New approach helps teachers integrate conservation biology into high school ecology classes
Friday, July 9, 2010 - 04:07
in Biology & Nature
Framing familiar environmental issues in everyday language - whether the topic is a Gulf Coast oil spill or the spread of Lyme disease - may be the key to successfully engaging high school students with conservation biology research in their ecology classes. A study, presented in the latest issue of Conservation Biology by Yael Wyner, an assistant professor at the City College of New York, and Rob DeSalle, a curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), advocates a pedagogical model where students learn about normal ecological processes (biodiversity and ecological integrity) by studying what goes wrong when human actions disturb those processes...