Fuchs Foundation Antarctic Expedition 2007

From 05.12.2007 to 20.01.2008 - Status: success

Four teachers on the ice

The Fuchs Foundation would like to inspire future younger generations by sending young teachers into the Polar Regions so that they can carry out scientific projects in situ, and therefore in a hostile environment.

The Fuchs Foundation's project is truly original. By forcing young teachers out of the traditional comfort zone of their teaching, by imposing undreamt of challenges on them, and by plunging them into a hostile environment for a few weeks, the Foundation's Managers hope that the teachers will acquire new experience that could be used in the classroom. They also hope their adventure will profoundly change their courses, making lectures more fascinating than ever and their methods more dynamic.

Phill Avery, an Oxford PGCE student and Geography Co-ordinator at Oxted School, will try to understand how the human being can tolerate temperatures that can drop to minus 50 or even minus 60°C. All the members of the team will lend their bodies to the analysis and will even have to plunge their heads and hands into icy water several times in order to measure the reactions of their hearts.

Ruth Hollinger, Geography Teacher at Tapton School (Sheffield), will concentrate on taking photographs and on studying the footmarks left in the snow. She will focus on a more glaciological and more traditional study of the Union Glacier.

Amy Rogers, for his part, is a science teacher in the Higham Lane School of Nuneaton. He will be responsible for collecting and studying lichens and their ecology in places of the Antarctic where, to date, no samples have been taken.

Ian Richardson is head of the "Biology" section in Ferman College, Butingford (Hertfordshire). He is going to study the remarkable specimens of what is called microfauna in the Ellsworth Mountain chain. Some of the species that he will have to find are endemic to this area of the world and show remarkable adaptations to the polar cold.