Nature Kids Learn in Bren Lab–and Tip Tutor Toward Teaching

By GAIL GALLESSICH

Kids In Nature (KIN), an outreach program that opens doors to the field and the laboratory, begins its third year this fall after serving more than 500 upper elementary students in its first two years. The program has also inspired at least one UCSB undergraduate to go for a master's degree in teaching.

Helping to restore native plants at UCSB's Sedgwick Natural Reserve in the Santa Ynez Valley constitutes the main focus of the program, but laboratory visits are also important to the curriculum. After starting lab visits with biological sciences, last year each school class went to a laboratory in the new Bren School for Environmental Science and Management.

This was an outgrowth of the efforts of KIN founder and organizer Jennifer Thorsch, adjunct professor of biology, associate curator of botany, and chief of the Cheadle-Esau Botanical Collection. In addition to the visit to the Bren lab, the children stopped at the Museum for Systematics and Ecology, where the Cheadle-Esau collection is based, and looked at the vertebrate collection.

With the lab's ratio of three elementary students to one undergraduate lab instructor, the youngsters learn to prepare slides and place their final product under a microscope. The undergraduate tutors help the students use instruments, including microscopes, and tools, such as razor blades and forceps, to prepare their slides. Then the tutors ask questions about what the students see.

Additionally, students are introduced to how Bren Hall has incorporated the reuse and recycling of materials–from storage cupboards to counter tops–as important ways to protect the environment.

Each class makes one other trip to the campus, this one sponsored by the Educational Opportunity Program, and on this visit they become familiar with the whole university. The children are from underrepresented groups, and for many it is an opportunity to see that going to college may be an attainable goal.

Thorsch explained that the KIN approach of learning-by-doing rather than teaching-by-telling was very effective in breaking down the language barrier that sometimes exists with this population of children.

A special aspect of the KIN program is the opportunity to bring in undergraduates to serve as part-time teachers and mentors. "It gives them the opportunity to see what it would be like to be teachers," said Thorsch. "The undergraduates did a great job. The elementary school students bonded with the university students."

Undergraduate environmental studies and Spanish double major Samantha Escobar was so influenced by Thorsch and the KIN program that she has decided to pursue a master's in education from the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UCSB, something she had not imagined possible before.

Escobar said it if there was one turning point in making her decision to become a teacher, it was probably seeing the looks on the children's faces when they took apart leaves in the lab to make slides. It also helped to have a role model like Jennifer Thorsch.

"She makes learning seem like fun, instead of a chore," said Escobar of Thorsch.

"Her vast knowledge of botany is truly remarkable, but she can still manage to explain the complexities of the function of the secondary xylem cell walls in plants in a fun environment that breaks it down so that even a fourth grader can understand."

Currently, Thorsch is looking for funding to continue the program and possibly expanding it to other UC reserves in addition to Sedgwick.