— Filed by Adrienne Smith for WSYR NewsChannel 9

Oswego, NY, July 12, 2023 - Summer means a break for teachers, but not for this one group you're going to meet. News Channel 9's Adrienne Smith tells us about these teachers spending a week on a research vessel to take a deep dive into the Great Lakes.

In his 25 years of teaching Earth science, Joe Perry never thought he'd see his career expand aboard a ship.

"Yes, it's work, but boy, then it just gives us that motivation to go back to school," says Perry.

Perry is among the select group of educators taking part in this year's shipboard science workshop hosted by New York Sea Grant. For one week. Teachers live on this vessel, working alongside scientists to research the Great Lakes this year, Lake Ontario.

"The experience of doing the work with scientists side by side so in the lab and both on the deck," says Nate Drag, NYSG's Great Lakes Literacy Specialist. So they're using the equipment, big equipment they couldn't have in their classrooms or things like that, gathering real world data and then having that come back to their classroom."

One of the scientists guiding the teachers on Lake Guardian is Greg Boyer, professor emeritus at SUNY ESF.

"Teachers these days are really knowledgeable about environmental problems,” says Boyer. “They have some really great questions. A lot of what we [researchers] do is we answer questions and so it's really fun to see what questions they come up with."

The research on the ship here is a 24/7 operation. This is one of the spaces where the teachers collaborate, developing lesson plans and different curricula to take back to their classrooms as a way to teach, but inspire their students to.

"Different organizations that I work with that I'm a part of, I can take that data, that I'm learning the experience back and then share it with not just my students and my district, but other educators," says Perry.

"I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do, and I think their kids are super fortunate to have teachers that are this dedicated and passionate to bring this experience back to the classroom," says Drag.

This group of teachers is sure to get an A+ in Oswego. Adrienne Smith, News Channel 9.

In addition to New York, the teachers are from Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. The workshop is free. It's funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

WSYR-TV is a television station in Syracuse, NY, affiliated with ABC.

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.