The Science Education Partnership Award Program

In order to understand and be able to teach effectively about modern biology, teachers must have a thorough background in the concepts that unify the field, and they must also understand and be able to communicate about research process that leads to new discoveries. When teachers want to bring an element of "real-life science" into the classroom in order to engage their students, they often find that they are limited by a lack of material or financial resources, since the materials necessary to do modern biology in the classroom can be very costly.

This project aims to address several issues that can interfere with teachers’ ability to teach about modern biomedical sciences. Through an award from the Science Education Partnerships Program at the National Institutes of Health, we:

Offer two graduate-level summer courses in cell and molecular biology, Biology Update 1 (BIOC 623a) and Recombinant DNA Techniques (BIOC 597a) which are open to middle and high school teachers with appropriate undergraduate preparation in cell and molecular biology.
Provide scholarships for teachers whose background in cell and molecular biology is weak so that they can take undergraduate-level courses that will prepare them for our graduate courses.
Offer teachers pursuing a master’s degree in the General Biology Master’s Program the opportunity to do biomedical research under the supervision of over sixty University of Arizona biologists.
Provide teachers with the time and materials to develop biology units for their classrooms or to do action research on curricula related to their research experiences, and provide them with the financial, equipment, and technical resources they need to implement biomedical science activities in their classrooms using exemplary teaching methods.
Provide teachers with the opportunity to share their ideas and experiences by giving local workshops for other teachers and presentations at state and national science education meetings.