Hi, everyone! It’s been a while. Here’s some updates on things I’ve been thinking about in my classroom and my graduate program.
Back in November, I went to a workshop with the fabulous Deb Morrison, a professor at the University of Washington College of Education. The focus was on activities and practices that increase equity in the science classroom. I left with a number of amazing tools, which are cataloged in this Google Doc which you should feel free to use and distribute, with attribution! The one I want to focus on today is “The Path Here – Educational Journey Maps.”
As a part of the activity, students are asked to map out the “key events, people or things in your life that have contributed to your science education.” This allows students to examine the ways they have been encouraged or discouraged in science, provides information to teachers about students’ personal relationships with science topics, and allows students to see trends in the ways different students have engaged with science in the past/reflect on how that impacts students’ current work and sense of belonging in the classroom.
I hope to use this with my students next fall, but as an experiment, I decided to create my own journey map of how I came to be a science teacher. Here’s what I have so far:
Until I completed the activity, I would never have noticed a few striking trends:
- Middle school is basically absent from my timeline – it is like a gap in my experience of education. Many of my middle school memories have been blocked out, in large part because of hormones (or at least that’s my theory)
- I have had very few positive relationships with science teachers. With the exception of two or three college professors and my 5th grade teacher, no conventional science teacher has really had a positive relationship with me as a student. This is striking, given how much I enjoy teaching science now.
- I had a lot of pressure growing up to become a scientist, and I was very resistant to that pressure. My mother’s parents were both scientists, and I was a bright student as a kid, and as a result I was pushed hard into STEM topics. As a result, I pushed hard back. Especially as a school-aged girl, I felt like there was an expectation that I would go into STEM to break stereotypes about women in those fields.
- Interestingly, I spent a lot of my free time as a kid working on STEM-related projects, like taking apart electronics, spending time in the woods, and learning to identify birds. However, I never really got to connect those passions to the work we were doing in classroom science until I got to college. I spent a lot of high school avoiding science by testing out of those classes based on knowledge I had from reading and being cared for by my grandparents. As a result, my best connections are with humanities teachers who allow me to pursue topics of interest and push me to critically think about issues of justice and representation.
Based on this work, I included a question about teachers’ paths to science on a recent interview done with 6 teachers in my professional learning community. I was working on some interview practice for an upcoming research capstone in my graduate program, and was asking teachers to reflect on their inclusive practices in their classrooms. Below is a table summarizing those teachers’ responses to thinking about moments when they were especially included or excluded from the grade school science classroom:
The most striking trend I noticed was in teachers discussing a specific project, paper, or lab that drew them into the practice of science. One teacher described breeding a specific kind of fruit fly on her own using multiple generations of reproduction and her knowledge of genetics. Another talked about a paper written in a seminar that she had worked especially hard on that had been appreciated by her professor.
As I enter into leading a long-term research project for the first time as a science teacher, I am excited to try and create this sense of excitement, personal investment, and challenge for my students. It would not have occurred to me before completing this exercise that this could be listed as an inclusive practice within science teaching, but it is clear that both in the experience and teaching of science content, having authentically engaging and challenging independent tasks is a keystone for many students’ ability to see themselves belonging in that space. More to come on how that plays out in the near future!
What are the key moments from your own STEM education that led you to feel included or excluded in that space? Share in the comments!