Education & Outreach
All Aboard the School of Rock
The JOIDES Resolution, a 143-meter (469-foot) drill ship originally designed for oil exploration and converted for scientific exploration of the ocean floor in 1985, now has another new gig: It doubles as a floating classroom.
Teachers work around a core sampling table in a laboratory on board the JOIDES Resolution to describe and sample cores recovered from the ocean floor — part of the School of Rock expedition. Photograph is courtesy of IODP-USIO.
In November 2005, the research vessel was in transit from Victoria, British Columbia, to Acapulco, Mexico. But for the first time in the vessel’s 28-year history, she also brought along 13 nonscientist passengers — 10 middle- and high-school teachers, two museum educators and one textbook publishing consultant — who took advantage of the ship’s 16-day break between scientific expeditions to take a crash course in all things ocean drilling.
The program, dubbed the School of Rock, aims to show the teachers everything from how the ship works to how scientists sample the ocean floor. On their journey, the teachers were guided by a pair of scientists who have sailed on many expeditions and are currently conducting active research on drilled ocean sediment cores.
“They covered essentially everything [scientists] do out on the ship,” says Matt Niemitz, education associate with the Joint Oceanographic Initiative (JOI) Learning Education program, which works with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) to organize the course. The scientific topics of the first expedition, Niemitz says, ran the gamut of oceanography, including plate tectonics, paleomagnetism, seismic surveying, geochemistry and past climate change.
In their own classrooms, the teachers cover many of these subjects, but found themselves telling students, “‘we know this because experts tell us,’ rather than, ‘we have this evidence,’” Niemitz says. After their experience at sea, however, they reported that they were now able to not just state the conclusions, but also explain how scientists came up with those conclusions, he says. “They said they learned how we know what we know about Earth.”
The teachers did have homework, of a sort: While at sea, they collaborated with each other to compile what they were learning into 15 ocean-science-related classroom activities for high school and middle school curricula, which, once finalized, will be available on the School of Rock’s official Web site (www.joilearning.org/schoolofrock) this fall. For her inquiry-based curriculum, earth science teacher Julie Marsteller, from Hoover Middle School in Rockville, Md., chose to focus on the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) geologic boundary 65 million years ago, when nearly 70 percent of all species on Earth, including the non-avian dinosaurs, became extinct (see Geotimes, February 2005). Marsteller recently spoke with Geotimes reporter Carolyn Gramling about studying at sea, choosing the right drill bit and making very thin slides.
CG: What appealed to you about the School of Rock program?
CG: Walk me through a typical day at sea.
CG: How did you design the curriculum based on your experience?
CG: What was the WebQuest?
CG: What was the most memorable moment of your trip?
With the success of the School of Rock’s pilot expedition, JOI Learning and IODP now plan to organize the next session some time after current renovations to the JOIDES Resolution are completed, and the vessel returns to drilling in 2007.