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Although participants are officially welcomed into the program at a reception in the spring, the Peabody Fellow’s year truly begins with the summer Biodiversity Institute. Often described by Fellows as “summer camp for teachers,” this is the weeklong professional development course that takes place each summer at the Peabody Museum. Fellows are exposed to the rich resources that the Museum has to offer, from the behind-the-scenes tours with collections managers to guided walks through the Museum’s marine field research station on Long Island Sound in Guilford, Connecticut.
The week’s schedule includes a variety of lectures and presentations given by Peabody Museum Curators, Collection Managers and other members of the Yale scientific community. Past instructors have included Professor Michael Donoghue, Curator of Botany, Professor Jacques Gauthier, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Eric Lazo-Wasem, Collections Manager of Invertebrate Zoology, Dr. Ray Pupedis, Collections Manager of Entomology, Tim White, Senior Collections Manager of Invertebrate Paleontology, and entomologist Larry Gall. This past summer the NIH focus of Biodiversity and Human Health necessitated a shift in the program content. Professor Curtis Patton from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Medicine spoke compellingly about the human toll from malaria, and the relationship between mosquitoes and the microbe that causes this dreaded illness. Fellows heard from two researchers on both the importance of and the proper techniques for working with the world of microbes.
A major strength of the Peabody Fellows program has been its ability to evolve according to the needs of its participants. Extensive evaluation during and after each summer Institute has led to some significant changes in the week’s structure. For example, the first year Fellows sat through many informative lectures by foremost life science professors at Yale. The program’s eagerness to share a great deal of information about biodiversity led to an overzealous schedule, including a full afternoon of lectures following a rigorous morning at the field station. At the suggestion of those Fellows, the field station biodiversity hike now comprises that day’s entire schedule, even though it ends well before the usual quitting time of 5:00 p.m. By the fourth year, the Institute had moved into modeling the kind of teaching endorsed by the Peabody Fellows program. There were few traditional lectures and an abundance of hands-on and inquiry-based activities, ranging from a natural selection role-playing game on the Peabody Museum lawn to learning how to extract DNA from kiwi fruit. And, in keeping with the new focus on Biodiversity and Human Health, Fellows were treated to samples of produce from around the world, including the infamously odorous durian fruit from Indonesia.
The Institute also offers Fellows an opportunity to explore the BioAction Lab and the numerous program resources. There are several blocks of time designated as curriculum workshops, allowing Fellows to discuss possible topics with the Curriculum Specialist and Institute staff. They are encouraged to collaborate with each other as they narrow down the endless topic of biodiversity. By week’s end, most Fellows have selected the topic they will use to create a curriculum unit. Once teams creatively compete in the ”Biodiversity Follies”, and each Fellow receives his or her Biodiversity Institute Certificate, the Institute ends and the real work begins. Teachers spend the next six months developing and refining their curriculum units before implementing them in their classrooms during the upcoming winter and spring.
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