The Sailing Vessel (S/V) Denis Sullivan emulates a 19th century three-masted Great Lakes schooner, but there’s one pretty important way it differs from the ships it commemorates: the Denis Sullivan is used for Great Lakes literacy education, not for carrying cargo.
The S/V Denis Sullivan near its port of Milwaukee. Photo from www.discoveryworld.org.
With funding from the Sea Grant institutes of Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program, the Center for Great Lakes Literacy and has been planning sailing trips on this amazing ship over the past few years. The participants on these sails are Wisconsin and Minnesota educators who are looking to expand their Great Lakes literacy and to bring that knowledge back to their students. The Shipboard Science Workshop is a great way for educators to do this in an experiential way that also allows them time to collaborate with peers.
So what does the Wisconsin Water Library have to do with all of this? Our librarian, Anne Moser, helps with planning the sail (and on-land) activities, creating educational materials, and educating the educators!
The 2018 Denis Sullivan Shipboard Science Workshop participants and team! Photo from Meridith Berghauer.
This year, the Denis Sullivan team tried out a new approach: a mentor-mentee framework for participants. Mentors were asked to identify teachers in their area who would be interested in being their mentees, drawing on pre-existing relationship between educators with common interests. Participants were Wisconsin or Minnesota educators with a passion for bringing experience-based instruction to their students. Throughout the sail, the pairs worked on building lesson plans and brainstorming ideas for ways to introduce their students to aquatic sciences literacy and experiential learning.
To gain a better sense of how this first run of the mentorship framework went, I talked with a mentor-mentee pair from Wisconsin. Cindy, the mentor, invited Joe to be her mentee on the Denis Sullivan because he was an outstanding student teacher in her classroom four years ago. In my interview with them, they spoke fondly of the sail and trip as a whole, and had plenty to say about how the mentorship framework established on the trip has carried over into their classrooms!
Cindy and Joe on the Denis Sullivan. Photo from Sheryl Williams, another participant.
Here are the top 5 things I learned from Cindy and Joe:
- Opportunities to share classroom knowledge with other teachers, especially across such a wide geographical area, are few and far between. The Denis Sullivan trip offers educators the chance to learn from each other in a hands-on, face-to-face environment that fosters creativity and collaboration.
- The mentor-mentee framework paved the way for this collaboration to continue once the trip had ended. Cindy and Joe have implemented a project that they planned during the sail – see point #5 for details on what they’ve accomplished!
- The mentor-mentee setup was a success! Cindy has participated in sails in the past, and she said that the mentor-mentee framework enriched her experience this year. Joe was also a big fan, saying that if Cindy hadn’t invited him to be her mentee, he likely never would’ve known about this experience.
- An open mind and curious spirit are essential to getting the most out of the Denis Sullivan experience. Being willing to challenge your own assumptions, learn from others, and get excited about how to implement what you’ve learned are all necessary.
- Cindy and Joe have been teaching their students how to collect and analyze water samples using real-world testing methods. The students will go out for testing a few times throughout the year and investigate reasons for changes in their measurements over time. At the end of the year, the students from the two classes will meet and explore what they’ve learned. I don’t know about you guys, but this is way more hands-on and interactive than anything I did in middle school science classes!
It was inspiring to talk with Cindy and Joe about their experience on the Denis Sullivan. I could tell that they were passionate about enriching their students’ learning, and were thankful for programs like the Shipboard Science Workshop on the Denis Sullivan that could help them do that in even more meaningful ways.
If you are a Wisconsin educator and would like more information about future opportunities on the Denis Sullivan, please reach out to us at askwater@aqua.wisc.edu. We would love to have more amazing teachers like Cindy and Joe on future sails!
Cindy is teacher at Rosholt Middle School in Rosholt, Wisconsin. As an instructor in a rural district, she teaches Earth Science, Health, English, and Advanced Reading.
Joe teaches at Pacelli Middle and High Schools in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. He teaches life sciences to high schoolers and broad field science at the middle school level.
Rather than type out a full transcript of the interview in this blog post, I chose to highlight a few common themes that Cindy and Joe discussed. If you’re interested in hearing the full interview or learning more about their experiences, feel free to reach out to me at mcwitte@wisc.edu.