SCIENCE IN THE ICE

Science in the Ice is an initiative to develop immersive science activities for the secondary school curriculum. The natural fascination with extreme environments will be used to introduce cutting edge research to the classroom from multiple disciplines---glaciology, geology, and astrophysics---with polar science as a unifying theme. It will leverage the resources of the National Science Foundation-supported AMANDA (Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array) and its successor, IceCube, TEA (Teachers Experiencing Antarctica and the Arctic) and SCALE (System-wide Chance for All Learners and Educators) programs to bring together master teachers and active researchers committed to producing engaging, integrated materials that convey the content and process of these disciplines.

One of the SCALE project's goals is to make participation in immersion projects something that all students in its four districts can count on every year. Successfully achieving this goal entails finding ways to provide sets of immersion projects that fit a coherent whole from each student's perspective, and using and pioneering research-based processes for introducing material into the secondary school curriculum that teachers want and will be able to use. To meet these challenges, SCALE is establishing synergistic design teams of secondary level educators (including The Institute For Learning's Disciplinary Literacy curriculum developers, and master teachers from the SCALE districts and from the TEA), and university faculty in the learning sciences, mathematics, and various sciences who will develop and test strategies that link the math/science immersion projects to the system-wide reform efforts underway in the four school districts. The educators involved in Science in the Ice comprise one of these design teams. Building on the Astronomy in the Ice proof-of-concept project, they will develop immersion units that engage teachers and students in polar science

Science in the Ice, like its predecessor Astronomy in the Ice, is guided by the belief that the teachers are the best judges of what works in the classroom. Accordingly, our university scientists work with our teachers to present new scientific knowledge and insights, and our teachers work with the scientists to develop laboratory and curricular activities that will be effective in classrooms. Our challenges include:
creating activities that are accessible and interesting to secondary school students;
ensuring that teachers acquire sufficient training to be comfortable with the new course materials;
connecting these activities to the standards applicable to the teachers' curricula; and
developing efficient means to transfer this knowledge to a mass audience of teachers.

These challenges will be addressed using the Institute For Learning's Framework for Disciplinary Literacy in Middle and High Schools . This approach places equal emphasis on content expertise and habits of practice. To provide access to teachers and students to science as it is practiced, we have partnered with the TEA program, which pairs practicing teachers with polar science projects to provide intensive first-hand field experience. The TEA teachers are an essential link that completes the loop from the secondary school classroom to current research through mechanisms like live, interactive reports from the field broadcasted over the internet. The initial target audience for Science in the Ice is teachers of middle school Earth Science. The activities will be layered so they will be accessible for middle school students but can be revisited with increasing levels of sophistication in succeeding classes, with access to current research data where appropriate.

While polar science will be the unifying theme to introduce current research, an underlying thread of the activities and content will be to investigate the nature of science. Science is a human construction that must evolve and change if it is to remain vital. For each of the disciplines, we must continue to ask, "What do we know?" and "How do we know it?" This builds on The Institute For Learning's Design Literacy Design Principle two that stresses that students need to be able articulate the how and why of the activities in which they are engaged. We are committed to producing materials that captivate a cohort of teachers from the SCALE districts who will join our team and work with us to develop disciplinary literacy study and design tools that enable materials following the Institute For Learning framework.

For Science in the Ice to be successful, it is important to create a compelling story that ties together what on the surface appear to be the disparate fields of glaciology, geology, and astrophysics. Science in the Ice will start by discussing glaciers since ice and cold are what people most closely associate with Antarctica. We will begin with an investigation of what glaciers are and how they flow. This will require the introduction of stress and strain, which are important concepts in a variety of phenomena. We will provide concrete examples by constructing simple experiments to measure the strain on ice samples as a function of time to learn about how ice responds to applied forces. This will be connected back to glacial flow, which reshapes the earth and transports materials.

In addition to scraping material from below as the glacier flows, the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has existed for several millions years, also acts as a giant net collecting meteorites. These meteorites are buried and then transported through the glacier with the flowing ice. They emerge at the margin in the Blue Ice near the terminal moraines. These meteorites are literally messengers from space that give clues about the internal composition of the Earth as well as other planets. This leads naturally to a discussion of planetary geology, and how to distinguish meteorites from other rocks. It provides a great connection to the current research project and TEA partner ANSMET (Antarctic Search for Meteorites) that is collecting meteorites and studying their composition, texture, abundance, and so forth to better understand the make up of our solar system and beyond.

From glaciers and planetary geology via space messengers in the form of meteorites, we move to astrophysics, which is studied at the South Pole using other cosmic messengers. Cloud chambers can be constructed from readily available materials (pickle jars, dry ice, and denatured alcohol) that show that we are being bombarded continuously by cosmic rays from outer space. These require more sophisticated equipment to analyze but the approach can be tied back to the meteorites. We want to understand the composition, abundance, and direction of the cosmic rays to try to determine their origin and what they can teach us about the Universe.

Finally, we will introduce the most abstract messengers from space, neutrinos. Neutrinos at this point will be just another particle that we collect to learn more about the cosmos. But the neutrinos have intriguing properties themselves, and can potentially tell us about the most distant reaches of the universe and the most energetic events that remain mysterious despite decades of study. The AMANDA and IceCube projects, also TEA partners, are building unique telescopes that track neutrinos rather than light to explore the universe. The discovery potential of these instruments can be related through examples of previous surprises that were identified with the introduction of new technology such as optical telescopes, x-ray and gamma ray observatories, radio telescopes, etc.

We are committed to developing activities that are engaging and have the support of both teachers and administrators to ensure wide use. We look forward to working closely with Institute for Learning experts to design curricular and assessment materials in ways that build on the Disciplinary Literacy and Professional Development processes and principles. The immersive authentic science activities we develop and refine by field-testing in a small number of SCALE classrooms will provide the foundation for future units, such as life in extreme environments, global warming, etc. consistent with the polar science theme.