- Hi, I'm gonna talk to you today a little bit
about some of the work that I've been doing at City College.
And also along with Janice Koch
who is back of the room there.
We're looking at and trying to expand the Pipeline.
And to do this, we're looking
to engage New York City public school students
at the middle, high school and college level
with science and the environment.
So the first project that we've done this week
is a project called Ecology Disrupted
and you can see from the name,
this is working with high school students
across New York City.
And the idea was to use published scientific data
to bring together their daily life.
What's their daily life connections?
Not just to environmental issues,
but also to ecological principles.
So we're learning ecological principles at school,
particularly in New York City
that's learned separately from the environmental issues.
So the idea here was to bring...
use data to help students
to connect what they see in their life.
For example, salting the roads or in case the students
they really understand the sidewalks much more
than much better connection to the salt on the sidewalks,
and how that might affect the freshwater supply
but the abiotic factors
to really understand what that means.
And this project was done
with the Museum of Natural History.
And we worked in the schools with them.
And now the curriculum that we created
is now available online
for people to use across the country.
And you've just typed in Ecology Disrupted,
you can find it, AMNH.
The next project kind of after doing that,
what I really wanted to do was get outside with kids.
I think that's always
once you're working with the environment,
you automatically want to get outside.
And we worked here in the classrooms,
I felt just now middle school classrooms,
to take kids outside
to look at the New York City street trees.
So there's easily available biodiversity in New York City
but nobody notices it.
And it's the street trees
that they walk by every single day.
And the idea was to open up
different opportunities to students
so that they can see the connection to biodiversity
in their lives and also to evolution.
So the idea here was not only
to help them understand
that all oak trees are oaks 'cause they have acorns,
but they have acorns
because they share a common ancestor that had acorns.
And doing this is kind of you're reaching students
and helping them see career possibilities
that they may not even have known had existed.
And there always are some sorts of kids
who just love the environment and they love the outdoors,
and to give them some of that exposure.
And now here at City College,
what we're starting as a new program
to prepare our undergraduate students
for careers in informal science learning environment.
So you can see all the different types of institutions.
And New York City, we have a lot of these institutions.
And we also have just community based organizations.
There's a lot of environmental education centers
all around the city.
And these organizations...
There's a big under-representation problem
at these different organizations.
So I've spoken to a lot of people
who are particularly at the big museums
and botanical gardens and things like that,
and they're really excited
that we're getting this off the ground.
And they're excited to host internships
and things like that to help expand the Pipeline,
because they are interested in kind of staying relevant
and they wanted to do that.
They need to meet the needs of the wider community.
So I think I spoke really quickly.
I'm from New York so--
(audience laughing)
I'm gonna stop. (laughing)
(audience clapping)