3:55 p.m., March 4, 2008--Deborah Allen, associate professor of biological sciences at UD, brought her experience with Problem-Based Learning (PBL) to Peru over winter break during a two-and-a-half week stay funded in part by the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program.

While there, Allen primarily worked on developing PBL curricula to bolster science education in Peruvian middle schools, and said that, while her stay was short, the project has long-term and far-reaching goals.

“The purpose of this project is to bolster the science curriculum in middle schools and to improve the way it's taught,” said Allen, who plans to return to Peru in July. “What I was invited to do was to help design a new curriculum for the schools and to help design courses for teachers in order to help them, in turn, design science curricula for their middle school students.”

A veteran advocate for science education improvements closer to home, Allen was awarded the Fulbright grant to work in Peru based on her experience with curriculum redevelopment and implementation at the University of Delaware and in Delaware public schools.

“Peru is like the United States in that it has a set of national education standards,” said Allen, who co-teaches a course at UD designed to prepare future science teachers for effective science. “The problem is that what's written on paper often isn't what happens; and what's written on paper is that the students should be able to do interdisciplinary science and know how to put concepts together across the different sciences.”

Allen said that middle school science teachers, in particular, often benefit the most from curriculum overhauls, and she added that her ongoing interest in faculty professional development, in association with the Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education (ITUE), drove an earlier project in Peru, in which UD took part. Completed with faculty at the Universidad Católica del Perú, the former project, as it turned out, in fact gave way to a long-term alliance with administrators in a Peruvian federal educational system, the Consorcio Ignaciano de Educación (CONSIGNA), which in Peru is run by the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church.

“The federal school system in Peru, including many of the universities, can be part of the Catholic Church,” Allen said, explaining that the new project with the Fe y Alegría school system in which she is involved was set up through a collaboration with the Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, in Lima. “Because [Fulbright senior specialists] are not invited by schools in the K-12 system, I worked in collaboration with the Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya,” she said.

Allen further explained that the school system, Fe y Alegría, which translates as faith and joy, is a community-based school system, where the community requests the schools and puts up the funds. “The idea is that families within walking distance of the schools are in charge of maintaining the school grounds and have a maintenance schedule,” Allen said. “In exchange for that, they get good teachers paid for by the federal government.”

In developing PBL curricula for the system, Allen said that she focused on environmental science education because many environmentally related issues impact students' everyday lives, and provide a natural way to help the students think about how to integrate the science concepts they are learning.

She worked collaboratively with a team of Peruvian colleagues, including three science teachers from the Fe y Alegría School System, two instructors from the Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, and one administrator from CONSIGNA, Luis Bretel, the organization's secretary. Together, they broached issues such as forest preservation, sustainable tourism, environmental pollution and its impact on human health and water conservation, treatment and access.

“There is a major gap in environmental science education for all students,” Allen said, “and since there are similar problems in the United States, I thought that this field would be relevant and helpful to bring back to UD and Delaware, as well.

“The piece that I think is really interesting about this project, however, is that for Problem-Based Learning--science that gets organized around problems--these problems won't be abstract ones for students. Teachers are going to develop problems that are about the community in which the children live, and so they will actually be identifying and then trying to solve real environmental problems in their communities through the work they do in the classroom--and that's a pretty unique thing to do.”

Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photos courtesy of Deborah Allen