimidating for a lot of teachers, especially if they've been out
for a long time.
In this school, our other area of interest is in teaching
professional development. That's a program we started last year. What
it does is teachers work in the lab here so they get lab experience
and they get to manipulate the machinery and use it. It makes it
easier for them to go back to their classroom and do things within
the classroom. The teachers are actually pretty interested in this
program for biology because it gives them this experience. So we
figure the kids will benefit from that, as well.
That's just the biology part of it. There's a lot more to it.
