Why it’s cool to be a space geek teacher

Jennifer Cheesman sat in her middle school science classroom when a teacher who reminded her of Mr. Clean, came in with tears in his eyes. He was repeating the words, “It’s gone. It’s gone.” Cheesman, now a sixth-grade science teacher at Zuni Hills Elementary School in Peoria, Arizona, said she always wanted to be a teacher, but the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in which teacher Christa McAuliffe lost her life, was a special inspiration for her. It led her to space camp and to this past weekend’s Space Exploration Educators Conference (SEEC).

More than 400 teachers (443 to be exact) from 40 different states and seven countries ventured to Texas for a three-day space conference sponsored by Space Center Houston, a nonprofit organization backed by the support of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.  

“We want our kids to be excited about STEM as much as we are,” Cheesman said.

Tours of Johnson Space Center facilities, keynotes by famous astronauts and more than 100 interdisciplinary workshops were offered during the conference, most of which taught by teachers. Topics ranged from how to manage microbes in space to how to spray paint space murals. While opportunities to hear directly from astronauts or to take a tour of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab are high on the list of SEEC highlights, the number one thing that draws teachers to the conference is each other.

“There’s an acceptance here,” Cheesman said. She pointed to fellow science teacher Maria Nickel, who teaches seventh and eighth-grade science at École Stonewall Centennial School in Manitoba, Canada, as an example. Both teachers met at space camp in California in 2009, where they became friends.

The two science teachers co-presented a workshop this year called “Ship the Chip Nasa Style,” an engineering design challenge in which educators created a container out of everyday materials in order to protect a potato chip inside, simulating the careful designs that go into shipping supplies to the International Space Station. After the conference, the packages are sent first class mail to another attendee’s class where students examine the design and check to see if the potato chip is still in tact.  

Cheesman and Nickel pay for SEEC out of their own pockets, but they consider the “arsenal” of teaching tools they bring home to be worth it. 

Working on a budget is something NASA is all too familiar with as well. On Tuesday, the White House’s 2017 budget request for NASA’s education programs was $15 million less than what was an enacted last year ($100 million versus $115 million). This cut comes two years after the Obama Administration requested $28 million less than the previous year, which would have dropped the overall budget to $89 million. However, Congress has occasionally provided relief for these cuts, such as when the House of Representatives injected  $15 million for education programs for 2015 fiscal year.

Space education workshops are what drew Mera Burton to SEEC for the first time this year. “Taking classes from like-minded teachers is more valuable than any district prescribed professional development training,” said Burton, a K-12 STEM education specialist at AERO Institute in Palmdale, California. One of Burton’s goals is to help her generation of students witness humans traveling to Mars. SEEC provides the tools to do that, she said.

Teachers at SEEC are excited to talk about what’s next for space, including NASA’s James Webb telescope, Hubble’s successor, whose 18 gold-plated mirrors were recently assembled.

“It will allow us to see deeper, farther back in time and at higher resolution than Hubble—who knows what it will reveal,” said Michael Wilkinson, a fifth-grade math-science teacher at Fieldston Lower School in the Bronx, N.Y.

Wilkinson pointed to other topics of conversation including the promising role of commercial space programs and plans for NASA’s next rover mission, Mars 2020, which will look for life on the Red Planet. “The students who we’re teaching now, most of them are going to take a job that doesn’t even exist yet,” Wilkinson said.

In his “Mars on Earth” workshop, Wilkinson brought a group of teachers outside where they conducted a Mars rover simulation. Using maps and images, teachers decided what data they needed and communicated with their rover (another teacher) via text messaging, simulating how NASA scientists decide which areas of Mars to explore.

“Humans are natural explorers and that is our frontier now,” Wilkinson said, a message he’d like to get out there especially to the skeptics who too often tell him, “I thought NASA was closed.”

A couple of years ago, Maria Nickel helped to give elementary school students in her district a front row seat to space. Nickel directed a space education program in which two different classes in her district won top prizes; one experiment, which tested if green tea could protect cells from radiation damage, was tested aboard the International Space Station. Nickel’s directorship of the program helped to earn her Canada’s National Teacher of the Year award.

This year, Nickel got a chance to meet fellow Canadian and astronaut Jeremy Hansen during a tour of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab where astronauts train for spacewalks.

“My students back home are going to freak right out. They’re going to be so excited to hear what we talked about,” Nickel said.

It’s this type of excitement that has Shanna Peeples, who earned the 2015 National Teacher of the Year award in the U.S., eager to bring space into her classes. Peeples, who gave a keynote at SEEC, teaches English at Palo Duro High School in Amarillo, Texas. She told PBS NewsHour how space exploration makes for a great speech and debate topic, including questions such as should we send humans into space.

“It naturally provokes an ethos, a wonder and curiosity in your kids, and that’s what’s unfortunately been driven out of so many classrooms because of testing,” Peeples said.

SEEC reminds us that humans design, build and drive the robots that are exploring planets where we might want to go in the future,” said Daniel Newmyer, director of education at Space Center Houston.  “There’s not a single astronaut that hasn’t had a powerful educator behind them,” Newmyer said, who spoke with education coordinator Angela Case. Case, known as the “SEEC Goddess,” has worked at the event since it started 22 years ago and said it’s like family coming back every year.

As SEEC wrapped up, Cheesman tweeted, “A talented dedicated lineup ending,” about the three generations of astronauts on stage for the conference’s closing keynote address: Kjell N. Lindgren, who just returned from the International Space Station in December, Mike Foreman of the space shuttle era and 83-year old Alan Bean, of the Apollo 12 mission and the fourth man to walk on the moon, who told the crowd:

“Everyone of you has a star to reach for. That’s how you became a teacher.”