Ben Davis
In August, the education subteam met with Ben Davis, a teacher at Henderson Hopkins Middle School, to learn about inclusivity in school systems. Davis believes that the issue with inclusivity in education is that school systems do not highlight or include diverse scientists in their curriculums. To help address this issue and teach students about science, diverse scientists could come into the classroom and provide demonstrations to engage the students. His insight was extremely valuable as the education team continued educating others, especially in their goal to emphasize diversity in synthetic biology.
Davis’s insight has been extremely valuable as the education team continues improving their calendar and educating others in their goal to emphasize diversity in synthetic biology. They plan to interview more teachers about the presence of diversity in STEM education and how their calendar may help with inclusivity within the classroom. Additionally, to add more material to the calendar and further engage students, they have compiled supplemental information and videos about each scientist, which are linked on the calendar through a QR code and can be found above in the calendar drop down menu.
Karen Edery
Another teacher that we were fortunate enough to communicate with was Mrs. Edery, who teaches biology, scientific inquiry, and analysis at a vocational-technical school. From Mrs. Edery, we learned that the curriculum does not always allow for many additions. However, teaching about diversity in science is important and currently not represented in her school’s curriculum. For her, she would like to teach more about diversity, but faces issues with timing. In addition, different levels of students may benefit from varying levels of information about the scientist’s contributions to their fields. Showing students not only the scientists, but helping them to understand their work could help to further inspire students and augment their abilities in science to become closer to their role models.
Mrs. Edery taught us that it would be important to provide lots of information about the scientists' work to the supplemental educational materials that we create. This would help teachers to integrate our calendar better into their lesson plans. Keeping the calendar information short and sweet would be helpful, so that it could be used as a short activity at the start of each month. This would help teachers who do not have much time to add a full-fledged lesson about diversity to their lesson plans.
Jetaime Ross
We are very grateful that we were able to gain the insight of Ms. Ross. One of the main things that we learned from her is how she tailors her lessons to each class. She decides on the lessons based on her classroom’s academic levels, culture, interest levels, and other observations. To support various learning styles, Ms. Ross provides various visual cues, scaffolding and other modalities. As to why teachers do not focus more on educating about diversity, Ms. Ross mentions that many teachers feel unequipped to deal with potential sensitive topics. When asked about what kind of educational materials would be helpful, she stated that science curriculum that is culturally responsive, inclusive, and includes specifically tailored information would be beneficial. As for the calendar, Ms. Ross stated that bulleted information about the scientist and their contributions would be enough. She highly values the need to teach about diversity in science and thinks that providing role models for students will allow them to see the world from a fuller perspective.
From our discussion with Ms. Ross, we took away the fact we would need to prioritize equity throughout our calendar. Additionally, it would be important for us to highlight the differences in people, which is what makes them special. By doing this, we would be able to show kids that being different is a good thing, and seeing things from different perspectives is actually what triggers many scientific discoveries. Also, our conversation with Ms. Ross allowed us to recognize the importance of highlighting setbacks, as well as successes. We tried to show setbacks in the supplemental material provided. By providing teachers with information, hopefully we alleviated some of the feelings of discomfort about teaching topics different from what they are used to.
Kim Brown
Kim Brown is the director for a homeschool co-op, which one of our students attends. Furthermore, she has also been a teacher in homeschooling for a number of years. She helped shed light on sexism and racism in STEM, particularly from chemistry book publishers. “I found all STEM subjects needing diversity improvement. The sexism is rampant.”
