For Tammara Garrett, a high school senior in Fentress County, Tennessee, “doing a lot of electro-magnetic stuff and viewing the ultraviolet spectrum” became a welcome part of her day in this rural community where studying physics had previously been about as rare as spotting an ivory billed woodpecker.
Thanks to an innovative application of distance learning developed at the University of Tennessee, 30 college-bound science students in the county, along with their classroom teachers, were able to seize upon a jewel of a learning experience at a time when they really, really wanted it.
“For a serious student, this is great,” Tammara says, “I like the physical sciences and I saw this as an opportunity. I especially liked the hands-on work.”
Much of the course, taught as a block segment in the fall of 2008, did engage teachers and students in hands-on exercises illustrating the immutable laws of physics. But the basic teaching structure flowed out of interactive videoconferencing between the Nielsen Physics Building on the UT campus and a classroom in Fentress County where students from Clarkrange High School and the Alvin C. York Institute gathered up and took part in lectures and discussions.
The first inkling of an idea around this creative venture into distance learning emerged as Dr. Lynn Champion, director of Academic Outreach and Communications for the College of Arts and Sciences, considered the significant shortage of qualified physics teachers in the state.
“We had very capable and knowledgeable physics teachers here at UT Knoxville and interested Tennesse high school students without teachers,” she says. “The option that came to mind was distance education.”
According to Dr. Jon Levin of UT’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, a professor heavily involved in the project as both planner and instructor, there are fewer than 200 out of 300 public high schools in Tennessee that offered physics last year.
“Many rural schools in the state don’t have accredited teachers,” he says, “so we identified two we could target with distance education. The primary reason we’re doing this is to get teachers certified.”
Typically, teachers work toward accreditation by participating in a two-week class in the summer.
“The tact we’re taking in Fentress County,” Levin says, “has to do with teachers learning over a semester right along with their students. It fosters a deeper understanding than blitzkrieg types of courses. Plus there’s great leverage involved, since one certified teacher can teach physics to thousands of students over the course of his or her career.”
The program addresses, for both physics-teachers-in-training and students, a national and state priority to increase college graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM disciplines.
“Physics is at the root, the most fundamental of the sciences,” Levin says and, as Tammara Garrett, whose long-range goal is to teach high school biology, recalls, “I took a lot of notes.”
Kelly Ramey, a certified chemistry and biology teacher at Alvin C. York and Tammara’s instructor, remembers, “I got super interested when UT called. We had 40 kids who wanted to take the course at York and enrolled 24. There were also six from Clarkrange, which is a much smaller school. I went to Clarkrange myself.”
“Science is coming back to the forefront,” she says, “and I’m learning with the kids. My ultimate goal is to be certified in physics so I wanted to get involved.”
Linda Jordon, a science consultant for the Tennessee State Department of Education, recommended Fentress County Schools for the pilot program mainly because of the school’s enthusiasm for the project. The College of Arts and Sciences at UT provided significant funding from private gift endowment earnings that support K-12 outreach projects. Other extrarodinarily important team members in the venture have been Physics Department Head Soren Sorensen, department teaching assistant Erica Johnson, and the Office of Information Technology at the university.
“Physics by distance” will most likely stream into a classroom from an over-sized television screen at York Institute in the fall of 2009. Students and instructors will again hold atmospheric conversations that touch on entropy, friction, impedence, repulsion, apogee, causality and centripedal force. In such a rural part of Tennessee, economically depressed, where close to 60% of all students qualify for free lunches, it seems particularly rewarding that the intellectual gifts of learning physics are not only accessible but also capable of kinetically influencing students toward note-worthy achievement in college, career and life in general.
“It’s not an easy subject,” says Dr. Levin. “It’s a grind to learn and you learn best by doing. But with these kids, we’ve been very pleased, and we so appreciate the connection.”
As Tammara Garrett succinctly puts it, “I got to learn a lot.”
Footnote: Kelly Ramey and her team of science students, including Tammara Garrett, recently won the state of Tennessee’s Envirothon competition, sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture, which teaches students to view their environment as a dynamic, integrated system and encourages comprehensive systems management as a team.
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