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Each summer educators are invited to apply for the opportunity to work alongside Great Lakes scientists aboard a research vessel for a week.
Brienne May, a 5th-grade science teacher at Franklin Regional School District in Westmoreland County, was chosen this year, along with 14 other applicants, two from Pennsylvania.
The Sea Grant Center for Great Lakes Literacy (CGLL) program gives educators the chance to learn about environmental issues in the Great Lakes and network with researchers and their peers.
The lakes studied rotate each year, and this July, the expedition set out to explore Lake Erie.
The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple talked with Brienne May about her experience.
Listen to the conversation:
The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Kara Holsopple: I know you wrote an essay for the application. What do you think was in it that cinched it for you?
Brienne May: Maybe the honesty of it. I was not somebody who was well-versed in ecology and environmental sciences until about two years ago. I’ve always loved space and physics and chemistry, and that was really where my passion was. And then I worked on the team that helped develop the science standards for Pennsylvania and the stakeholders who came in to talk about this environmental ecology piece really inspired me.
There were a lot of non-formal educators, a lot of ecology teachers, and somebody said, kids know so much about these animals that live all over the world, in Africa and in the rainforest, but they don’t know anything about the diversity of life in their backyards. And that really spoke to me.
From that point forward, I started looking into these different organizations that I could learn from. I wrote about that in my essay, about not having this strong background but this strong desire to learn. And I learned so much on the boat. It’s crazy the amount that I learned in a week.
Kara Holsopple: The trip started in Cleveland. Where did the expedition take you?
Brienne May: We were on the R/V Lake Guardian, which is the EPA’s largest research vessel. We traveled all over Lake Erie. We started in the western basin in Cleveland, and then we were doing sampling at different points along the lake.
There are all of these different pre-established points for collecting data for consistency’s sake. So we had the opportunity to compare data between different locations in a lake, which all have different depths and different biodiversity, different problems. Seeing how one lake can have so many different environmental pieces; I didn’t know, I just thought a lake is a lake. But these different basins are pretty unique in and of themselves.
Brienne May and 14 educators from the Great Lakes region were chosen to spend a week on the EPA research vessel to learn more about Lake Erie. Photo: Courtesy Brienne May
Kara Holsopple: So, what are the topic areas that you guys looked into?
Brienne May: We looked into cyanobacteria and harmful algal blooms. The second group was looking at benthic organisms, the critters that live at the bottom of the lake. Specifically one of the things they were looking for was the presence or absence of invasive mussels, quagga mussels, and zebra mussels, which has been a problem in Lake Erie since about the ’80s or ’90s. And then the third group that I spent most of my time researching with was the group that worked on microplastics with Sam Mason.
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Kara Holsopple: Sam Mason is a researcher in Lake Erie. She’s basically one of the first people to have found microplastics in the Great Lakes.
Brienne May: She is, yes, She saw this research in the ocean, and she thought, I wonder if there’s any in freshwater. And it turns out there’s a lot of plastic, especially in Lake Erie, because there is plastic production in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Kara Holsopple: You were on board for a week? Yes. Take me through one of the days. A day that was memorable for you.
Brienne May: Oh, man. I would say probably the first day. So we boarded on Sunday, and then Monday was our first full day. And the reason why I’m saying that date was so memorable is because we kind of all signed up for these different chances to collect data. So there were eight of us on at a time, and everybody rotated. So I took the 4:25.
Kara Holsopple: In the morning.
Brienne May: Yeah. Day one. I’m really glad that I did that. I was very nervous. We got up, we got all of our gear on, our hard hats, and our work vests, and then we did all of the data collection.
We collected plankton for the cyanobacteria group. We did a rosette, which is where you deploy this big instrument with all these tubes around it. And you collect water samples at different depths, and then it collects all this other data, like the amount of sunlight, the water temperature, dissolved oxygen. They collect these samples and compare the cyanobacteria up and down the water column.
And then we did a manta trawl, which was my group. That was what we use to collect plastic samples [in]. [It’s] basically a big — probably four feet long, roughly looks like a plankton net. [It has a] a wide opening, and then it slowly tapers off, and then at the end is where we would collect all the samples….A manta trawl glides on the surface.
