SENCER FAQ
Q. What is SENCER?
A. Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities is a national dissemination project launched by the National Science Foundation five years ago to promote creativity, higher level thinking, and community problem-solving into university-based science courses.
Q. What is so unique about SENCER?
A. SENCER embodies a transformation in science learning from traditional classroom teaching into a more powerful initiative for getting students to explore issues important in their community. A successful SENCER project combines original research across several disciplines on real-world problems, building advocacy skills to inform public policy. The National Science Foundation originally conceived the program as an experiment serving undergrads, primarily science non-majors, in order to make them more effective and active citizens. SENCER’s scope has expanded into the international scientific community by featuring projects of global significance.
Q. Why is UM interested in adopting the SENCER initiative and strategies?
A. The UM SENCER team is training high school chemistry students to perform research on air quality, a topic highly relevant in western Montana. Called the Big Sky Model, this SENCER project provides an effective bridge to higher education and potentially to careers in science.
Q. What exactly is the Big Sky Model?
A. The Big Sky Model is a science learning strategy to help young students apply science to their everyday lives. It is also a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional partnership for enhancing science learning. Although originally designed for measuring and understanding the quality of local airsheds, it can be adapted to examine any number of issues relating to the nexus between environmental science and public health.
Q. What do students get out of this?
A. High school students experience what it feels like to be an active citizen and a useful resource within their community. They work individually and in small groups, coming together with other schools in an annual science symposium to present their research and inform their peers, the public, and policymakers of their findings. Whether or not they eventually choose careers in environmental or biomedical sciences is really beside the point. Their gain is a growing sense of civic engagement and responsibility as they face environmental public health challenges of the future.
College students also benefit by incorporating a meaningful service-learning component outside their standard classroom experience. NSF studies have documented that this contextual, cooperative approach is particularly effective for students who are traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. In this way all students are exposed to the ways of community-based participatory research. In fact, several former high school participants have stepped up to become college-level mentors involved in training younger students and assisting in their analyses. The Big Sky Model is demonstrating that these kinds of peer-led investigations are important formative experiences that reinforce and continually expand the educational value of the program.
The Big Sky Model empowers young students to identify environmental problems in their community and then gives them the knowledge and support to explore them using the latest in scientific and analytic technology.