Hayley Ruhnka starts summer school Monday. A science summer school, for teachers, at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Ruhnka, a 10th-grade science teacher at Hazen High School, will join about 30 science teachers from Washington, plus two from Singapore and one from Australia, in the two-week class.
The program is called the Hutchinson Center’s Science Education Partnership (SEP). The partnership’s director Nancy Hutchison, Ph.D., says the program is intended to “help jump-start students’ knowledge of bioscience and research and perhaps kindle their interest in jobs or careers in science.”
The teachers will spend half of their two weeks learning laboratory basics and honing their teaching techniques, and half working one-on-one with a scientist-mentor in a research laboratory. Ruhnka’s mentor is a cell molecular biologist in the University of Washington Health Sciences department.
Other mentors work at places like the corporate biotechnology firm ZymoGenetics, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute, the University of Washington Genome Sciences Department and the joint UW/Hutchinson Center Molecular and Cellular Biology doctoral-research program.
After finishing the program, participating teachers receive a $500 stipend and graduate-level credit through the University of Washington. They also have access to a resource library from which they can borrow textbooks and DVDs. And they get first dibs on Fred Hutchinson surplus lab supplies. And, perhaps most importantly, the graduating teachers
get two weeks to use SEP science kits in their classrooms. Each kit contains tools costing up to $10,000, and has all the equipment and lesson plans necessary for experiments in areas including DNA gel electrophoresis, bacterial transformation and fruit-fly genetics.
Ruhnka is eager to get her hands on these kits.
“I want to expose kids to biotech, and let them know there are careers out there,” she says. “A lot of this stuff the kids have never seen before. But they’ve heard of it, like ‘CSI.’”
Ruhnka says many teachers turn their classrooms into a veritable “CSI” show, with created crime scenes and stories. A past scenario has students figure out whether the DNA from an elephant tusk came from a poacher.
Ruhnka, who has taught at Hazen three years, will become the third of four Hazen 10th-grade science teachers to go through the SEP program. She applied in spring and was accepted soon after.
The Science Education Partnership began in 1991. Since then, 368 teachers have participated, bringing benefits of the program to 150,000 students.
