The little explorers sit, transfixed, in a nuclear-research lab where ordinary field trips do not tread. Harold Myron, an Argonne National Laboratory physicist, has posed the most crucial of questions: “Did your true love give you gold? Or mere brass?” Twenty-six children record data as an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer - a machine so sophisticated that some physics grad students never encounter it - analyzes the necklace in question. Connie Taylor has spent two months preparing her inner-city Chicago pupils for this moment. Using new classroom materials as unorthodox as they are exciting, Taylor’s seventh graders have readied themselves not just to identify the elemental components of jewelry but to work with something quite rare back in Holy Angels Parish: a scientist. The bond is instant. “Look at these faces,” Taylor murmurs. “There’s been a spark.”
Farewell to soporific lectures on Madame Curie. Farewell, too, to textbooks and memorization as the unchallenged pillars of science education. Next Sunday night, PBS launches a brisk, 13-part series, “The New Explorers.” The episodes let viewers taste the thrill of the knowledge chase with 13 different scientists: this is “Nova” with an adrenaline rush. And there is even life after television. The 13 shows will be recycled in schools nationwide as one part of a holistic, three-pronged approach that also includes imaginative classroom tools and working visits like those that Connie Taylor’s students have already made to a place like Argonne. The goal of “The New Explorers” is to make stars of scientists, the oft-portrayed nerds who, the project asserts, lead pretty fascinating lives. A subtler goal is to lure minority students in particular to careers in the hard sciences, where they’re woefully underrepresented.
“The New Explorers” sprang from a chance meeting in the spring of 1989. Chicago television anchorman Bill Kurtis, who has his own production company, had completed a series on scientists for his CBS affiliate. He vaguely hoped to see his work used in an educational setting. Argonne director Alan Schriesheim had just been asked by James Watkins, head of the U.S. Department of Energy, to seek out groundbreaking science-education projects that DOE might fund. Soon Argonne, a DOE lab famed for its energy research, began recruiting Chicago zoos, museums and other institutions to “adopt” one of Kurtis’s episodes. Working with specialists from the institutions, teams of teachers extracted the scientific principles from each video and assembled 13 thick workbooks of corresponding classroom exercises. Each institution also agreed to host “working” field trips for students who had viewed its adopted videotape and marched through its accompanying workbook.
Kurtis’s “New Explorers” videos are vivid catalysts. In the first we meet Mark Plotkin, a young ethnobotanist studying how primitive Indians extract medicines from exotic plants in the jungles of Surinam. In later episodes we join a treetop ornithologist who is nose-to-beak with baby eaglets in Ontario and dive with environmental engineers tracking pollutants at 1,000-foot depths in Lake Superior. The accompanying workbooks are imaginative: no cutting articles out of newspapers. “We kept asking what the scientist does that children can do,” says Argonne physicist Sam Bowen. For example, some of the 20,000 Chicago youngsters who have already served as “New Explorers” guinea pigs have rebuilt their classrooms as miniature rain forests. Because science teachers often lack specialized training, the workbooks are designed to be self-explanatory. A few Chicago instructors have found ways to make “New Explorers” more than a learning supplement. After adding her own materials to one workbook, Connie Taylor substituted the resulting alloy for one quarter of the year’s regular curriculum. “With this much advance knowledge of atomic structure,” Taylor says, “the kids move through their science texts in half the time.”
Expeditions outside the classroom include informal schmooze time between scientists and kids. Curious students come to see that the pros were once much like themselves-often in the doghouse with parents for tearing apart radios or spilling noxious compounds on the linoleum. Questions tend to range from the practical (“How did you pay for college?”) to the more practical (“Did you ever flunk anything?”). Not every community has world-class research institutions willing to accept little explorers, but the program’s designers think teachers in any locale can find a worthy substitute. “The point is to introduce kids to someone who works with science,” Bowen says. “It doesn’t matter whether that happens at a museum, a chemical company or the local soil-test office.”
One allure of “The New Explorers” is its cost. Any school is free to tape the PBS programs and buy a full set of workbooks for $130. Organizers hope the project will mushroom; Kurtis is already hustling sponsors to back 13 more episodes. Breathing life into science education is its own reward, but Argonne’s Sam Bowen recently got another. Word filtered back that the project had inspired a Chicago student to become a biologist. The victory was especially sweet: before experiencing “The New Explorers,” she’d considered becoming a lawyer.
