STEAM education–science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics–prepares students for success beyond high school by helping them develop much-needed durable skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving.
An integrated STEAM education also puts students on the path to success with higher test scores, stronger attendance records, better disciplinary records, and increased engagement and graduation rates.
STEAM education is trending at an opportune time: The COVID-19 pandemic caused learning loss across the board, and a STEAM-centered curriculum that engages students while weaving important 21st-century education principles into real-world lessons is critical for success.
Let’s take a closer look at STEAM education:
What is an example of STEAM education?
Makerspaces are a great example of STEAM learning, letting students combine creativity and art elements into more traditional STEM topics. School makerspaces have emerged as centers of creativity, problem solving, collaboration, and more. These skills–often referred to as soft skills, but also known as durable skills for their importance in the workplace–are a focus of 21st-century classrooms. These days, school libraries often include makerspaces and librarians are becoming well-versed in the coding, robotics, engineering, and tinkering skills necessary to help students bring their ideas to fruition. Let’s look at some STEAM education facts: Here are 5 resources (digital and non-digital) for school makerspaces that might be worth a look.
What does STEAM do for education?
As STEM has risen in prominence over the past decade, arts education has yet to achieve the same recognition and integration. In order to provide a rich, robust, and inclusive curriculum for youth, STEM needs to evolve to STEAM. And in many ways, that transition is already taking place as technology and engineering drive the next wave of art and creative expression. You can’t have one without the other. As our digital world encompasses new storytelling mediums across design, audio engineering, music production, digital art, and more, new unique skill sets are required to prepare young people for careers of the future. STEAM education principles need to become embedded into media production, music production, and graphic design to enable the next wave of innovation and creativity needed for these major technological shifts. STEAM education lesson plans can incorporate so many learning principles. Here’s why creativity is essential in today’s curriculum.
What is STEAM and STEM activity?
Much STEM and STEAM activity happens in labs. A STEM or STEAM lab is an environment where students, irrespective of grade, can come together and actively participate in hands-on STEM and STEAM learning. These educational spaces encourage active learning and problem solving. In these STEM laboratories, students can develop their science, engineering, and mathematics skills by using technology to create, collaborate, and complete projects–learning and applying knowledge to find new solutions. Imagine a technology-enhanced learning environment where everything is student-centered and supports theme and project-based learning–that’s a STEM lab! And these are just a few STEM and STEAM education examples. Here are 4 ideas to consider when creating a STEM or STEAM lab.
What is the value of STEAM education?
Science, technology, engineering, and math are broad but dynamic subjects that contain innumerable and specific learning concepts. Arts and sciences have traditionally been perceived as different subjects with few commonalities, and STEM programs often omit the arts from the conversation. But with a STEAM-centered curriculum, students are trained to introduce design, agile thinking, and creative solutions to solve social and scientific problems and bring new inventions to fruition. What’s more, a multi-subject approach to a STEAM education promotes deeper conceptual learning and career self-determination, and prepares youth for interdisciplinary STEAM careers in a rapidly changing workplace. So, what’s the impact of STEAM education? A STEAM learning approach encourages collaboration to understand and distill new concepts. By integrating the arts, a STEAM-centered curriculum uses tools such as quantitative visualization or fine arts imagery to deepen one’s understanding of science, math, and technology. Here’s why students will benefit from STEAM learning.
What are 3 benefits of STEM?
A new study at the University of Missouri–in partnership with Harvard-Smithsonian researchers–shows that when colleges host ‘STEM Career Days,’ the students who attend are far more likely to pursue a career in a STEM-related field. The findings not only highlight the benefits of college recruiters introducing high school students to STEM-related opportunities, but they can also help increase and diversify the STEM workforce in the United States. The benefits of STEAM education and STEM learning help students develop much-needed skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration. Students learn how to navigate challenging situations regardless of what career field they pursue. STEM learning benefits are invaluable.
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
WASHINGTON — Two tribal colleges in northern Minnesota are receiving millions in funding to expand their science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs.
On Wednesday, U.S. Sens. Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar, both Democrats from Minnesota, announced STEM expansion funding for White Earth Tribal and Community College and Red Lake Nation College. The funding comes from the National Science Foundation.
Smith, a member of the Senate Indian Affairs and Education committees, says the demand for STEM-trained employees has soared, which highlights the importance of education in those fields.
“This funding will provide accessible pathways for Native students to pursue higher education and serve their communities — all while integrating Tribal cultural heritage and roots into their curriculum,” Smith said.
Both colleges will receive $2.5 million.
White Earth’s college will be using the funding to begin offering an associate’s degree in natural sciences, with coursework that includes biology, chemistry and physics. Tribal cultural heritage will also be integrated in the curriculum.
Red Lake Nation College will focus on expanding its curriculum in social and behavioral sciences with coursework rooted in the Ojibwe language and culture.
WCCO has reached out to both colleges for their response to the funding announcement.
Cole Premo is a web producer at WCCO.com. For more than a decade, he’s been covering breaking news and weather, daily topics, stories from the Native community and more in Minnesota.
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Angelique Hammack, a teacher in California, creates lesson plans about climate change for the website SubjectToClimate. She often starts from a question posed by one of her four children.
Her 7-year-old, who has autism, has been really interested in space lately. “He was asking me questions about the solar system and about black holes, and I started pulling out all these books I had on outer space,” she said. “He’s got a telescope for his birthday, he’s been looking at the moon.”
When he asked the question about whether there were more Earths, Hammack saw the opening to create a climate-related lesson that explains how Earth is a “Goldilocks planet,” with just-right conditions for life to thrive.
New York state is currently considering several climate education bills. If the proposed policies become law, the state will join California and New Jersey in mandating that climate topics be introduced across grade levels and subjects, not just confined to science class. A wide range of science and environmental groups such as the National Wildlife Federation andEarthday.org back this interdisciplinary approach to climate education.
But as the movement for teaching climate grows, thanks to new standards and increasing student curiosity, teachers are on the hunt for materials and lessons they can rely on. “I think there’s a big disconnect,” said Lauren Madden, professor of elementary science education at The College of New Jersey. “Teachers really need materials that they can use tomorrow.”
For the last few years, Madden has been researching the experiences of teachers who are tackling this topic. She shared some of her results with The Hechinger Report. SubjectToClimate, a large free repository of climate change lessons, also shared some data on its most popular lessons and materials.
Madden said that what teachers need most are clear strategies that allow them to plug climate lessons into existing curricula, so that climate can be interwoven with existing requirements, rather than wedged into an already-packed schedule. “Teachers want and need straightforward starting points in terms of instructional materials,” she said.
Yen-Yen Chiu, director of content creation for SubjectToClimate, agreed. In response to demand, she said, the organization is beginning to create teacher pacing guides, like a middle school math pacing guide that maps specific climate resources from their database to math standards.
Here’s an overview of more key findings from Madden, and from Hammack and Chiu at SubjectToClimate.
Younger learners have big questions: At SubjectToClimate, the most-searched lessons are for grades K-5; and there is unmet demand for grades 3-5. Hammack said it can be tough to find materials that are simple enough for the youngest students. “I created a unit on energy — I intended it for K-2 but we ended up changing it to 3-4,” she said. “Energy is so abstract for a K-2nd audience.”
Energy, extreme weather and humanities: Energy is the most popular topic on SubjectToClimate. There’s also growing interest in lessons related to extreme weather, and lessons that relate to non-science subjects, such as writing and public speaking. One art lesson — on “Energy and Art” is among the top 10 most popular on the site.
