GK12 Montana State University

The Montana State University GK12 Science and Society Fellows program is an NSF-funded program that partners graduate and undergraduate fellows at Montana State University (MSU) with teachers in rural K-12 classrooms.  Through participation in the program fellows support enhanced science education while refining their communication and teaching skills.  Participating K-12 teachers will strengthen their ability to teach science concepts by infusing locally relevant, current environmental science research about the Greater Yellowstone.  Scientists and teachers involved will learn from each other’s unique backgrounds and skills while developing lasting, mutually beneficial relationships between MSU scientists and local teachers.

The goals of the BSI GK12 program are to

1. strengthen MSU’s institutional support for training experiences in a K-12 context in order to enhance the communication and leadership skills of graduate and undergraduate scientists; and,
   
2. enhance science education in rural K-12 settings by infusing locally relevant, current environmental science research about the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem into K-12 classrooms.

The Fellow-Teacher partnerships will be enhanced by a number of focused team activities, joint professional development activities and Teacher collaboration in the Fellow’s summer field work.  GK12 Teachers and Fellows will collaborate during the school year to develop a lasting product that links the GK-2 Fellow’s research and expertise with a science issue of local or regional concern (e.g., water quality, wildlife, climate change).

The BSI GK12 Program creates a model of GK12 engagement with rural school districts in a state where 42% of the 159,998 K-12 students attend schools in communities where the population is < 2500. There are two broad impacts from the proposed project. First, by bringing to the K-12 classroom scientific research on topics that ultimately relate to the management of a large, diverse and complex ecosystem, we are working towards creating an environmentally literate citizenry who have the capacity to make science-based decisions about contentious resource management issues. Second, by establishing an MSU standard of exposing our best and brightest graduate researchers to the K-12 community, we increase the capacity for future partnerships between academic scientists and K-12 educators while increasing the communication skills of our next generation of scientific researchers.