Business and the Arts Contribute to Lessons for Science Educators

Indianapolis, Ind.

Bring together several hundred physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science teachers for a conference, and you’re likely to hear plenty of strategies for getting potentially incurious students hooked on those subjects. There’s science through technology, science through seismology, science through rocketry, science through everyday classroom tools, and on it goes.

While many instructors are well served through those tactics, Greg and Carolyn Ulmer of Fort Zumwalt South High School in St. Peters, Mo., have come up with their own distinctive approach: science through the realities of the business world.

In a session at the National Science Teachers Association’s Midwest-area conference, held here Nov. 4-6, the husband and wife described how they ask students in their applied-biology and -chemistry class to solve scientific problems as if they were serving clients who needed their expertise for specific tasks. The Ulmers separately teach the biology and chemistry course in the...