Facts and evidence: Madden finds teachers (especially new ones) want to gain familiarity with facts they might not have learned in a general education curriculum. They also need to be able to clearly and simply attribute scientific findings to specific data: i.e., how we know that atmospheric carbon is rising, or that storms are getting bigger. This presents a bigger challenge, requiring the development of scientific literacy, Madden said: “I think it’s important that we explain what counts as evidence.”
Debate, but not doubt: In the United States, climate change is still a highly politicized topic. Teachers need help to present debates in an evolving field of research without losing sight of the overwhelming scientific consensus. This also includes lessons that directly combat misinformation or disinformation that students might bring in from outside the classroom. “Teachers want to know where scientific debate is appropriate. For example, wind vs. solar is a topic that can yield productive discussion, while whether climate change is exacerbated by human activity is not,” said Madden. The New York Times recently reportedthat a Republican state representative wants to amend standards in Connecticut in a way that would obscure that consensus in the name of open debate.
Climate brings up feelings: While a lot of introduction of climate topics is happening in response to new state standards, Madden said students are also bringing up the topic, for example, in response to extreme or unseasonable weather. And that’s making some teachers nervous. “Teachers worry that they are not knowledgeable enough about the science of climate change to answer students’ questions appropriately,” she said. “There is also concern about inciting dread and anxiety in children, especially at the lower grade levels.” Hammack said that she finds herself wondering how deep to go: “Some of the videos I’ve been watching are scaring me and I’m 44!” And Madden said those climate emotions are, if anything, stronger among kids in higher grades. “In my experience, it’s preteens and teenagers who have that sense of understanding the scope of these problems,” she said. “They are very concerned.”
English Language Learners: There’s a gap in resources for these learners. Madden points out that in Spanish, “clima” is the word for both “weather” and “climate,” which can at times cause confusion. SubjectToClimate lists 93 resources suitable for Spanish speakers and/or Spanish classes.
Focus on solutions: Related to concerns about climate anxiety, is a clear desire for lessons that deal with solutions. Among the SubjectToClimate top 10 most-trafficked lesson plans are two that deal with renewable energy, one about conservation, one about reducing, reusing and recycling, and one about green transportation. Underscoring the demand, This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m an advisor) and The Nature Conservancy are currently collaborating on an initiative to create more short-form content for children focused on hope and solutions.
“I have to say that the message that comes across loud and clear to me has been — telling the truth is really important, and focusing on areas for solutions and optimism,” said Madden. “There are really great things happening at the edges of what humans are capable of right now.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
When Kim Rider and her team contact a former student, they aren’t just checking in — they’re also gathering data.
Rider oversees career and technical education in Allen Parish, a region of rural Louisiana known for pine forests and the state’s largest casino. The 4,000-student school district offers classes in agriculture and health sciences, courses in coding and welding, and internships at the local hospital and the district offices.
Yet Rider can’t be sure that her program steers students toward successful careers. That’s because Louisiana, like many states, lacks a system for tracking students once they enter the workforce. To follow students’ career paths, Rider and her colleagues must ask the graduates themselves for updates.
“That’s about what we can do right now because we don’t have the tracking system,” she said. Without one, “How accurately can we see if these programs are truly leading to viable careers?”
As college costs soar and demand for skilled labor rises, programs that prepare students for well-paid work are gaining popularity. About 85 percent of high school graduates in 2019 had taken at least one course in career and technical education, or CTE. In 2018, Congress increased annual funding for CTE, which now exceeds $1.4 billion. And in 2022, 36 states enacted policies promoting career training for high schoolers, college students, and adults, according to Advance CTE, a professional organization for state CTE leaders.
Yet many states struggle to answer a basic question: Is career education working?
Their inability to answer stems from disconnected data. Due to student privacy concerns, a number of states fail to connect their K-12 school and workforce data sets. In effect, students fall off the states’ radar when they start working.
Students suit up for medical assistant class at Walker High School in Livingston Parish, Louisiana. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report
Now, Louisiana is one of a few states seeking to combine its data sets in order to track students from preschool into college and careers. Until then, students’ post-high school employment outcomes remain a mystery. Do former CTE students find jobs in the industries they studied? Do they earn good wages? Prospective CTE students and policymakers have no way of knowing.
“You can’t see that in most places,” said Daniel Kreisman, an economics professor at Georgia State University who helped launch an effort to inform CTE policymakers by compiling data and producing research. “Without that, they’re making decisions in the dark.”
Louisiana bet big on career education. Beginning in 2014, the state sought to improve CTE instruction, better align course offerings with the job market and increase funding. By 2018, the number of industry-recognized credentials students earned, signaling they attained specific job skills, had grown fivefold.
Yet nearly a decade since starting the overhaul, the state still hasn’t shown that CTE gives students a career boost. Officials can’t study the long-term outcomes because in 2014 Louisiana lawmakers passed one of the nation’s strictest student-data privacy laws, which blocked state agencies from sharing student data.
One upshot is that policymakers cannot see where public school graduates work or how much they earn. Another consequence: Louisiana is one of just five states that do not report to the federal government exactly how many CTE students find jobs soon after high school, a U.S. Education Department spokeswoman said — despite a law requiring states to report students’ post-CTE outcomes. (Louisiana does report on other outcomes, such as college enrollment.)
At a legislative hearing in 2020, a Louisiana education department official said the reporting lapse could cost the state $21 million in annual federal funding for career education. (A department spokesman recently said no funding was lost.) Another agency official said she had been “begging” for years to see former CTE students’ employment records, but the privacy law forbade it.
“Are we preparing them for a career in the fields that we say we are?” Jill Prather-Cowart, then an assistant superintendent, asked lawmakers. “I think we’re doing a great job, but I have no data or research.”
A student puts the final touches on a steel fire pit during his welding class at Walker High School in Livingston Parish, Louisiana. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report
Louisiana’s blind spot is not unique. Only 27 states maintain data systems that connect education and employment information, according to a 2021 analysis by the Education Commission of the States. The rest keep school and work data separate.
“The information is collected, but right now it’s not serving anyone,” said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit that pushes for preschool-to-career data tracking. She added that, even in states with connected data systems, the information is often inaccessible to school districts and the public.
Put to better use, data showing how CTE graduates fare in the labor market could provide valuable insights, advocates say. Policymakers could troubleshoot CTE programs whose graduates struggle to find jobs, while schools could use positive outcomes to attract business partners and students could review data about graduates’ employment rates and earnings before deciding on a CTE program.
“It would give students more of an option to see how it could affect their future,” said Madison Badeaux, a 12th grader at Walker High School in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, where she took a medical assistant course this fall.
Lacking longitudinal data, some states survey high school graduates about their careers, but the responses often are scant and unrepresentative. School districts sometimes try to collect their own data by contacting former students and local employers or scouring LinkedIn, but the method isn’t feasible for larger districts.
Brandi Desselle, the CTE coordinator for Livingston Parish Public Schools in Louisiana, said she’s looking forward to changes that will allow her to more easily track student job outcomes. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report
“That is something I would love to be able to do, but we don’t have the manpower,” said Brandi Desselle, CTE coordinator for Livingston Parish Public Schools, which enrolls some 27,000 students.
States that don’t track graduates’ careers still must report short-term outcomes. The federal career education law, called the Perkins Act, requires states to choose at least one measure of CTE quality: the share of high school CTE students who earn job-skill credentials, attain college credits, or participate in work-based learning, such as internships or apprenticeships.
But achieving those benchmarks is no guarantee of career success. For example, a 2020 analysis found that only 18 percent of the credentials CTE students earn are sought by employers in job postings. And a 2022 study, focused on Texas, found that most former CTE students work in industries or choose college majors unrelated to the credentials they earned.
