This year´s course is: Taking Educators Out of the Classroom and into Nature

Explore topics focused on environmental sustainability and gain new skills to be used in the classroom. This exciting workshop is only open to Iowa Educators. Over the course of the workshop, educators will engage in a variety of outdoor, hands-on activities including water quality testing, turtle sampling, and mussel collection. There will also be a diverse number of tours including a pontoon cruise in the backwaters of the Mississippi River and a tour of the local weather station. At the conclusion of the workshop, educators will team up with biologists and participate in a BioBlitz.

YES! (Youth and Environmental Sustainability) is a joint project with Eastern Iowa Community Colleges (EICC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to facilitate the incorporation of critical thinking, problem solving and decision making skills to understand the environmental topics of climate change, air pollution and water pollution.

Participating middle and high school teachers will receive a$250 stipend for their evaluation of the workshop and for pilot-testing the workshop activities in their classrooms. Following each workshop, educators will take the instructional materials back to their school and incorporate the new material into their science curriculum. ATEEC staff will use the best practices from the classrooms and results from the pilot-test evaluations to develop an Educator Guide for middle school and high school science teachers.

Attendees may apply for one of eighteen $1000 sub-grants that will be disseminated to participating schools to purchase educational materials and activities to use in their classrooms and for field trips to the ATEEC Learning Laboratory and Nahant Marsh.

If you took the course in 2017, you can take this course for credit, but cannot receive the stipend/grant again.

Course Syllabus

Instructor: Heather Ballou - ATEEC Interactive Learning Lab/EICC
Dates: 6/18/18, 6/20/18, 6/21/18, 9:00-4:00; 6/19/18 10:00-5:00
6/22/18 or 6/23/18: 4 hours participation at the BioBlitz
+15 hours of outside class work
Registration closes 6/5/18.
Location for first day: Nahant Marsh Education Center, 4220 Wapello Ave., Davenport
Transportation is needed for all days for visitis to the compost facility, waste water treatment center, Exelon Generations Learning Center, Roock Creek Marina, Linwood Mines, Natioanl Weather Service, and ATEEC.

Costs:
1 Drake Credit $115
1 Relicensure Credit $35
$0 for audit/no credit option