Physiology Understanding (PhUn) Week at Texas A&M University‐Kingsville: a Retrospective Study

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Texas A&M University‐Kingsville (TAMUK) is located in Kingsville, Texas and serves a highly diverse student body of around 9,000 students. PhUn week is a K‐12 community outreach activity that in 2014 had 86 events nationwide (www.aps.org). Out of the 86 events, only three of them were in Texas, and none of them south of San Antonio. During the Fall semesters of 2016, 2017 and 2018 the Biological and Health Sciences (BHS) Department at TAMUK offered the course Understanding Human Physiology (BIOL 4355) centered on service learning. As part of this course, students developed ways to teach newly acquired physiology concepts to elementary and middle school students. Interactive workshops were presented during Physiology Understanding Week as a way to showcase what students had learned in the areas of cardiovascular, immune, respiratory, renal and nervous system. Support from the American Physiological Society, Service Learning initiatives at TAMUK, and the TAMUK BHS Department were critical for the success of this program. Here we will discuss how in 3 years, a total of 41 TAMUK undergraduate presenters and 13 volunteers impacted five schools and more than 500 elementary and middle school students. PhUn week activities allowed the university to build local partnerships between science teachers and student scientists. In addition, this kind of engaging activities served as a platform for students to reach out to our communities, and to motivate the next generation of scientists.Support or Funding InformationThis project was funded by The American Physiological Society, Texas A&M Service Learning Initiative and the TAMUK Biological and Health Sciences Department.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.