High school campuses provide a unique setting for long-term ecology experiments and for: 1) advancing research, with involvement of secondary teachers and their students, 2) increasing student learning, including hands-on outdoor inquiry, and 3) developing long-term collaborations between high school teachers and university faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. In 2013/2014, we established a prairie restoration experiment in an abandoned football practice field at Free State High School in Lawrence, KS. The experiment consists of 18 large plots with three initial planting treatments. This design allows us to explore effects of seeding density on prairie plant establishment and study patterns of plant colonization. We are also investigating the role of soil microbes on prairie plants in a smaller experiment. The site is now well established with prairie grasses and forbs. Throughout these five years we have involved high school and university classes, and individual students, in prairie research and management. Further, we have published our work (including data collected by high school students) in peer-reviewed journals. Our experiences lead us to ask: What are general lessons that we have learned that could help other ecologists build successful university-high school collaborations?
Results/Conclusions
Successful collaborations depend on both planning ahead and learning from mistakes. As we look back, we recognize the importance of choosing authentic research questions (no point in doing a study where you know exactly what will happen) and establishing the experiment with the same rigor used in any other research project. Because high school students have short class times and little field experience, we had to develop efficient but also meaningful methods of data collection. Maintaining data records over many years has been challenging, but is essential. Making students comfortable in a field setting is also important; mowed aisles at our site allow hesitant students to easily access the plots, and we provide jumpsuits and boots to protect clothing and reduce tick exposure. Our study was designed to minimize site management, and we turned management activities (e.g., cutting back woody vegetation) into research activities (comparing woody vegetation levels among treatments). Our work is successful in large part because of: 1) the enthusiasm for this project by several university researchers and 2) the interest and flexibility of high school teachers (field ecology often has surprises) and their recognition that even “exposure” to experiments and outdoor environments is a worthwhile educational objective