Welcome to the Elephant Seal Curriculum website at California
State University, Monterey Bay. This NSF-funded
science education project is centered around a continuously
updated database of images and environmental data from a seal
rookery. Raw data, multimedia instructional materials, and background
information in English and Spanish, will be provided to students
internationally via the World Wide Web. Because the Mexican
Government is responsible for bringing the Northern Elephant
Seal back from the brink of extinction, the subject naturally
lends itself to a bicultural and bilingual approach. Teachers
will be provided with an in-depth set of modules covering important
aspects of elephant seal biology, beginning with materials designed
to teach field observation and inquiry techniques, and progressing
to natural selection, behavior, reproduction, physiology, metabolism,
genetics, population, and conservation biology. The methods
of observation and hypothesis generation and testing taught
in this curriculum can subsequently be applied to projects in
the student's local area.
A key to the success of the bicultural science curriculum will
be its development in collaboration with researchers at the
Centro de Investigación
Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada
(CICESE) lead by
Dr. Ernesto Franco Vizcaíno, who has joint appointments
at CICESE and CSUMB. During development, teachers from local
high schools in Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito Counties,
and in Ensenada, Baja California, will work together with a
binational team of researchers and science educators to develop
the curriculum.
Content expertise is provided through the laboratory of Daniel
P. Costa and Burney
J. Le Boeuf at the University of California Santa Cruz,
as well as through the laboratory of
Juan Pablo Gallo, CIAD, Mexico. Additional content expertise
is provided by Dr. Dawn Noren of UCSC and Professor Paul Webb
of Roger Williams University.
Service learning will be incorporated into building the image
database through a course pairing CSUMB students with local
high school students. Enthusiasm for the curriculum will be
generated via an introductory bilingual video produced by Ecologic
Productions. An on-line virtual model of the rookery has
been built by HDT, a Monterey
software company, and is maintained by CSUMB students.