Although credentials vary widely — from Microsoft Office specialist to emergency medical technician — states’ reported data can mask differences in students’ career preparation. For example, Louisiana reported that about 54 percent of CTE students in 2022 earned industry-recognized credentials, but a state task force found that only 6 percent of CTE graduates that year earned advanced credentials, which are more likely to help students secure high-wage jobs.
“The attainment of a credential, in and of itself, is not success,” said Erin Bendily, vice president for policy and strategy at the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a Louisiana think tank.
A firefighter training class at Walker High School in Livingston Parish, Louisiana has students climbing ladders and rolling hoses. Several graduates are now working as firefighters, according to their training officer. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report
The U.S. Department of Education has long promoted school-to-workforce data tracking. Since 2006, it has awarded states more than $900 million to create data systems that can track students over time, and is working on an effort to help states share employment data. Still, as of 2020, only 35 percent of states and territories included workforce data in their student tracking systems, according to a department survey.
States that do connect school and work data, such as Florida and Maryland, have found that taking career courses in high school can lead some students to earn higher wages after graduation. (Maryland’s data, in line with other research, suggests that CTE training in skilled trades like construction produces the biggest wage boost.) California has spent years developing its own Cradle-to-Career Data System, set to launch this year, which should shed light on students’ long-term outcomes.
Emily Passias, deputy executive director of Advance CTE, said she expects more states to follow suit as lawmakers seek evidence that career education warrants the investment.
Students practice drawing blood in a Walker High School class that trains medical assistants. Programs such as these are popular in the Livingston Parish, Louisiana high school, but school leaders say they have a hard time determining if they are leading to jobs in the field. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report
“Our state legislators are asking the right questions,” she said. “How does X program affect Y labor market outcomes?”
In Louisiana, lawmakers might soon get some answers.
In 2022, Louisiana enacted a law requiring the state workforce commission to share high school graduates’ employment data with the education department. To comply with the privacy law, parents must consent to the tracking, which ends when students turn 26, and the employment records must omit social security numbers. Data-sharing was set to begin in December.
Under a separate law enacted last June, Louisiana is building a new system called LA FIRST that will combine data from multiple state agencies, including education and workforce. The data will inform annual reports, including one on students’ college and career outcomes.
Knowing how each CTE program’s graduates fare in the labor market will help the state identify which programs to expand or improve and give other districts models to emulate, said Ernise Singleton, who oversees college and career readiness for the Louisiana education department.
“Hopefully this data will allow a lot more transparency across the state in seeing what others are doing that’s leading to success,” she said.
A student prepares to take a blood pressure reading in a medical assistant class at Walker High School in Louisiana. Credit: Patrick Wall for The Hechinger Report
As of December, the participating agencies were still finalizing data-sharing agreements, said Stephen Barnes, director of the Kathleen Babineaux Blanco Public Policy Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which is managing the system. Due to privacy concerns, it is not yet clear whether the system will report on each school districts’ student outcomes or only statewide trends, Barnes added.
“We want the insights to be actionable,” he said. “But certainly one of the broad concerns we have is protecting confidentiality.”
On a recent afternoon, Desselle, the CTE coordinator in Livingston Parish, gave a tour of the career programs at Walker High School. In the welding shop, students put the final touches on steel fire pits that will sell for $200 each. One senior was scheduled to begin working for a welding company the day after he graduates.
In a medical assistant class, where students demonstrated how to draw blood and measure blood pressure, a 12th grader said she planned to become a labor and delivery nurse. And in a firefighter class, while students climbed ladders and rolled up hoses, a training officer said several of last year’s graduates now work for fire departments.
The anecdotes suggested the school was putting students on a path to successful careers. But exactly how many students land good jobs and keep them? The school won’t know until the state shares its data.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
SHPE Joins 4th Delegation of Hispanic Leaders at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Representing the 5th Largest Economy in the World
LOS ANGELES, February 5, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– In January 2024, SHPE attended the 54th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This yearly convening welcomes over 100 governments, all major international organizations, 1,000 Forum’s Partners, as well as civil society leaders, experts, youth representatives, social entrepreneurs, and news outlets.
SHPE interim CEO Miguel Alemañy and Chief External Relations Officer Monique Herrera were invited by the We Are All Human Foundation to join the Hispanic Delegation in Davos. This delegation aims to ensure that Hispanic voices are heard and that Hispanic leaders have a seat at the table when decisions impacting their communities are made.
While this was SHPE’s second time joining the global gathering, Alemañy and Herrera were not in unfamiliar territory. Many of the organization’s greatest supporters had both representation and influence there. SHPE partners like IBM, Microsoft, Bank of America, Accenture, Qualcomm, and JP Morgan Chase were major players in discussions that took place throughout the week.
“The access we had to industry decision-makers was remarkable, “ says Hererra. “It was incredibly valuable to be able to have conversations with various corporate leaders in one place. What might usually take months to make happen due to travel and scheduling, we could accomplish in one evening while there.”
The Forum’s theme was “Rebuilding Trust.” In response to the rise of AI and its effect on the global workforce, it was designed to be a crucial space to focus on the fundamental principles driving trust, including transparency, consistency, and accountability.
Speaker sessions and panels provided important insights into the future of the STEM employee. Key learnings included the role of the knowledge worker, emphasis on pre-skilling employees, and the importance of middle management. Additionally, a commitment to DEI was reinforced consistently.
“We walked away with three truths,” says Alemañy. “STEM careers are still on the rise and will be for the next 20, 30, 50 years. As the 5th largest economy in the world, Hispanics are both an economic powerhouse and workforce goldmine in the coming decades. And SHPE is uniquely positioned to answer the call of this supply and demand with our passionate and resilient members.”
“This experience was helpful on two levels,” Hererra added. “It reinforced that SHPE’s current programs are providing necessary pre-skill training, leadership development, and problem-solving for the next generation of STEM workers. It also helped us lay groundwork for new programs to address the challenges facing an evolving tech-centered world in the future.”
SHPE is grateful for the partners that made this trip possible: We Are All Human Foundation, HACE, Latinas in TECH, Martin Cabrera with Cabrera Capital, Dr. Robert Rodriguez, and HACR. SHPE looks forward to working together in the coming years to elevate the influence and recognition of Hispanics.
Turn your calendar to February and find new engaging resources from Discovery Education! With DE resources, you can plan February fun where your students can explore STEM innovations, important moments in history, and career options to prepare them for the future! Pop of Professional Learning What’s New Trending Topics Magic Moment Pop of Professional Learning […]
Pleasantville is a mostly Black and Hispanic community located between two major freeways, the I-10 and the 610, in Houston, Texas. This placement is no accident, saidBridgette Murray, a retired nurse and local community leader: “The highway plan in the 1950s was used to divide communities of color.” Today, an estimated 300,000 vehicles stream by on a daily basis, she said. The neighborhood is also close to the Houston Ship Channel, exposing it to heavy industrial pollution.
But state air monitoring stations aren’t placed to capture all the hazards concentrated in that small area. So Murray’s group, ACTS (Achieving Community Tasks Successfully), has been partnering for almost a decade with urban planning expert Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University, to do their own air quality monitoring. ACTS just won a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to expand the program.
Bullard has been called the father of the environmental justice movement. His 1990 book “Dumping in Dixie” documented the systemic placement of polluting facilities and waste disposal in communities of color, as well as those communities fighting back. He said scientists and communities need each other.
“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people,” he said. “We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”
“It’s a mutual respect,” Murray said of the relationship between her group and the Texas Southern researchers. “You have to have a partner that respects the ideas you are bringing to the table and also allows you to grow.”
