The ABE Program Office launched a new opportunity for Master Teacher Fellows this year to help them continue their work once their Fellowship year is over. Master Teacher Fellows are now eligible to apply for a Mini-Grant, which funds up to $2,000 for their continued work. We just awarded Mini-Grants to our first recipients, who are as follows:
Aidan Johnson and JoAnne Donaldson, ABE Australia, were awarded for jointly creating the Working like Rosalind Franklin Project, which provides a classroom experience that examines developments in technology that led to advances in scientific discoveries.
Declan Cathcart, ABE Ireland, will create and facilitate a teacher professional development workshop with an associated classroom experience. The first workshop will guide teachers through a practical microbiology inquiry module on the lactic acid bacteria. The second workshop presents an inquiry-based module on pathogenic E. coli that aims to introduce PCR to students in a way that is hands-on and engaging.
Angela Del Toro, ABE Puerto Rico, was awarded a mini-grant to create a student classroom experience called Surface to volume learning experiences through amphibians, in which students will practice the skills of observation and mathematical reasoning.
David Upegui, ABE Rhode Island, was awarded a mini-grant to create The Barcoding Life’s Matrix Project, which engages students in the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) project. This “citizen-science” project affords students opportunities to apply their biotech skills to work on real/applicable scientific issues.
Aynur Elif Bulut, ABE Türkiye, will be conducting a classroom study, Big Thinking for Big Data: Computational Thinking, which will examine the steps of students' computational thinking skills in the context of the ecosystem ecology unit.
Laurie Jackson-Grusby, ABE Massachusetts, was awarded for her development of Experimental Analysis of Environmental Antibiotic Resistance, a pair of laboratories that will engage students in critical thinking about antimicrobial resistance, uses and misuses of antibiotics, and the natural product origins of most antibiotics.
Salvatore Stira, ABE Italy, will develop a unit called Studying Thalassemia: An Example of Connection Between Molecular Biology Research and Medicine, in which students will study the genetic basis of thalassemia, a form of hereditary anemia quite widespread in his region.
Congratulations to all of our Mini-Grant awardees. We can’t wait to see your final products and will be sharing them on our website soon after.