JAIRUS LOFTON
Staff Writer
Dr. Mercedes Fisher, a professor of technology at Pepperdine’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology, recently added the title of field researcher to her list of accomplishments when she received a fellowship from Earthwatch International.
The fellowship, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, includes a research trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, the country’s largest wetland, to study the eating habits of nocturnal frugivores, or fruit-eating animals.
This expedition lasts from March 28 to April 12. Traveling along with Fisher are researchers from Brazil, Argentina, Malta, Cambridge, United Kingdom and Los Angeles. To get to the Pantanal, the team will fly into Sao Paolo then take a small six-seat plane 400 miles to a rural area near Campo Grande.
Each researcher has an area of focus and a large part of Fisher’s will be to set up cameras for the night team so they can attempt to capture the images of the elusive animals.
The findings from the expedition will help Earthwatch understand the region so it can better formulate a management plan for the fragile ecosystem and produce a field guide to help promote these extraordinary animals.
The field guide from the research expedition is one of many ways in which Earthwatch tries to achieve what it claims to be its main goal, which is, according to its Web site, to teach and promote “scientific literacy.” The organization, which is non-profit, attempts to do this by placing scientists and researchers directly in the field.
Fisher said she sees the project as having a big short-term and long-term impact.
“(The project) has potential to help the ecosystem, identify needs and support others who work in the field,” Fisher said.
But she also sees another purpose as well: one that is felt a continent away in the classroom.
“My motivation is to create a ‘living curriculum’ for the hundreds of teachers I train each year,” she said. “My hope is that (my students) will create a similar experience tied to authentic opportunities for their students.”
Other than the main study of the frugivores, the research team will also hike across the wetlands to track the feeding areas for some of the wetland’s native species including peccaries and macaws. In her backpack laboratory Fisher will also incorporate technology by plotting courses using her GPS maps.
The team will also try to measure food availability for the frugivores by taking measurements from a large portion of the many trees in the region. The scientists will be able to know immediately what their research means when they enter the findings into the databases that they carry with them and also in the lab at the camp.
Using GPS satellites and setting up cameras to film animals may seem like a complete shift away from life at Malibu and while Fisher’s main field of study is technology at Pepperdine, one of the reasons she decided to take part in this expedition is to widen her experience past the coastal campus.
“Most of my work with technologies has happened inside school buildings, but this will be an outside the box-experience,” she said. “I expect to find a very different culture and get in touch with nature and science in innovative ways.”
Fisher attended the University of Denver where she first studied psychology, but after her college mentor told her that she had a skill with computer teaching she has been steady in educational technology ever since.
The Pantanal expedition is a way to help advance efforts to improve her teaching Fisher said. But as she continues at Pepperdine, Fisher said she sees a need for eventual changes in the approach to education.
“Education can no longer be defined by static guidelines but rather by growing, changing and evolving sets of opportunities, projects, technology and people,” Fisher said. “Students learn by becoming involved and they will be enabled to find their voice with technologies, and inspire others through their ideas.”
Ideas will certainly be able to grow if there are more opportunities to learn with a hand’s on, experiential approach. Fisher is attempting to bring this also by continuing her classes at Pepperdine via satellite during her stay in Brazil. This is just another example of Fisher’s dedication to teaching and to her students.
“I view teaching as a means to enhance the ‘communicative competence’ of my students,” Fisher said. “The issue is their voice (and) the power of their ideas.”
Like that combination of voices and ideas, Fisher takes technology and science and combines them to increase and expand knowledge.
03-31-2005