Bullard is co-founder, with Beverly Wright, of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium, which brings together historically black universities and community-based organizations in what Wright has termed the “communiversity” model. There are partnerships like the one in Houston all over the South: Dillard and Xavier Universities, in New Orleans, working on wetlands restoration and equitable recovery from storms; Jackson State is working in Gulfport, Mississippi, on legacy pollution; and Florida A&M in Pensacola on the issue of landfills and borrow pits (holes dug to extract sand and clay that are then used as landfill).
Bullard said it’s no accident that so many HBCUs are involved in this work. “Black colleges and universities historically combined the idea of using education for advancement and liberation, with the struggle for civil rights.”
When these partnerships go smoothly, Bullard said, universities provide community-based organizations with access to data and help advocating for themselves; students and scholars get opportunities to do applied research with a clear social mission.
“We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”
Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University
A lot of growth is happening in environmental justice right now. ACTS’ $500,000 EPA grant is part of what the White House touts as “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by the Federal Government.” Notably, President Biden’s Justice40 initiative decrees that 40 percent of all federal dollars allocated to climate change, clean energy, and related policy goals flow to communities like Pleasantville: marginalized, underserved, and systematically overburdened by pollution.
Expanding on this model, the EPA has allocated $177 million to 16 “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers” — a mix of nonprofits and universities that will help groups like ACTS get federal grants to achieve their goals.
But, warned Bullard, all the new funding might cause a gold rush, raising the danger of attracting bad actors. Sometimes, he said, universities act like “grant-writing mills,” exploiting communities without sharing the benefits. “You parachute in, you mine the data, you leave and the community doesn’t know what hit them. That is not authentic partnership.”
Murray, at ACTS, has seen that kind of behavior herself. “A one-sided relationship where they came in to take information,” she recalled. “The paper was written, the accolades [for researchers] happen, and the community is just like it was, with no ability to address anything.”
“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people.”
Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University
It takes sensitivity and hard work to overcome what can be a long history of town-gown tensions between universities and local communities. “You have to earn trust,” said Bullard. “Trust is not given by a memorandum of understanding.” One way to break down barriers is to make sure that all participants — whether they have a GED or a PhD — share the air equitably at meetings between researchers and community leaders. And those meetings might be held in the evenings or on weekends, because community groups are often run by volunteers.
Denae King, a PhD toxicologist, works with Bullard as an associate director at the Bullard Center. She said she’s always looking for a chance to give space to community partners like ACTS, and reduce or equalize any power dynamic.
“I just ended a meeting where someone was asking me to put together a proposal to showcase environmental justice at a conference,” she said. “Before I would be willing to do that, I want to make sure it’s OK to showcase community leaders in this space. I might split my time in half and we co-present. Or it may look like me helping the community leader to prepare their presentation. I might be in the room and say nothing, but my presence says, I’m here to support you.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
BioBuddy aims to improve comprehension and access to all learners. With eye-catching animated lecture videos, a customizable Q&A study tool, and tutor walkthrough explanations, this platform makes learning even the most challenging topics fun.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, January 10, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– BioBuddy.com, an education technology startup, announces the pilot launch in Ohio for their cutting-edge biology e-learning platform.
BioBuddy paired world-class animators with experts in biology to create a resource that improves both comprehension and access for all students. BioBuddy offers seven hours of high-quality animated lecture videos, a customizable Q&A study tool, and hundreds of tutor walkthrough explanations.
All this content is offered online at BioBuddy.com with packages starting at $9.99/mo. Quality, comprehension, and access are paramount to the founding members of BioBuddy.
“It is our mission to provide all students, educators, and parents with the highest quality STEM resources. We will continue to work tirelessly to provide content that improves comprehension and makes learning fun. By remaining focused on this task, we aim to inspire the next generation of leaders in the STEM space.” – The BioBuddy Team
BioBuddy is being built at The Ohio State University with the help of the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship.
The BioBuddy Story:
The idea for BioBuddy began with two non-traditional pre-med students, an Army medic, and a paramedic, who were roommates during a Post Baccalaureate Pre Med program. When their classes had to be delivered remotely because of COVID-19, they noticed a lack of high-quality resources for their STEM classes. This is where the BioBuddy journey began.
El Segundo Unified School District (ESUSD), in partnership with EdSAFE AI Alliance, is proud to announce the establishment of a new AI Policy Lab. The lab will be focused on fostering safe and ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) in educational settings, and part of a nationwide network of similar policy initiatives, including the New York City Public Schools AI Policy Lab.
“Our AI policy initiative underscores our dedication to integrating AI in a manner that prioritizes our values,” stated Melissa Moore, Superintendent at ESUSD. “Our primary objectives include ensuring equity, safety, ethical practices, effectiveness, and transparency. We aim to incorporate a wide array of perspectives in this process, including those of policymakers, industry experts, educators, students, and families, to collaboratively develop AI strategies and policies that resonate with our community’s unique needs and principles.”
ESUSD’s AI Policy Lab is designed as a collaborative, interdisciplinary partnership that encourages responsible AI development, deployment, and usage. The lab will provide ESUSD with policy recommendations and educational resources for teachers, students, and parents, and facilitate ongoing refinement to ensure policies are in sync with practical applications with a particular focus on community, parent and student engagement.
The national network – led by the EdSAFE AI Alliance – aimed at addressing the challenges and embracing the opportunities arising from the rapid introduction of AI in education. The network is comprised of 12 districts throughout the country who have come together to develop a “policy stack” – including acceptable use policies, parent communication and consent policies, and professional development resources for their districts.
By working together in an open science approach the network aims to create a comprehensive policy stack supporting AI’s responsible, secure integration in K-12 education by involving experts from various fields. This collaborative effort is a significant step towards leveraging AI in education more effectively and aligned with the SAFE framework.
Numerade, the AI-powered online STEM learning platform, announced the company is offering a free year of access to its Numerade Plus subscription to all Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) K-12 students and teachers. With Numerade Plus, students and teachers will have access to a full suite of education features, including over 100 million textbook video solutions, expert-verified answers, full-length video courses, custom quizzes, unlimited “Ask an Expert” questions, and an AI chatbot tutor powered by GPT-4.
The initiative comes as downstream effects from pandemic-related learning losses continue to manifest. In fact, recent data from the state found that most California students don’t meet grade-level standards in math and reading. And historically, supplemental learning materials and tutoring haven’t been accessible to all students – nearly 1 in 5 upper-income families can afford to hire a private tutor, while only 7% of middle and low-income families can. As an LA-based company, Numerade is giving back to its community to help bridge this divide and reduce barriers by offering its premium features for free.
“This is a personal initiative for me, as Numerade was born from my own experience growing up in LA and seeing education inequity firsthand,” said Nhon Ma, CEO and co-founder of Numerade. “I believe that everyone deserves a quality education, regardless of their background. Numerade is my way of giving back and helping level the playing field – we’re proud to help support our community and give students opportunities and resources that they may not have otherwise.”
All teachers within the LAUSD will also have free access to Numerade Plus so they can incorporate Numerade’s trusted educational content into their instruction to reinforce the topics covered throughout the year. Numerade Plus can also help them save time with lesson plans, quizzes and even grading assignments.
To enroll in 12 months of free Numerade Plus, students and teachers can visit www.numerade.com/lausd and use their LAUSD email address to enroll between now and December 31, 2023.
Success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) demands keeping up with the latest tools and techniques. The AI boom, for example, has made coding and data management skills integral. But going back to school isn’t an option for most scientists. Short training programs like webinars and boot camps have become a popular alternative among busy STEM professionals. However, these formats can have significant shortcomings. There’s often no guarantee attendees will leave with the skills needed to advance their careers. And they can be exclusionary, preventing learners of all abilities and circumstances from benefiting equally.
An interdisciplinary and international team assembled at CSHL’s Banbury Center to address the challenges of short STEM training programs. The meeting was titled “Making Career-spanning Learning in the Life Sciences Inclusive and Effective for All.”
