Ryan McRae

This project delivers a four day professional development workshop at the Nairobi National Museum, Kenya for 40 Nairobi-area high school teachers that introduces them to teaching strategies for religiously sensitive topics including human evolution, a new museum-based evolution school program focused on the iconic Turkana Boy fossil as a case study of human evolution, tours of the museum exhibits and collections, and a field trip to two prehistoric sites. The workshop is designed to increase Kenyan teachers’ comfort and confidence in teaching human evolution and navigating related science-religion conversations in their classrooms and to increase their content knowledge about human evolution. This will build the capacity of teachers to nurture the next generation of paleoanthropologists in Kenya by engaging their students with authentic human evolution content during high school. This project builds on prior workshops conducted by the Prehistory Club at the National Museum of Kenya, Nairobi.