So you’re just taking the plastic pieces or whatever, you know, organic material off the surface of the water….By the time we were doing that, the sun’s coming up, and, you know, it was just so beautiful out on the water. And it was a very surreal experience.
So after we collected the data every day…we were working on looking through curriculum. We had some make-and-take projects, which is a kind of a teacher professional development thing where you position yourself as a student and try a mini-project so that you can see what it would be like for your students to do it…We were in the lab a lot, so it was really, no pun intended, all hands on deck for the entire week.
The manta trawl scoops up plastic and other materials from the surface of the lake. Photo: Brienne May
Kara Holsopple: I saw a photograph of you with microscopes in a lab. What did you find, and what did it look like under the microscope?
Brienne May: It was shocking. On our first day, we had that first sample from our 4:25 [am session], and towards the end of the day, Sam Mason took us into the lab. She said let’s work through identifying some of the things we might see and let’s practice finding plastic or not plastic.
And then how would we classify this as a film, as a fragment of plastic, or as a pellet which are like little round pieces.
I thought I knew about microplastics. Every single one of us, as we took our turn looking into the microscope, stepped back and said, wait, are you kidding? To look under the microscope and see a bright purple or bright red piece of plastic that you could not see sitting in that petri dish with your eyes was shocking.
I couldn’t believe how much it resembled whatever it had started, as whatever piece of plastic it was in the beginning. It really changed the way that we see microplastic pollution.
Kara Holsopple: I can tell by the enthusiasm that you have about this trip that you’re going to be using a lot of what you learned, what is something from the trip that you’re excited to bring back to your students?
Brienne May: Everything. But I’m using what I learned about cyanobacteria and the harmful algal blooms. I’m using what I learned about benthic populations. The difference, though, is I don’t live in Lake Erie. I live in the Pittsburgh area.
So that’s the biggest thing that I’m bringing back, is this awareness of the choices that we make impact the entire world around us.
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I want to take what I learned and translate it into, ‘okay, so we don’t have a lake, but we have rivers.’ And how does what we do upstream impact what happens downstream? And the other thing is the plastics, because it’s everywhere. I have a plankton net that we are going to be using to scan our creeks.
We’ll kind of drag it up and down the creek, see if we find anything. And then I’m also working with my district to bring plastic recycling to our building. So that’s the biggest thing that I’m bringing back, is this awareness of the choices that we make impact the entire world around us.
So let’s try to make choices within our classroom where we’re helping and making kids aware. Honestly, it’s going to be the fifth graders in my classroom who are coming up with solutions when they’re older for this problem that is definitely not going to go away.
Kara Holsopple: What did you learn that you think will make you a better teacher?
Brienne May: Oh boy. I want to give a little bit of background. These new science standards that we have that we just recently adopted in Pennsylvania are a complete shift from what we were doing before. We’re not asking kids to be able to list facts. We’re asking kids to think like a scientist. So we have these science and engineering practices and we have these cross-cutting concepts.
To have this very authentic experience where I’m with scientists who are doing real research…For me, that was really impactful.
Most teachers, especially in elementary school, have not had the opportunity to think like scientists. Most of us have probably only had 1 or 2 science method classes in undergrad. And then, unless you get your masters in STEM, you probably aren’t getting anything there either.
To have this very authentic experience where I’m with scientists who are doing real research that they care about, that they’re going to write papers about. To see how questions are asked, how data is analyzed, how surprising things are dealt with, and how obstacles are overcome in real-time with scientists who didn’t know that they were modeling those things for us? For me, that was really impactful.
May and her team saw microplastics imperceptible to the human eye under the microscope. Photo: Brienne May
I feel better equipped to bring that back to my class and say, ‘yeah, this data that we got is a little bit wonky, but guess what? That happens sometimes in science and we report it, and then we can try to find why, we can look for our errors or, you know, maybe it is something that’s legitimate happening in the environment that we can look for.’
I think that probably is the number one thing that’s going to change my teaching practices more than anything else that I did.
Kara Holsopple: There’s such a skepticism about science in the world right now, so that’s a really important skill to be teaching kids.
Brienne May: Yes. We want our kids to be scientifically literate. We’re talking about just having a basic understanding of how the world around you works.
Good citizens are scientifically literate. Good voters are scientifically literate. We want our kids to be thinking a little bit more globally through these local studies.
