Newton teacher to study Southern Ocean for 6 weeks

NEWTON, Kan. (KSNW) – Kiley Preheim teaches seventh-grade science at Chisholm Middle School in Newton. She was accepted into a program called Polar STEAM, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“I will be going on a research mission with other scientists from large universities, and then taking that science and bringing it back to my classroom and helping educate kids on the important work of polar science,” Preheim said.

She will spend six weeks in the Southern Ocean on a ship beginning Nov. 1. The scientists will conduct research near 170 degrees west and move north from there, collecting water samples along the way.

“We’re going to be collecting and looking at diatoms, which are these little tiny microscopic phytoplankton, so they do photosynthesis, and they tell us a lot about the ocean and what the makeup of the ocean has been in the past so we can help make predictions about what is going to happen in the future,” Preheim said.

Preheim saw the program and thought it would be a perfect fit, so she applied.

“It sounded like a really good fit for someone in my position because I live in the middle of the country, and so my students, most of them, will probably not get access to going to a location like the Southern Ocean and a lot of people that live in this area are just unfamiliar with the really important stuff happening in the polar regions whether that be in the Arctic Circle or near Antarctica where I will be, and so I thought this would be a great opportunity,” Preheim said.

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Preheim says she was in disbelief finding out she was chosen for the program. While she is gone, the NSF will pay for a substitute teacher.

“I will have someone come in and teach my class for six weeks, and then, I will join back in and start to implement some of the things that I got from the trip,” Preheim said. “My overall goal is to create a phenomenon-based NGSS-aligned science unit that covers the important work that’s being done in the polar regions.”

The lessons she is teaching by being in the program go beyond science.

“I think it’s really important for me to have this experience because kids can see somebody who is, you know, just an average Kansan, an average person that is a teacher in kind of a rural area that’s going and getting these opportunities, and it makes the science more real for the students,” Preheim said. “It’s really important that the kids see someone who is a career educator doing this important science work. It makes the science more real to them but also helps get the point across that you can be a citizen scientist.”

She will also video chat with her students while on the boat, showing them what she is doing.

“My substitute teacher can kind of plug in and get me up on the screen, and I can show the students what I’m doing which will be really, really cool for them to see it live,” Preheim said.

Preheim is also working with the community to expand outside of Chisholm Middle School.

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“We’ve been talking about how we can make this Polar STEAM project come to life for seniors as well because a lot of them, even though they’ve lived a lot of years, they haven’t had the experience of going to the Southern Ocean going close to the South Pole,” Preheim said. “I’m going to not only be video chatting with my students, but also with other people in the community such as STEAM with seniors to really help get the polar science out, get the message out, and just make sure that the community is really bought into what I’m doing too.”

Her No. 1 goal is to create a phenomenon-based science unit for students and make it an open source.

“Putting that out there so that other educators could also introduce their students to something that is real world, something that incorporates science and engineering practices, something that is interesting to the students.”

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