“We’ve all had horrible teachers,” recalls Jason Williams. Williams is Assistant Director of Diversity and Research Readiness at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) DNA Learning Center. “There have been efforts to improve science education at the undergraduate level for decades. But there’s basically no effort to improve education once you’ve graduated. It’s just assumed you’ll somehow keep up.”
To tackle this problem, Williams and collaborators have created a new teaching framework called the “Bicycle Principles.” It aims to make short STEM training effective, inclusive, and scalable. The principles originated from a meeting at CSHL’s Banbury Center think tank. Williams and co-organizer Rochelle Tractenberg recruited the world’s leading experts in short-format education. They identified the field’s biggest issues and ways to address them.
The group came up with two sets of principles linked like bicycle wheels. One wheel, Core Principles, focuses on effectiveness and inclusivity. Recommendations here include setting clear objectives participants of all abilities can achieve. The other wheel, Community Principles, revolves around reach, accessibility, and sustainability. It recommends making training adaptable for different institutions, especially those lacking the resources of large universities.
Williams says the Banbury meeting and the guidelines it inspired are the first of their kind. He hopes they won’t be the last. Williams explains:
“If we can raise awareness, we can start doing something about it. Our goal was to put the first flag in the ground to say, ‘Here are the key problems scientists face in professional development. And here are some potential solutions.’”
Such improvements could help researchers achieve their career goals and increase the impact of their work—familiar objectives for Williams and CSHL. The institution supports a number of science career paths through its education initiatives. These begin as early as grade school via the DNA Learning Center. And they continue throughout a scientist’s career, with CSHL’s Meetings & Courses Program.
After all, learning is a journey. The Bicycle Principles can make the trip more successful for all.
Kevin is a forward-thinking media executive with more than 25 years of experience building brands and audiences online, in print, and face to face. He is an acclaimed writer, editor, and commentator covering the intersection of society and technology, especially education technology. You can reach Kevin at KevinHogan@eschoolnews.com
Since the introduction of ChatGPT, educators have been considering the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) on education. Different approaches to AI codes of conduct are emerging, based on geography, school size and administrators’ willingness to embrace new technology.
With ChatGPT barely one year old and generative AI developing rapidly, a universally accepted approach to integrating AI has not yet emerged.
Still, the rise of GAI is offering a rare glimpse of hope and promise amid K-12’s historic achievement lows and unprecedented teacher shortages. That’s why many educators are contemplating how to manage and monitor student AI use. You can see a wide range of opinions, including some who would like to see AI tools outright banned.
There is a fine line between “using AI as a tool” and “using AI to cheat,” and many educators are still determining where that line is.
In my view, banning tech that will become a critical part of everyday life is not the answer. AI tools can be valuable classroom companions, and educators should write their codes of conduct in a way that encourages learners to adapt.
Administrators should respect teachers’ hesitation about adopting AI, but also create policies that allow tech-forward educators and students to experiment.
A number of districts have publicly discussed their approaches to AI. Early policies seem to fall into three camps:
Zero Tolerance: Some schools have instructed their students that use of AI tools will not be tolerated. For example, Oklahoma’s Tomball ISD updated its code of conduct to include a brief sentence on AI-enhanced work, stating that any work submitted by a student that has been completed using AI “will be considered plagiarism” and penalized as such.
Active Encouragement: Some schools encourage teachers to use AI tools in their classrooms. Michigan’s Hemlock Public School District provides its teachers with a list of AI tools and suggests that teachers explore which tools work best with their existing curriculum and lessons.
Wait-and-See: Many schools are taking a wait-and-see approach to drafting policies. In the meantime, they are allowing teachers and students to freely explore the capabilities and applications of the current crop of tools and providing guidance as issues and questions arise. They will use the data collected during this time to inform policies drafted in the future.
A recent Brookings report highlighted the confusion around policies for these new tools. For example, Los Angeles Public Schools blocked ChatGPT from all school computers while simultaneously rolling out an AI companion for parents. Because there isn’t yet clear guidance on how AI tools should be used, educators are receiving conflicting advice on both how to use AI themselves and how to guide their students’ use.
New York City public schools banned ChatGPT, then rolled back the ban, noting that their initial decision was hasty, based on “knee-jerk fear,” and didn’t take into account the good that AI tools could do in supporting teachers and students. They also noted that students will need to function and work in a world in which AI tools are a part of daily life and banning them outright could be doing students a disservice. They’ve since vowed to provide educators with “resources and real-life examples” of how AI tools have been successfully implemented in schools to support a variety of tasks across the spectrum of planning, instruction and analysis.
AI codes of conduct that encourage both smart and responsible use of these tools will be in the best interest of teachers and students.
This response is a good indication that the “Zero Tolerance” approach is waning in larger districts as notable guiding bodies, such asISTE, actively promote AI exploration.
In addition, the federal government’sOffice of Educational Technology is working on policies to ensure safe and effective AI use, noting that “Everyone in education has a responsibility to harness the good to serve educational priorities” while safeguarding against potential risks.
Educators must understand how to use these tools, and how they can help students be better equipped to navigate both the digital and real world.
Already, teachers and entrepreneurs are experimenting with ways that GAI can make an impact on teacher practice and training, from lesson planning and instructional coaching to personalized feedback.
District leaders must consider that AI can assist teachers in crafting activity-specific handouts, customizing reading materials and formulating assessment, assignment and in-class discussion questions. They should also note how AI can deter cheating by generating unique assessments for each test-taker.
As with many educational innovations, it’s fair to assume that the emergence of student conduct cases within higher education will help guide the development of GAI use policy generally.
All this underscores both the importance and the complication of drafting such GAI policies, leading districts to ask, “Should we create guidelines just for students or for students and teachers?”
Earlier this year, Stanford’s Board on Conduct Affairs addressed the issue and its policies, clarifying that generative AI cannot be used to “substantially” complete an assignment and that its use must be disclosed.
But Stanford also gave individual instructors the latitude to provide guidelines on the acceptable use of GAI in their coursework. Given the relative murkiness of that policy, I predict clearer guidelines are still to come and will have an impact on those being drafted for K-12 districts.
Ultimately, AI codes of conduct that encourage both smart and responsible use of these tools will be in the best interest of teachers and students.
It will, however, not be enough for schools just to write codes of conduct for AI tools. They’ll need to think through how the presence of AI technology changes the way students are assessed, use problem-solving skills and develop competencies.
Questions like “How did you creatively leverage this new technology?” can become part of the rubric.
Their exploration will help identify best practices and debunk myths, championing AI’s responsible use. Developing AI policies for K-12 schools is an ongoing conversation.
Embracing experimentation, raising awareness and reforming assessments can help schools ensure that GAI becomes a positive force in supporting student learning responsibly.
Ted Mo Chen is vice president of globalization for the education technology company ClassIn.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Acton, MA – Discovery Museum and Natick-based MathWorks announced today their continued partnership to bring the Museum’s Traveling Science Workshops to classrooms throughout Massachusetts and beyond for the 2023-2024 school year. This is the fourteenth consecutive school year that MathWorks has invested in the school outreach program.
Traveling Science Workshops (TSW) are state curriculum-aligned, small group, in-classroom workshops that use simple, everyday materials and a hands-on approach to allow students to be scientists by exploring, observing, asking questions, and sharing discoveries. Museum educators deliver twenty-three STEM topics—including Sound, Weather & Climate, Physical Changes of Matter, and Force & Motion—to give elementary and middle school students direct experience with how things work in the physical world. It is the only classroom-based program of its kind in Massachusetts.
