Science for Schools
The Maurice Wilkins Centre is committed to supporting science education in New Zealand schools. High-quality science education not only encourages the next generation of researchers, it also helps all young New Zealanders to understand and value science and how new scientific developments are important in their everyday lives.
Maurice Wilkins Centre school outreach initiatives
Biology is a fast-moving field, and teachers need mechanisms to keep abreast of the latest developments if they are to pass these messages along to their students successfully. The Centre realised the mechanisms to achieve this were very limited in New Zealand and so has decided to focus on working directly to support high school biology teachers.
Science teacher professional development
The NCEA curriculum requires biology teachers to teach in various new areas, but specific professional development courses have not been available. The Maurice Wilkins Centre has used the expertise of its investigators to provide teachers with a series of science update courses tailored to be directly relevant to the new curriculum.
The material has been presented in a series of free teacher professional development days, beginning in Auckland in 2012. Over 60 workshops have been held at 22 different venues from Kaitaia to Invercargill. These have attracted over 2500 registrations from teachers, and when surveyed, they said that the days were either “essential” or “very valuable”. The material is also freely available on our biology teacher resources page, and 95% of teachers who attended said they plan to use parts of this directly in their classroom teaching.
The MWC ran three workshops in 2024. The popular annual PD programme, in association with the Biology Educators of Aotearoa New Zealand (BEANZ), continued in 2024 at three locations: Dunedin (4 November), Auckland (5 November), and Nelson (6 November).
Over 170 local science educators and health providers nationwide attended the seminars to meet with and hear from New Zealand's leading scientists. Topics included homeostasis and thermoregulation, genomics insights into the settlement of Polynesia, the biochemistry of modifying biomolecules to tackle challenges in infectious diseases, the genetics and biology of cancers and the community-led circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) screening in Te Tairāwhiti, and medicine-guided chemistry and genomics to support Māori and Pasifika communities.
Read more about the programme, here.
Biology teacher development scholarships
The Centre also sponsors scholarships for high-school biology teachers to attend the annual Queenstown Research Week (QRW). The aim is to give New Zealand teachers the opportunity to attend an international conference on contemporary biological research and network with colleagues and practicing biologists from around the world.
Three high-school teachers were supported in 2024: Mr Andrew Leitch (John McGlashan College), Mrs Alexander McHugh (Waikato Diocesan School for Girls), and Ms Shazia Nisha (Wesley College).