Florida Citizens for Science had a welcome presence at the Florida Association of Science Teachers conference Oct 14-16 in Gainesville. FlCfS board member Mary Bahr filed this report about our activities there.
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We were able to hand out our brochures at four presentations at FAST and made some valuable contacts with members of Mote Marine, Scripps, and the FAST legislative liason and other attendees.
I did an all-day workshop on Thursday with 30 attendees and received an interested reception to the brochure when I handed it out and made a brief explanation of our organization.
On Friday Phyllis Saarinen and I attended Joe Meert’s lecture which was well attended and we handed out brochures. Joe had included a power point slide on FLCS in his presentation. I heard a lot of compliments about this lecture. It was well received and gave science teachers a look at a real on-going reasearch process instead of the packaged science in a text we deal with so often. Well done!
I made contact with several employes of Mote Marine including an environmental educator from Mote at our Thursday workshop who is on the FAST board. His director spoke on Friday on Meiofauna and we discussed the Mote booth handing out brochures. This director who is new to Florida was leery of the politics involved in handing out brochures at FAST and wanted to know more about us first. He ended up offering a booth (cheap or free) at the FMSEA meeting in Naples April 27 – 29 . FMSEA is the marine sciences organization in Florida. The FMSEA web site is http://www.fmsea.org/
I also went to a Scripps presentation and spoke with the presenter who was interested in tapping the universiy people in our organization for a bioscience education intiative that they are working on. The main event is in April but they are looking for scientists around the state who would visit local schools. I thought this might be a possible way for us to partner with Scripps and get their political support in the standards process in turn. The BIOSCIENCE initiative website is https://bioflorida.com/expo
On Saturday Pete Dunkelberg, Curtis Wolf and I were at the event and Pete sat in on a presentation on Natural selection where the presenter had agreed to distribute brochures. I passed out brochures to the participants in my workshop. The attendence on Saturday was less than on Friday but the particpants were very interested in what we were doing and one asked for extra copies of our brochure to take back to her school.
On Saturday we also attended the FAST business meeting and talked to the FAST lesgislative liason and to a FAST board member. They were supportive of our efforts and the liason told me that what we need to do to get heard on standards is to contact the state board of education and introduce ourselves and ask for a position on the planning committee and for other ways to get our recommendations heard. This is the board that will oversee writing the standards and also will have the final say on them. So this is probably the group we need to figure out how to lobby. Their contacts are all on the DOE website at http://www.fldoe.org/board/
They also oversee Yecke and her staff who still are in charge of this process.
The FAST board folks were alarmed when Pete contacted them and asked to attend their board meeting because they thought we were creationists! They were immediately willing to give advice on the issue of standards. They also said it would be a very long process that would probably not be ocmpleted until 2010. There seemed generally to be fear of the political power of the creationist/ID crowd at FAST but I found no real sympathizers with dismantling science even among the obviously politically conservative members.
Organizers told me that the conference had about 600 registrations and we handed out an estimated 100 – 150 brochures. We were only authorized to pass them out in a presentation where the presenter agreed to it.
This concludes my report form FAST.
Mary Bahr
Related
About Brandon Haught
Communications Director for Florida Citizens for Science.
Report on FAST conference
Florida Citizens for Science had a welcome presence at the Florida Association of Science Teachers conference Oct 14-16 in Gainesville. FlCfS board member Mary Bahr filed this report about our activities there.
———————
We were able to hand out our brochures at four presentations at FAST and made some valuable contacts with members of Mote Marine, Scripps, and the FAST legislative liason and other attendees.
I did an all-day workshop on Thursday with 30 attendees and received an interested reception to the brochure when I handed it out and made a brief explanation of our organization.
On Friday Phyllis Saarinen and I attended Joe Meert’s lecture which was well attended and we handed out brochures. Joe had included a power point slide on FLCS in his presentation. I heard a lot of compliments about this lecture. It was well received and gave science teachers a look at a real on-going reasearch process instead of the packaged science in a text we deal with so often. Well done!
I made contact with several employes of Mote Marine including an environmental educator from Mote at our Thursday workshop who is on the FAST board. His director spoke on Friday on Meiofauna and we discussed the Mote booth handing out brochures. This director who is new to Florida was leery of the politics involved in handing out brochures at FAST and wanted to know more about us first. He ended up offering a booth (cheap or free) at the FMSEA meeting in Naples April 27 – 29 . FMSEA is the marine sciences organization in Florida. The FMSEA web site is http://www.fmsea.org/
I also went to a Scripps presentation and spoke with the presenter who was interested in tapping the universiy people in our organization for a bioscience education intiative that they are working on. The main event is in April but they are looking for scientists around the state who would visit local schools. I thought this might be a possible way for us to partner with Scripps and get their political support in the standards process in turn. The BIOSCIENCE initiative website is https://bioflorida.com/expo
On Saturday Pete Dunkelberg, Curtis Wolf and I were at the event and Pete sat in on a presentation on Natural selection where the presenter had agreed to distribute brochures. I passed out brochures to the participants in my workshop. The attendence on Saturday was less than on Friday but the particpants were very interested in what we were doing and one asked for extra copies of our brochure to take back to her school.
On Saturday we also attended the FAST business meeting and talked to the FAST lesgislative liason and to a FAST board member. They were supportive of our efforts and the liason told me that what we need to do to get heard on standards is to contact the state board of education and introduce ourselves and ask for a position on the planning committee and for other ways to get our recommendations heard. This is the board that will oversee writing the standards and also will have the final say on them. So this is probably the group we need to figure out how to lobby. Their contacts are all on the DOE website at http://www.fldoe.org/board/
They also oversee Yecke and her staff who still are in charge of this process.
The FAST board folks were alarmed when Pete contacted them and asked to attend their board meeting because they thought we were creationists! They were immediately willing to give advice on the issue of standards. They also said it would be a very long process that would probably not be ocmpleted until 2010. There seemed generally to be fear of the political power of the creationist/ID crowd at FAST but I found no real sympathizers with dismantling science even among the obviously politically conservative members.
Organizers told me that the conference had about 600 registrations and we handed out an estimated 100 – 150 brochures. We were only authorized to pass them out in a presentation where the presenter agreed to it.
This concludes my report form FAST.
Mary Bahr
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Related
About Brandon Haught
Communications Director for Florida Citizens for Science.