MathWorks has partnered with Discovery Museum since 2010 to bring TSW to school classrooms, supporting program growth and developing virtual workshops and distance learning resources for teachers. MathWorks also supports community access to the Museum by funding free-access Friday nights and a week of reduced admission pricing in the fall. MathWorks volunteer groups also undertake on-site projects several times each year.
For the 2022-2023 school year—the 30th year of Traveling Science Workshops—Discovery Museum delivered more than 2,600 workshops to more than 51,000 students in their classrooms, a remarkable 28% increase in the number of workshops and a 26% increase in the number of students served from the prior school year. For the first time, demand exceeded staff capacity, and a waiting list had to be created. For the 2023-2024 school year, the Museum has increased its teaching capacity and expects to serve upwards of 54,000 students.
“The impact of delivering STEM explorations into students’ hands at a young age cannot be overstated,” said Kevin Lorenc, director of corporate communications at MathWorks. “Opening young minds to observing and ‘doing’ science in their everyday lives helps students better understand their world and can spark an early interest in a STEM-track education and career path. We’ve partnered with Discovery Museum for 14 years to bring hands-on STEM to students because it matters to them and the communities they will ultimately contribute to.”
“The world that we are passing along to our kids is going to require them to be creative thinkers and problem solvers, yet they build, create, and explore far less than their grandparents or even their parents did,” said CEO Neil Gordon. “Thanks to the ongoing and impactful support of MathWorks, we continue to grow our Traveling Science Workshops program to get science into more kids’ hands, spark their interest in the world around them, and build confidence in their own abilities as problem-solvers.”
About Discovery Museum
Discovery Museum is a hands-on museum that blends science, nature, and play, inspiring families to explore and learn together. The museum and its Discovery Woods accessible outdoor nature playscape and giant treehouse blend the best of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) learning on a beautiful 4.5-acre campus abutting 180 acres of conservation land in Acton, MA, about 20 miles west of Boston. Originally founded in 1982 and expanded to two museums in 1987, the museum reopened in a single, 16,000sf accessible building after a complete renovation and expansion in early 2018. Hands-on, open-ended exhibits developed by professional educators inspire curiosity and exploration, providing a fun and engaging experience for children and adults to discover their world together. Serving families and schools from towns throughout the region, the museum is devoted to informal education that enhances classroom learning. Discovery Museum is committed to accessibility and is a proud recipient of the Massachusetts Commonwealth Award, the only winner in the Access category, and a LEAD® Community Asset Award from The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Discovery Museum was also recognized in 2023 as a Finalist for the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Medal, the highest honor in the museum field. For more information, please visit discoveryacton.org. Discovery Museum is a community-supported non-profit organization, supported in part by a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
About MathWorks
MathWorks is the leading developer of mathematical computing software. MATLAB, the language of engineers and scientists, is a programming environment for algorithm development, data analysis, visualization, and numeric computation. Simulink is a block diagram environment for simulation and Model-Based Design of multidomain and embedded engineering systems. Engineers and scientists worldwide rely on these products to accelerate the pace of discovery, innovation, and development in automotive, aerospace, communications, electronics, industrial automation, and other industries. MATLAB and Simulink are fundamental teaching and research tools in the world’s top universities and learning institutions. Founded in 1984, MathWorks employs more than 6000 people in 34 offices around the world, with headquarters in Natick, Massachusetts, USA. For additional information, visit mathworks.com.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Early Childhood newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about early learning.
Researchers have found kindergarten through third grade classes spend, on average, 89 minutes a day on English language arts, 57 minutes a day on math — and just 18 minutes a day on science.
One way advocates are trying to encourage more science time? Adding outdoor classrooms to elementary schools.
Such efforts can only improve current practices. According to the 2018 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education, which compiled the information on minutes spent learning science, only 17 percent of early elementary classes had science lessons most days of the week.
“We think the best kind of science that happens at that level is real-world based,” said Jeanne McCarty, CEO of Out Teach, a national nonprofit that promotes new approaches to science education and builds outdoor learning labs at schools. “We work with schools to engage kids in much more hands-on science learning outdoors, that not only gives them that foundational knowledge they need early on, but it also helps inspire them to see themselves as scientist and think about science as a future career path.”
Schools that get an outdoor learning lab also get coaching on teaching science in the lab. The outdoor lessons are tailored to where students live — a school in Texas, for example, uses a section of their lab to grow a salsa garden and native yucca plants. The labs vary, but typically include garden beds, weather stations, earth science stations and signs to reinforce concepts students are learning.
One goal of installing the labs, McCarty said, is to give teachers an outdoor space where they can not only teach science, but also embed science instruction into other subjects. The hope is these lessons will also spark students’ interest in science at a young age.
Some research seems to back this idea up — a study from 2017 found that, after an innate interest in science, women in STEM-related fields were more likely to point to playing or spending time outdoors as the spark for their initial interest in STEM than other activities. Most respondents said they became interested in STEM prior to sixth grade.
“Anything we can do to help get kids to see science and STEM as things that are useful to them and things they can interact with and they can do, or recognize things around them in the world that are happening — that’s going to be really valuable,” said Adam Maltese, one of the study’s authors and a professor of science education at Indiana University.
With a set amount of instructional time each day, elementary schools are less likely to significantly shift class time to science because most states do not have accountability measures tied to science as they do for reading and math. But embedding science instruction into other subjects has had positive results, said Jenny Sarna, director of director of the NextGenScience project of nonpartisan research agency WestEd. The project is a multi-state effort to create common teaching standards for science from kindergarten through 12th grade.
“Students who have positive science identities are more likely to see themselves as a science person, or good at science, and then they’re more likely to pursue STEM careers,” Sarna said.
A study of first grade students whose classroom used a curriculum that embedded science into language arts found that the students performed higher than their peers on standardized science tests at the end of the school year, and their reading performance was the same.
“Those students learn more science and the same amount of literacy, so if you could pick between your kid having science and reading every day, or just reading, it’s kind of a no-brainer,” Sarna said.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
As part of a new program, every third grader in Albuquerque Public Schools spends a day at the Los Padillas Wildlife Sanctuary just outside the city. There, a wide variety of local landscapes are packed into five acres: a meadow, piñon, juniper and cottonwood trees, an arroyo and even a pond — a rarity in the desert.
“All the way into October they can fish in the pond with a net,” said Monie Corona, an environmental education resource teacher for the district. “There’s cattails, dragonflies. For the kids to feel like they’re playing, but they’re actually learning — that to me is the key thing.”
The sanctuary borders the black mesas to the west and to the east and the Rio Grande bosque — a term for a forest near a river bank. To the south is the Pueblo of Isleta, one of New Mexico’s many Native American communities: There are 19 different sovereign Pueblos, plus Apache and Navajo communities, across the state.
Research on the physical, psychological and academic benefits of outdoor learning for kids is well-established, and is now informing the development of climate education. What’s also becoming well-known is the essential role of traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge in the effort to cope with the climate crisis. Authorities as disparate as UNESCO and the U.S. Forest Service, have underlined the value, not only of specific place-based and historical knowledge of flora and fauna, but of traditional ways of relating to and understanding humans’ place in the natural world as we seek to adapt to and mitigate climate change.
Third graders visit the “grassland classroom” at Los Padillas Wildlife Sanctuary. Credit: Steven Henley/ Albuquerque Public Schools
And, as recently noted in a review of the potential impact the education sector can have on U.S. cities’ climate plans by This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor), Albuquerque Public Schools is among those pioneering the attempt to connect outdoor learning with local and Indigenous knowledge.
During Los Padillas field trips, the children spend time with Indigenous educators like Jered Lee, whose ancestral roots are in the Naschitti Region of the Navajo reservation in the northwest corner of the state.
