A Crucible for Curiosity : UCI Opens Science Labs to Minority Students

Sitting around their teacher in low-slung yellow and blue chairs at UC Irvine last week, the kindergartners sang in Spanish: “There is a little sea star at the bottom of the sea.”

Beside a sunny window in another room, third-graders in tiny white lab coats picked up a sea cucumber to peer at its underside and learn how an anemone feeds.

Meanwhile, high school students in a science lab kept their eyes on a gadget that measured the time it took for an enzyme to cause a chemical reaction in liquid.

In halls of learning usually reserved for young adults, the students, mostly Latino, are spending part of their summer in “Kids Inventing and Discovering Science,” a novel UCI program that brings minority students to a college campus to turn them on to the excitement of science.

In English and in Spanish, they are learning about the world around them, from sea creatures to the fundamentals of microbiology and natural gene selection. For three weeks, 60 children from kindergarten to third grade have been taking field trips to the beaches and the tide pools of Orange County, and 60 high school students will be immersed for six weeks in sophisticated laboratory work that makes their regular studies look like first-grade homework.

“Oh yeah, it’s hard,” said Coleen Mahone, an 11th-grader at Sherman Indian High School near Riverside. “But when you go back to school, you’ll be ahead of everybody else, and you’ll know what you’re doing.”

The program was the brainchild of Dr. Eloy Rodriguez, a UCI professor of biology and phytochemistry widely known for his research in plants and medicines.

Rodriguez said that while he does not normally work with children, he is interested in programs that “socialize” Latino and other minority youths to science in the hope that they may see it as a potential career. Even more important, he said, is to encourage them to see themselves as learners and thinkers in a society where alarmingly high numbers of Latino children drop out of school.

The elementary school children are mostly the sons and daughters of maintenance workers at UCI or the children of the Irvine Co. laborers who live in an Irvine mobile home park. They are all Latino.

The high school students, all from ethnic minorities but not necessarily Latino, were chosen from applications from a variety of high schools throughout Southern California. Many were not faring well in their regular schools, Rodriguez said, but so far enthusiasm and participation in the program have been high.

Funded by several grants, including one from the Howard Hughes Biomedical Research Foundation, the program tries to provide a delicate balance of elements that Rodriguez believes are missing in other school settings .

A native of south Texas, Rodriguez recalled that his high school counselor advised him to enroll in a vocational trade school instead of college, even though he skipped one year of school after scoring well on tests and graduated in the top 5% of his class.

“When you have minorities in the classroom at many schools around here, these are kids who are generally not called upon by the teacher to answer questions,” he said. “There is some stereotyping about them. We believe that with time and attention paid to kids, they will do well.

“Some of the parents came up to me the other day and wanted to know what we were doing to their kids, because on the weekends their kids were actually asking, ‘When are we going to go back to school?’ ”

Recently, U.S. Secretary of Education Lauro F. Cavazos attributed the failure of Latino students in school to lack of parental participation. Rodriguez said his program is showing that parents of Latino children are eager to take part if school officials approach them in the proper way.

On Wednesday, when the elementary school children went on a field trip to the tide pools at Corona del Mar State Beach, parents were invited, and many of them went. They also were encouraged to ask questions about the sea life their children were studying.

Many of their questions were asked--and answered--in Spanish.

“Parents are an integral part of what we’re doing,” Rodriguez said.

All of the teachers working in the program are bilingual, and most of them are Latino. They were deliberately selected, Rodriguez said, to provide the children with role models from their own cultures.

At the beginning of the workshop, the children were asked to draw a picture of a scientist.

“Most of them had men with beards; some of them wore lab coats,” Rodriguez said. “But not one of them drew a woman scientist. We’re going to ask them to do the same thing at the end of the program, and I’ll bet you the drawings will be very different.”

At the elementary-school level, the children had classes on insects, plants and marine life.

But the primary approach is to get the children to study real-life objects, such as sea creatures, around them and to consider theories and concepts of science, said teacher Mercedes Merrell.

“This is hands-on science,” she said. “They are also learning critical thinking, which teaches them to remember things longer, process it faster and utilize it in other situations.”

By looking for plants, insects and sea animals in their natural habitats, handling them or dissecting them to view under a microscope and then discussing how they fit into the broader food chain and evolutionary scale, the children learn what these things mean to their world, she said.

“The resources at the university are tremendous,” Merrell said. “They have the microscopes. . . . They even have people from the university here who can tell (the children) what each thing is. All kids need this, not just Hispanic kids.”

Seven-year-old Javier Arriver, who lives in the Irvine trailer park, said he has enjoyed the butterfly exhibits and the trips to the beach.

“I think I’ll be a scientist when I grow up,” he said. “I like this better than the other school, because we get to go on field trips and we get to catch the animals.”