Suzanne Jacoby, for NOAO Educational Outreach
The fourth annual NOAO-hosted Project ASTRO- Tucson workshop took place in September with 39 participants, bringing the number of astronomers and teachers trained in the Tucson area to nearly 200. This was a bittersweet workshop for the Tucson project, as our three years of start-up funding for Project ASTRO-Tucson have expired and additional funds have not been secured to continue the project at its current level. As a result, Ginny Beal will reduce her hours from full-time to half-time as our Education Program Coordinator. Ginny's dedication, enthusiasm, and personal commitment to the goals of Project ASTRO are largely responsible for the success the project has experienced in Tucson. She will continue to support ASTRO-Tucson in her half-time position, but we are not confident of being able to run a fifth annual workshop until additional funding sources are identified.
Meanwhile, Project ASTRO is evolving in Tucson to best meet the needs of our local educational community. This includes having teachers gain more astronomy content knowledge through the program, increasing the emphasis on inquiry as a pedagogical method at the workshop, and exploring ways to have teacher partners less dependent on their astronomers. Even in astronomer-rich Tucson, we are experiencing a shortage of astronomers, compared to the number of teachers, who wish to participate in Project ASTRO.
Authors Gina Rester-Zodrow and Joni Chancer came to Tucson to participate in our September workshop and present ideas from their book "Moon Journals—Art, Writing, and Inquiry through Focused Nature Study." Our Project ASTRO coalition, particularly the Tucson Unified School District, is interested in developing interdisciplinary ways of teaching science through inquiry, and in using the student-developed journals as an assessment tool. Project ASTRO's emphasis on hands-on, inquiry-based activities provides a way to extend the concepts of Moon Journals into authentic scientific observation. We'll see over the next year where these overlapping ideas lead as our collaborations continue. More information on Project ASTRO-Tucson and our last workshop including the Moon Journals ideas can be obtained from a media advisory at http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/.