Diane Brownlee
The EMGI continues its efforts to live up to its mission to promote Earth systems science education:
For teachers, EMGI provides a variety of Earth science education modules. Our most popular workshop is “More Rocks In Your Head.” This one-day program was developed by EMGI instructors, and gives teachers the background and confidence to teach Earth science in their classrooms. It includes information, glossary and activities targeted to every Texas Knowledge and Skill element the teacher is required to cover. Short enrichment classes for teachers are often taught in their school after the class day, and cover a topic selected by the school science coordinator. The teachers are left with a disc of images, some hands-on materials and classroom activities to use.
The Geology Outreach Project, originally funded by the Miles Foundation, also called the “GO Project,” sends working geoscientists into classrooms at all grade levels across North Texas. The topics offered include earthquakes and faulting, volcanoes, Texas in the past and plate tectonics. However, the most popular class is “Rocks for Breakfast,” an entertaining class about how rocks and minerals are used by everyone, everyday. The class concludes with a hands-on experiment to remove the iron out of breakfast cereal.
This will be the fifth year that EMGI will offer geospatial technology training for teachers through the Community Mapping Project, CMaP. Brookhaven College through the EMGI is the only certified provider of this training in Texas, and has trained a total of 110 teachers. The original projects done by these EMGI-trained teachers and their students have won national recognition from ESRI and 4H.
A new ongoing program started this spring is Brookhaven College School Alliances, a part of Instructional Support and Outreach partnering with EMGI to bring career speakers from the Earth sciences to every fifth grade class in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District. This partnership is a terrific example of leveraging the EMGI contact base of professional people to help the college directly influence young people to consider college and career at a critical juncture.
