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Ohio State forensics students take their expertise into the classroom

Posted on | September 23, 2009 | 607 views |

By Julia Harris

There’s evil afoot in the halls of Linden-McKinley STEM Middle/High School. Someone — or some ones — is committing heinous murders all through the building and leaving behind grisly crime scenes.

Thirteen victims mutely await justice.

Fortunately for them, the students at this unique hybrid school — currently housed at the old North High School building on Arcadia Avenue while the old school on Duxberry is modernized — have been trained by forensics experts at Ohio State to solve crimes just like this.

And so, for one very busy week at the beginning of the school year, seventh- and ninth-grade students unearthed skeletal remains, studied evidence of all shapes and sizes, took fingerprints and analyzed blood splatter patterns. Each classroom had a different crime scene, a different victim and a unique crime scenario.

Each classroom was also assigned a forensics expert, an Ohio State graduate student in the department of anthropology, who answered questions and provided direction as the students picked apart their crime scenes.

The learning was chaotic, messy and at times rather loud.

And that’s just the way Annalies Corbin, executive director of PAST Foundation (Partnering Anthropology with Science and Technology) and purveyor of the Forensics in the Classroom program, likes it.

“Part of the goal for this program was to provide these kids at this new school a sampling of what hands-on learning was going to be like,” Corbin said.

“At both the seventh- and ninth-grade level, we were pleased to see how well the program worked on the notion of collaboration, which is one of the primary tenets of STEM schools.”

The Forensics in the Classroom project is just one of many programs PAST has developed that make science come alive for students. It’s based on a summer learning experience conducted for two years with Metro High School students, during which students excavated mock crime scenes from plots in Waterman Farm and spent many hours learning about and compiling forensic data.

“Taking what was a summer-long program and putting it into an in-school setting was really challenging,” Corbin said. “We had to do some pretty radical modifications.”

Part of the modifying process involved training the classroom teachers and a larger cohort of experts and student mentors that could work independently in each of the 13 classrooms.

Forensics graduate students were trained to be experts on all facets of the curriculum content and then sent into the classrooms — a daunting task for some of them.

“This was the first time I’d been exposed to this curriculum, so teaching these guys helped me better understand the material,” said Rachel Balabuszko, a PhD candidate in bioarchaeology.

Her hands were black with the ground-up volcanic powder used in lifting latent fingerprints, her face smudged and damp in the stifling heat. All around her, ninth-grade students clumped on desks examining and comparing fingerprints.

“It’s been kind of crazy,” she said.

Corbin acknowledges that the week-long project was more than a little hectic. Not all sections of the program appealed to all of the students — some liked the ballistics, some liked the math, some liked the social aspects. And the fact that it happened so early in the school year meant that relationships weren’t fully formed and interactions could be a bit strained.

“Also, this setting was different from the summer program because it wasn’t voluntary: Some of the kids were really excited to be there and some just didn’t care. The seventh graders were young enough that they had no preconceived notions of what high school should be, and they just jumped right in.”

She laughed. “Some of the ninth graders, you know, were into that ‘I’m too cool for school’ stage. But overall I think it was very successful.”

Notes from the field

Linden-McKinley senior Pilar Clark is both student and mentor

Pilar Clark didn't mind getting dirty this summer during her Cave Ecology class.

She may be quiet and a bit shy, but there’s nothing fearful about Pilar Clark. Just ask her how she spent part of her summer vacation.

“I studied water temperature in caves, identified Daddy Long Legs and spider webs, and looked at lizards, frogs and cave crickets. Man, those things are big!”” she said with her radiant, toothy smile.

“I was scared of bugs at first but I’m not now.”

She credits this growth experience to the PAST Foundation and its week-long field learning program, Life in Transition: Cave Ecology. The program took a group of students into Kentucky’s Carter Caves, where they conducted research projects on topics related to environmental science and natural resource management.

Or, as the 5-foot 8-inch tall Clark describes it, “The tallest part of the cave was probably four feet high and the shortest was like two feet, so we got stuck a lot. It was muddy and wet and there were literally butts everywhere, but it was fun and it was something I never thought I’d have the opportunity to do.”

Her enthusiasm for the kind of hands-on projects the PAST Foundation provides is what led her to sign on as a mentor for the Forensics in the Classroom program recently offered at Linden-McKinley. She underwent a week of training at Metro High School before the course, where she learned about comparing fingerprints, studied bullets and bullet casings and examined skulls and skeletons.

“I never knew you could get an ear print,” she said. “Or that you could tell a person’s sex just by looking at the skeleton.

Clark was able to take her new knowledge into the classroom, where she mentored one group of seventh graders and one of ninth-graders. She was surprised by how differently the two groups approached the project.

“The seventh graders wanted to just jump in and go, and so we had to help them be more thoughtful about the process and understand the outcome,” she said.

“The ninth graders knew things the seventh graders didn’t and were more alert and aware. I didn’t have to guide them as much because they kind of got things quicker.”

Although Clark, who plans to enroll at the University of Cincinnati next year, is certainly grateful for the experiences she’s had through PAST and with the transition of her school into a STEM-based academy, she still feels a bit wistful.

“I wish I’d had this kind of stuff when I was a seventh-grader, because it gives you an early start on things,” she said.

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