Since the early 1960’s the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) has provided high quality research training to graduate students in tropical ecology. This has resulted in the development of a significant cadre of senior researchers and professors at research institutions who have the expertise and experience in field-oriented research in the tropics to pass on to their like-minded students. In the mid-1990s, OTS has expanded its programming to include undergraduates, introducing tropical ecology to an increasingly larger group of students with the expectation that many of them would become the next generation of graduate students and researchers in tropical studies. In 2002, OTS began a program of service training to high school science teachers. This program was created to promote the teaching of field-oriented science, to enhance and expand upon nationally created standards in science teaching, and to influence students in the importance of field-oriented, hands-on research in the tropics.

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This 14-day program provides teachers with both detailed information about tropical natural history as well as the pedagogy of teaching students to do research under field conditions. Held at the world famous La Selva Biological Station in a lowland tropical rainforest and Ecolodge San Luis near the Monteverde Cloud Forest, the course includes discussions of tropical ecosystems and their conservation, research projects focused on ecological concepts and organisms, and the development of teaching plans and evaluation techniques appropriate for use in the teachers’ home institutions. The program is open to all secondary and college teachers, with preference given to those early in their careers. CE or graduate credit is available.

Faculty: Dr. Barbara Bentley and Dr. Joe Levine
Cost: $2450 Full scholarships are available for qualified applicants.  
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