— Filed by Don Alhart, WHAM 13 ABC

Rochester, NY, July 6, 2023 — A group of local teachers boarded a ship at the Port of Rochester Thursday morning for a seven-day cruise on the Lake Guardian research vessel.

"Every year it goes out in the spring and summer to get water quality sampling on all five Great Lakes," said Nate Drag, Great Lakes literacy specialist for New York Sea Grant. "But for one week, it goes to one Great Lake and we bring 15 teachers out to the Great Lakes region to work with the scientists to do the research and then bring that experience back to their students."

The teachers will soon be able to turn that research into lessons.

"We'll be monitoring everything from dissolved oxygen, temperature, different nutrient levels, so we'll see how that bottom of the food web really supports the entire thing," Drag said. "These tiny microorganisms, plankton, if they're not there, there's no fish. No fish, we can't catch them, the whole ecosystem is thrown off, so this really creates a foundational understanding for scientists and for the students as well."

And the teachers understand the value of this experience.

"I think it's so important because so many of our students grow up right here with this resource, or they maybe have been to Charlotte Beach, but they really don't know the importance of it or the science that is going on," said Tara Spitzer-List, a science teacher at the Virtual Academy of Rochester. "I think it will be a great way to use the data in class to show them the pictures of what's really happening and have them looking at real data and making it relevant to their lives."

"These teachers, they're in the classroom, they're working with the kids every day," Drag said. "They get to take this real experience back to their classroom and hopefully inspire the kids to develop a loving relationship with the Great Lakes."

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For more on the 2023 Shipboard Science Workshop, including insights from the educators onboard, see NYSG's pre-workshop press release, "Educators to Learn from Scientists and NY Sea Grant Aboard Ship on Lake Ontario". There's also NYSG's post-media analysis news item, "On YouTube, On Air: Teachers Learn Aboard the Lake Guardian".

Additional video and audio clips related to this workshop can be found below ... 




More Info: New York Sea Grant

New York Sea Grant (NYSG), a cooperative program of Cornell University and the State University of New York (SUNY), is one of 34 university-based programs under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant College Program.

Since 1971, NYSG has represented a statewide network of integrated research, education and extension services promoting coastal community economic vitality, environmental sustainability and citizen awareness and understanding about the State’s marine and Great Lakes resources.

Through NYSG’s efforts, the combined talents of university scientists and extension specialists help develop and transfer science-based information to many coastal user groups—businesses and industries, federal, state and local government decision-makers and agency managers, educators, the media and the interested public.

The program maintains Great Lakes offices at Cornell University, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Oswego and the Wayne County Cooperative Extension office in Newark. In the State's marine waters, NYSG has offices at Stony Brook University and with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County on Long Island, Brooklyn College and Cornell Cooperative Extension in NYC and Kingston in the Hudson Valley.

For updates on Sea Grant activities: www.nyseagrant.org has RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube links. NYSG offers a free e-list sign up via www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlines for its flagship publication, NY Coastlines/Currents, which is published quarterly.