Genetic engineering class turns teaching on its head
The Chariho Times. WILL RICHMOND 06/10/2004

WEST KINGSTON - With the help of some local high school students University of Rhode Island visiting professor Dr. Albert Kausch is turning learning upside down.

Since January, 19 students from Chariho, South Kingstown, and Exeter/West Greenwich, High Schools have been making weekly visits to the Hybrigene Inc. agriscience labs off of Liberty Road to learn about modern techniques in genetic engineering. Ponagansett High School students are also involved in the program but rather than traveling to the West Kingston laboratory they have set up a satellite lab at the high school.

The students - working with Kausch and Ph.D. candidates from URI - are learning how to create dwarf turf and rice from their most basic cells. The work is not your typical high school science project, but Kausch said that bringing high school students into the complex world of genetic engineering is helping to raise younger students' awareness for the field.

"We're teaching college courses that are made high school ready," Kausch said last Wednesday during a visit to the Hybrigene labs. "It's been a pretty exciting course."

While teaching high school students Ph.D. level curriculum may seem a daunting task for both the students and the educators, Kausch said that the idea is to get these students to learn some of the specifics of genetic engineering. Traditionally, he said, teaching methods follow the form of an upside-down triangle. Under that model students learn basic, broad terms first and move on to more specialized projects towards the end.

Kausch's idea is to flip that idea around for high school students and teach them a specific field within genetic engineering. Therefore grabbing their interest with a highly intensive project rather then boring them with jargon written across a blackboard.
"This is project based education," Kausch said. "It's not content based, so the students get hands on experience."

For the students involved in the program the concept appears to be working.

"I didn't know much about biotechnology coming into this but I've learned a lot and now it's something I might get into," said Leah Adams a junior at Chariho High School. Adams said that one of the reasons she now has an interest in the biotech field is because the program has made the field less daunting.
"At first I was definitely intimidated," Adams said. "I didn't know about the language and all of the scientific jargon but as I got into it I've grown accustom to it. Now when I tell my friends about it they say 'what are you talking about.'"

Rashid Ahmed, a sophomore at South Kingstown High School, added that being able to enter the biotech field at such a young age has been exciting.
"When you consider our age this is something that you don't get to learn about that much," Ahmed said. "Here we're able to do a lot of hands on stuff. This is a very good way to educate people."

John Zhang, also a sophomore at South Kingstown High School, agreed that being able to work on projects normally reserved for Ph.D. students is an opportunity not usually reserved for high school students.

"This is a rare opportunity," Zhang said. "This is a one of a kind course in the U.S. It's a great opportunity for us to get a feel for the field."

Chariho High School junior Melissa Squillante added that the program gives students an opportunity that high schools just cannot compete with.
"We've learned about how to use all of these tools that we may not have been able to do in a high school setting," Squillante said.

That ability to teach the importance of issues such as genetically engineering something such as dwarf rice - which Kausch said could be used to increase a harvest yield - is an issue that Kausch said stu-dents should be learning at a young age.

"When a kid is in elementary school you can ask him to name all of the planets and they'll list them off," Kausch said. "But life is here. These students don't know about DNA. I think this should be a prerequisite to all of that."

While the students participating in the program now may not have the background of information that Kausch would one day hope students in the future could have, these students recognize now what they were missing.

"This is an interesting program," said Chariho High School junior Jarrod Pierce. "The more I got into it the more I really got into it and the more I continued to learn."

The program has also opened the door to new futures for the students.

"This course has been very informative," said Squillante. "Now I think of it as a new career path."
In addition to the educational aspects of the program Kausch and Ph.D. candidate Chip Longo said that the students also learn the importance of focus in the field.

In order to accomplish their projects the students have to sit under a hood - the hood is used to ensure that projects are not contaminated by particles in the air - for up to two hours at a time.

"That takes a tremendous amount of focus," Longo said.

With the success that the high school outreach program has found Kausch hopes to expand the program in the future. Eventually he hopes that schools would be able to teleconference with university professors to expand the curriculum that they can offer.

Kausch is also presenting the program to the Southern Agbiotech Consortium for Underserved Communities (SACUC) - a group of seven southern states - in hopes of creating a teaching model that will be picked up nationwide.

"This is a model not just for Rhode Island but for the nation," said Pierce. "It's a rewarding feeling to know that we're doing is going to change the world. We're pioneers for a whole generation of teaching."