Ecological and Environmental Field Work Engaging Undergraduate Science Non-Majors at the Community College

Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon offers biological and Earth/environmental science classes that have been utilizing our beautiful natural landscape and campus native habitats for many years.  Recently, our college faculty have designed new citizen science initiatives, including conducting long-term ecological research investigations related to our campus flora and fauna, and establishing long-term climatological and hydrological monitoring stations for watershed, forest, meadow phenological and other studies.  Our research effort has been broadened and supported by a National Science Foundation grant (DUE 1505081) that is helping us to move this research into our undergraduate classrooms.  Our approach is designed to tap into the liberal studies student taking science classes to meet their Associate transfer degree and engage them in a deeper understanding of science by this course-based research experience, which varies across our participating discipline groups.  

Faculty are engaged in this work in forest ecology, marine biology, field biology, environmental science (terrestrial, atmospheric, and aquatic environments), and microbiology, and geology classes.  The first year of the project culminated in nearly 60 science presentations to our Science UnderGraduate Research (SUGR) Day, a campus-wide event begun a year earlier; the presence of this research opportunity in the classes expanded research opportunities for our students.  We are collecting data to measure the impact of this exposure as part of our study.  

Lane Community College has a large proportion of students (over 60%) of students who are first-generation college students, and approximately 85% of them receive substantial financial aid.  Many enter science classes with great fear and trepidation about the requirement that all transfer students take 4 science-creditable classes, 3 which contain labs.  Our science classes are nearly all 24-seat class lecture-labs, with 4-credit classes that meet 6 hours per 10 week academic quarter.  Many students transfer to the University of Oregon or Oregon State University, but continue to take science classes at Lane because of the small class size, lower cost, and/or intense faculty involvement in their instruction, by exceptional faculty.  

Lane owns nearly 200 acres of forest, has a native plant landscape program in place on main campus, has an outdoor classroom, a Learning Garden run in conjunction with both the culinary and sustainability programs, and a natural wetland habitat and seasonal stream that runs nearly its entire course through campus on its way to the critical habitat confluence region of the two main forks of the Willamette River.  Students are studying water quality on and off-campus, carrying out biological surveys ranging from our resident turkey populations' dietary preferences (by examining output in detail), to fungi, insects, predatory mammals, along with reptile and amphibian behavior.  The faculty work collaboratively with each other across discipline where germaine to help students to follow established protocols that assure year-to-year comparisons of ecological change, phenological and climate change investigations.  

Cooperation with city parks, watershed councils, and the adjacent Mt. Pisgah Arboretum all provide tremendous opportunities for students who also carry out volunteer service learning projects, cooperative education work experiences, and internships.  Many of these students move on ultimately to be captured by the science experience through such research, as the research tells us.  It need not be restricted to the University with a large research budget and lab; with thoughtful implementation, these experiences can also be shared with declared science majors and non-science majors at our two-year schools, as well.  After all, a well-informed and scientifically literate public should be one of our goals as science educators; we should not just be driven by preparing the next generation of scientists, but also those in public policy and government in particular who are in positions to value the work of this next generation of scientists, as well.