“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important,” he said. “Even though I don’t live in a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, their values can still be applied to my livelihood today.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Lee doesn’t much care for the term “climate change”; he finds it too political. “We hear that we live in unprecedented times; well, when was it ever precedented? As far as I have understood, as far as our traditional stories, the world has always been changing,”
he said.What he seeks to instill in his brief time with the children is a sense of gratitude for being alive, and connection to other living things.
“They sit on the grass, and I sit on the earth with them, and try to see things from their eyes … I ask them to name their five senses, which they all know, and then I say, ‘Who taught you how to use them?’ And they might say ‘My mom,’ and then they think about it … and it’s almost like they refer to a divine source. They didn’t have to be instructed, and it’s in line with other growth processes in the natural world.”
Lee shares with the children a version of the Navajo creation story, and another one about horses, but he won’t tell them to a reporter on tape: They are part of an oral tradition passed down to him from his elders. He will say that he talks to the children about the rhythms of nature, and humans’ place in the world.
“The movement of nature, the rising of the dawn, the daytime sky, the evening light and the darkness of night, and how that process regenerates itself and the elongation of that process creates the spring, summer, fall, winter, and creates our being, our livelihood … for many it’s like we’re separate from that, we’re above that and we’re more intelligent than that. But the most intelligent people I know adhere to nature and know there isn’t a knowledge that surpasses that. It’s a humbling realization for people but it’s also good.”
“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important. Even though I don’t live on a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, the values associated can still be applied to my livelihood today.”
Jered Lee, a Navajo nation member who participates in Albuquerque Public Schools’ outdoor learning program
Some 80 percent of the students enrolled in Albuquerque Public Schools are people of color. Around 5.3 percent are American Indian, and are served by the district’s Indian Education Department.
Monie Corona works within that department in a newly created position, supporting Los Padillas and other outdoor programming. Her watchwords are “cultural humility, cultural relevance and the cultural landscape.” She said this collaboration, bringing Indigenous learning to all students in an outdoor setting, “has been a long time coming, let’s put it that way. As a [white] teacher coming in 30 years ago, I was not prepared for working with Native American students and their culture. There’s a lot of things we have to understand and be able to respect as well.”
She said her focus and that of her colleagues sharpened in 2018, after a state court’s decision in Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico found that the state wasn’t doing enough to meet its obligation to help all students become college and career ready, especially low-income students, Native Americans, English language learners and students with disabilities. New Mexico’s high school graduation rate is consistently among the lowest in the nation; Albuquerque’s is even lower, at 69 percent in 2022.
Corona hopes that the Los Padillas program, as well as aligned efforts to bring Indigenous traditions into the school garden program and into outdoor learning opportunities at all grade levels, will enhance student engagement, particularly for those with Native heritage.
“Making sure the kids know their culture — it’s not easy,” she said. “We want to build up their self esteem, their motivation to be at school.”
Lee said that just about every time he speaks to a class, one or two children will raise their hand and say, “I’m Navajo, too!” or name another tribe. But his aim is to share his culture and language and find commonalities with students, no matter their background. “Here in Albuquerque there’s different cultures. And I’ve realized this about many cultures around the world, the more you talk to them, our language, our customs may be different but the root of our cultural values are very similar.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation.
After an elder passed away recently in their community, the students at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School in Dzántik’i Héeni, the Tlingit name for Juneau, Alaska, got to work creating a special gift.
Using skills they’d learned in their computer science lessons, the students designed a traditional button blanket on a laser cutting machine. “They found a meaningful way to apply all of that skill and knowledge that they have learned and in such a way that it was authentic,” said Luke Fortier, the school librarian and math teacher.
Fortier’s school participates in a program operated by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society to expand access to computer science and science, technology engineering and math, or STEM, among Native American, Alaska Native and Pacific Islander students. The program trains educators at K-12 schools whose students include Native children on different ways they can introduce young people to programming, robotics and coding.
But computer science lessons like the ones at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School are relatively rare. Despite calls from major employers and education leaders to expand K-12 computer science instruction in response to the workforce’s increasing reliance on digital technology, access to the subject remains low — particularly for Native American students.
Only 67 percent of Native American students attend a school that offers a computer science course, the lowest percentage of any demographic group, according to a new study from the nonprofit Code.org. A recent report from the Kapor Foundation and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, or AISES, takes a deep look at why Native students’ access to computer and technology courses in K-12 is so low, and examines the consequences.
Director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor Frieda McAlear, who is Native Alaskan of the Inupiaq tribe, said the study “forefronts the context of the violence of centuries of colonization and its continuing impacts on Native people and tribal communities as the driver of disparities in Native representation in tech and computing.”
Schools serving higher proportions of Native students are more likely to be small institutions that lack space, funding and teachers trained in computer science, according to the report. In addition, many Native students attend schools that may lack the hardware, software and high-speed internet needed for these classes.
Even when the instruction is available, courses often lack cultural relevance that would allow Native students to authentically engage with the material, the report says.
Given the history of settler colonialism and the use of Native boarding schools that sought to erase Native identity, making sure that students’ tribal knowledge and traditions are celebrated and integrated into the curriculum will allow students to succeed, the report’s authors say.
“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities,” McAlear said.
“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities.”
Frieda McAlear, director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor
The situation isn’t much better at the post-secondary level, according to report co-author and director of research and career support for AISES, Tiffany Smith, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a descendant of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Since 2020, Native student enrollment in computer science courses has declined at most two-year and four-year institutions, she said, even as more students overall have received degrees in the subject. Part of the reason is that Native students don’t necessarily see a place for themselves and their culture in tech classes and spaces at predominantly white institutions, Smith said.
But the relatively few Native students who do graduate with these degrees are making significant contributions to their communities, according to Smith. She noted that graduates are using their computer science knowledge and emerging technologies to help revitalize Native languages and alleviate other issues tribal nation communities face, including climate change, biases in data collection and poverty.
Because tribal nations are at the forefront of job growth and development in their communities, they “should be considered critical partners in the future of the technology sector,” the report’s authors write.
The report calls for more investment in training Native educators to teach computer science and related fields, and integrating Indigenous culture, traditions and languages into those classes.
A 4-year-old program run jointly by the Kapor Foundation and AISES, for example, partners with school districts and Native-serving schools to develop tribe-specific culturally relevant computer science curriculum. That instruction doesn’t only happen in computer science class, said McAlear. The program’s staff work with schools to develop project-based, culturally relevant computer science lessons that are woven into other classes including science, language and history.
In Fortier’s district, students in science classes were recently tasked with using robots to code the life cycle of a salmon. Through that activity they gained knowledge of their local tribal economies while being introduced to new tech, he said.
Before the pandemic, Fortier’s school had eliminated some computer science and technology courses due to budget cuts. But with federal Covid relief funding, along with grants from Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit arm of a regional Native corporation, and programmatic support from AISES, the school was able to restore some of that instruction.*
Fortier said he believes these courses are essential for his students — not necessarily because they’ll have to learn all the latest cutting-edge technology for their future careers, but so they can use contemporary methods to share Native practices, knowledge and skills with the wider community.
“We can learn a lot from the elders in the traditional knowledge,” he said. “But our kids need to apply it in a new, modern, meaningful way. They need to be able to communicate to and within the world.”
*Correction: This sentence has been updated with the correct version of Sealaska Heritage Institute’s name.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
STEM projects can create relevant learning experiences by encouraging students to explore local problems within their community, while practicing cross-curricular skills. For instance, a science teacher may propose a STEM project centered on investigating and developing solutions related to a local invasive species affecting their local environment. Students can conduct research, propose solutions, and develop criteria for testing their proposed solutions. While these project steps are related to a scientific process, they also require students to practice reading, writing, and math skills and ultimately, make a difference in their community.
