There is a TV station that does double duty of covering both Florida and Georgia, and so it picks up interesting subjects that don’t necessarily affect us Florida folk, but one of those tidbits caught my attention: Georgia Educators Learn Tactics to Better Teach Evolution.
And for teachers like Gail Jennings, who is guided by her Christian beliefs, teaching evolution is something she is trying to grow into. That’s why she enrolled in an evolution workshop being held at VSU this week as part of the Georgia Teacher Quality Program.
Sounds like a potentially good workshop. But in true local TV news fashion, the story is skimpy on real information. I assume VSU is Valdosta State University. This pdf document looks like it’s from a previous year, but is probably pretty much what the news story is referring to. And this web page indicates that the workshop is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education/UGA Teacher Quality Office. Cool stuff!
Florida Citizens for Science is exploring opportunities to get involved with such activities here in our state. We are possibly participating in a workshop in one county later this summer (I hope to give my history of anti-evolution in Florida presentation). The details are still being ironed out there. Since evolution is now in our new state science standards, we would be happy to help any other school districts out with similar workshops. This summer may be too late, but we can always start the planning for the next school year or the next summer. Just let us know.
Workshops such as Brandon mentions are a great opportunity for school districts and for FCS. We have some great talent and knowledge of many areas which can help teachers both new to a subject and those with lots of experience.
Joe
Dr Jones gave a guest seminar in my department a while ago. The seminar involved refutation of “criticism” of evolution, and creating opportunities for those who are very religious and have a hard time reconciling this with evolution to accept evolution without sacrificing their faith. I don’t know about the program specifically, but if Dr Jones is in charge, I’m pretty confident that it will do very well.