NC Teachers See the Sea in Whole New Light

Teacher Mark Case (left)  examines sea-life samples with Biotech Center Education & Training Program Director Bill Schy and Emily Schultz, daughter of Marine Lab scientist Tom Schultz. Emily assisted at the workshop.

See more photos from the workshop

If you’d seen Mark Case rumbling across the North Carolina Piedmont on his Harley Sportster motorcycle one recent July day, you probably wouldn’t have guessed he was a Southern Guilford High School science teacher on his way to a professional education workshop.

But you also could not have guessed that Case’s participation in the four-day workshop on Beaufort’s Pivers Island will let students of this pony-tailed educator from a landlocked institution enjoy fun new explorations in marine biotechnology next academic year.

“My kids asked for it,” explained Case, bouncing with enthusiasm as he scooped through a sample of the Beaufort area’s marine biodiversity hauled aboard the Susan Hudson, a 50-foot Duke research vessel. “And I think it’s important too. I mean, the earth is 70 percent covered with water. We need to understand more about what’s in there,” he said, pointing over the rumbling aluminum vessel’s railing to the rolling water below.

This tiny brittle star, a close relative of the starfish, is among dozens of creatures netted by the Duke University Marine Lab crew for exploration by teachers attending this Biotech Center summer workshop session.

Case was one of 15 educators from around the state enrolled in the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s Marine Biotechnology workshop at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort. Boats were part of their four-day workshop, but most of the time was spent in classrooms and labs at the marine research campus, learning how to use the tools of biotechnology to energize and expand their science classrooms.

This marks the 25th consecutive summer for the Center's popular "working retreats," which give teachers hands-on activities that they can take back to their classrooms and labs to engage students and improve learning in biotech.

More than 1,700 educators have participated in the program since its inception in 1987. Biotechnology was added to the state's Standard Course of Study for high school biology classes in 2003, as North Carolina climbed into the nation's top-three states for jobs in the life sciences. Some 59,000 people work at 540 life science companies statewide, earning an average of $75,000 a year - nearly twice the state's overall private-sector average.

This year, the Biotech Center is offering eight summer workshops, including three targeting middle-school teachers. Besides this one on marine biotech, the selection includes one on stem cells and introductory biotech workshops in three North Carolina cities.

The Center's Bill Schy, Ph.D., Education & Training Program Director, arranges for instructors and venues. Center funding subsidizes the participants’ room and board, oversees curriculum development and gives teachers free lab supplies and equipment loans upon successful completion of the workshop.

Madison, N.C., High School biology and forensic science teacher Ginny Paul (right) exchanges fresh-caught sea squirts, a sea horse and lots of other critters with Bill Schy (left) and Emily Schultz.

All the educators at the Marine Biotech workshop had taken at least one of the Biotechnology Center’s workshops previously. Some teach at community colleges, others are in high schools. They came from as far west as Brevard and Madison and as far east as Havelock.

“This is the fun part, diving into the data,” said Cindy Seymour, a general biology and environmental biology instructor at Craven Community College. “This gives me extra practice at doing some of these things before taking them into my classroom. As an undergraduate, I ran only one gel my entire time,” she said, referring to a commonly used research tool that uses an electrical field for separating biological particles such as DNA and RNA in a bath of gelatin.

Case and two others from the group used the opportunity to practice some seafood sleuthing, applying forensics techniques to locally collected fish to nail down the swimmers’ identities. Havelock High School marine biology teacher Rob Thomas and West Mecklenburg High School biology teacher Keith Camburn joined Case in collecting bits of their dinners from a local seafood restaurant and testing them to see if they coincided with their menu descriptions.

Their experiments led them to numerous discoveries, discussed with classmates and instructors Tom Schultz, Ph.D., director of the Marine Conservation Molecular Facility at the marine lab, and Noreen Naiman, Ph.D., a Master Teacher from the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Durham.

True to all great scientific endeavors, the teacher/students found challenges and opportunities. They discovered limitations in some of the databases used for these kinds of projects. They discovered the importance of careful forensic procedures after contaminating specimens with an unsterilized pocket knife. But they also found evidence suggesting what they were served as wahoo at the seafood restaurant just might have been imported Nile tilapia.

And you can bet THAT kind of stuff will be getting some North Carolina biology students excited over some really fun research projects in coming years.