Engaging High School Students in Science Using Ticks

by Ted Snyder, BCE

My student, Josh, was so excited to see me on Monday. This was part way through second semester at the high school where I teach, when Spring Break is a distant memory and the summer seems to be a long way off, a time when the class days begin to lag for both students and teachers. Josh’s excitement should have been unusual for this time in the school year. Except, he couldn’t wait to share what he discovered over the weekend. He had found an American dog tick on his leg and had brought it in for our class. 

Josh’s excitement was the result of a few years’ worth of planning and experimentation in the classroom. When I started as an environmental science teacher, I was surprised to find out that my school didn’t have a curriculum. We had some slides from a prior teacher, but they weren’t exactly usable. While searching the internet for ideas, the solution came to me. I could base my class upon the curriculum from 6A-F5, Principles of Military Preventive Medicine, and my own experience working both as a Medical Entomology Officer and co-teaching workshops with Environmental Science Officers.   

Fast forward a few years. As an officer in the US Army Reserve, I am stationed at US Army Public Health Command – East, Fort Meade. They developed plans for building a tick sweep with PVC pipe and cloth, and during one of my Annual Trainings, James Butler showed me how to use the sweep and gave me a set of instructions. 

Students best learn science through doing science, not through lectures alone. And when it comes to teaching students about ecosystems and land use, two important units in an environmental science curriculum, focusing classes upon a vector such as ticks or mosquitoes allows students to do the same work as a medical entomologist. 

Josh wasn’t the only student who was excited by the tick. We had already covered the local tick species, and my students were excited to practice their identification skills. Throughout the unit, individual lessons covered disease ecology, emerging diseases, epidemiology, transmission cycles, IPM, food webs and trophic levels, and the global distribution of diseases and vectors. But, unlike a more traditionally taught unit, the tick tie-in for each topic gave more importance to what we studied. For example, where ticks fall on the food web and how this varies according to each tick’s stage, particularly in relation to their hosts, allowed us to use iNaturalist to search nearby natural areas for host sightings. 

I purchased PVC pipe, PVC glue, and muslin, gave the students the instructions for building tick sweeps, and they made their own sweeps. None of the students had worked with PVC before, so they also picked up some life skills in the process. Then, we walked to a nearby natural area and surveyed for ticks. Unfortunately, local ecologists had performed a controlled burn in the area a couple of months prior, and we didn’t find any ticks when we surveyed the area. However, students came away with an understanding of ticks, the major diseases they vector, and having learned about ecosystems and land use through working as scientists, not just passively listening to lectures. 

Students still talk about the fun they had learning about ticks. Josh still brings up the tick that he found on his leg, and another student did independent studies on Powassan virus. None of these students may go on to have a career in entomology or public health, but they have had experiences they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.