One great way to make a clear cross-curricular connection is by proposing, generating, and testing solutions found in novels or historical events that are being studied in English Language Arts or Social Studies class. The novel A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park could certainly lead to a STEM project after reading and discussing the novel Students can investigate and develop solutions that ensure access to water for all communities, which aligns to the content of the novel, a social/community application, and a scientific study. All great makings of a STEM project!
Director of Conservation Outreach and Staff Scientist
Alysa lives in Whitehorse, Yukon. She has a Bachelor’s of Science (Hon.) in Animal Biology from Thompson Rivers University and a Masters of Science in Ecology from the University of Alberta where her thesis focused on the polar bears of western Hudson Bay. She gained hands-on experience with polar bears from multiple fall and spring field seasons in Tuktoyaktuk and Churchill and has been heavily involved in tracking Hudson Bay polar bears, as well as coexistence efforts. She also spearheads Polar Bears International’s Tundra Connections webcast program. Prior to joining Polar Bears International’s staff, Alysa volunteered for several years in multiple capacities, including being a panelist on the Tundra Connections program and assisting with the Polar Bear Tracker. She is passionate about science education and polar bear conservation and is dedicated to ensuring that future generations inherit a healthy planet.
No matter how many times we say STEM is “strategies that engage all minds” it is still viewed as simply science, technology, engineering, and math. How do we include ‘non-STEM letter’ teachers in STEM lessons to showcase the strategies that really do engage all minds? How do we increase their confidence in using project-based learning […]
For as long as Jake Price has been a teacher, Wolfram Alpha — a website that solves algebraic problems online — has threatened to make algebra homework obsolete.
Teachers learned to work around and with it, said Price, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. But now, they have a new homework helper to contend with: generative artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT.
“Computers are really good at doing tedious things. We don’t have to do all the tedious stuff. We can let the computer do it. And then we can interpret the answer and think about what it tells us about the decisions we need to make.”
Jake Price, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington
AI can serve as a tutor, giving a student who is floundering with a problem immediate feedback. It can help a teacher plan math lessons, or write a variety of math problems geared toward different levels of instruction. It can even show new computer programmers sample code, allowing them to skip over the boring chore of learning how to write basic code.
As schools across the country debate banning AI tools, some math and computer science teachers are embracing the change because of the nature of their discipline.
“Math has always been evolving as technology evolves,” said Price. A hundred years ago, people were using slide rules and doing all of their multiplication with logarithmic tables. Then, along came calculators.
Sluggish growth in math scores for U.S. students began long before the pandemic, but the problem has snowballed into an education crisis. This back-to-school season, the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, will be documenting the enormous challenge facing our schools and highlighting examples of progress. The three-year-old Reporting Collaborative includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
Price teaches with human-capable technologies in mind, making sure to give students the skills in class by hand. Then, he discusses with them the limitations of the technologies they might be tempted to use when they get home.
“Computers are really good at doing tedious things,” Price said. “We don’t have to do all the tedious stuff. We can let the computer do it. And then we can interpret the answer and think about what it tells us about the decisions we need to make.”
University of Washington’s computer ethics class, taught by Prof. Dan Grossman, is not a requirement but it has more students than ever. Credit: Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times
He wants his students to enjoy looking for patterns, seeing how different methods can give different or the same answers and how to translate those answers into decisions about the world.
“ChatGPT, just like the calculator and just like the slide rule and all the technology before, just helps us get at that core, real part of math,” Price said.
Conversely, ChatGPT has its limits. It can show the right steps to solving a math problem — and then give the wrong answer.
This is because it’s “not actually doing the math,” Price said. It’s just pulling together pieces of the sentences where other people have described how to solve similar problems.
Min Sun, a University of Washington education professor, thinks students should use ChatGPT like a personal tutor. If students get lost in class and don’t understand a mathematical operation, they can ask ChatGPT to explain it and give them a few examples.
A student goes over an article in University of Washington’s computer ethics class, taught by Prof. Dan Grossman. Credit: Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times
The Khan Academy, an educational nonprofit that provides a collection of online learning tools and videos and has long been a go-to for math homework, has created exactly that.
The tutor is called Khanmigo. Students can open it while completing math problems and tell it that they are stuck.
They can have a conversation with the AI tutor, telling it what they don’t understand, and the AI tutor helps to explain, said Kristen DiCerbo, the chief learning officer at Khan Academy.
“Instead of saying, ‘Here’s the answer for you,’ it says things like, ‘What’s the next step?’ or ‘What do you think might be the next thing to do?’” DiCerbo said.
Sun, the UW education professor, wants teachers to use ChatGPT as their own assistant: to plan math lessons, give students good feedback and communicate with parents.
Teachers can ask AI, “What is the best way to teach this concept?” Or “What are the kinds of mistakes students tend to make when learning this math concept?” Or, “What kinds of questions will students have about this concept?”
Teachers can also ask ChatGPT to recommend different levels of math problems for students with different mastery of the concept, she said. This is particularly helpful for teachers who are new to the profession or have students with diverse needs — special education or English language learners, Sun said.
“I’m amazed by the details that sometimes ChatGPT can offer,” Sun said. “It gives you some initial ideas and possible problem areas for students so I can get myself more prepared before walking into the classroom.”
University of Washington’s computer ethics class, taught by Prof. Dan Grossman, at top, Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023, in Seattle. Credit: Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times
And, if a teacher already has a high-quality lesson plan, they could feed that to ChatGPT and ask it to create another lesson in a similar teaching style, but for a different concept.
Sun hopes ChatGPT can also help teachers write more culturally appropriate word-problem questions to make all their students feel included.
“The current technology is really a technical assistant to support them, empower them, amplify their creative abilities,” Sun said. “It is really not a substitute to their own agency, their own creativity, their own professionalism. They really need to keep that in mind.”
A year ago, if you asked Daniel Zingaro how he assesses his introductory computer science students, he would say: “We ask them to write code.”
But if you ask him today, the answer would be far more complex, said Zingaro, an associate professor at the University of Toronto.
Zingaro and Leo Porter, a computer science professor at University of California San Diego, authored the book Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming with GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. They believe AI will allow introductory computer science classes to tackle big-picture concepts.
A lot of beginner students get stuck writing very simple code, Porter and Zingaro said. They never move on to more advanced questions — and many still can’t write simple code after they complete the course.
“It’s not just uninteresting, it is frustrating,” Porter added. “They are trying to build something and they forgot a semicolon and they’ll lose three hours trying to find that missing semicolon” or some other bit of syntax that prevents a code from running properly.
Inside University of Washington’s nanoengineering and sciences Building, students attend a computer ethics class taught by Prof. Dan Grossman, Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023, in Seattle. Grossman said he initially incorporated artificial intelligence as a topic in place of facial recognition and now “A.I. is hot.” Credit: Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times
AI doesn’t make those mistakes, and allows computer science professors to spend more of their time teaching higher-level skills.
The professors now ask their students to take a big problem and break it down to smaller questions or tasks the code needs to do. They also ask students to test and debug code once it is already written.
“If we think bigger picture about what we want our students to do, we want them to write software that is meaningful to them,” Porter said. “And this process of writing software is taking this fairly big, often not-well-defined problem and figuring out, how do I break them into pieces?”
Magdalena Balazinska, director of the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, embraces the progress AI has made.
“With the support of AI, human software engineers get to focus on the most interesting part of computer science: answering big software design questions,” Balazinska said. “AI allows humans to focus on the creative work.”
Not all professors in the field think AI should be integrated into the curriculum. Some interviewed for a UC San Diego research paper and in an Education Week survey prefer blocking or negating the use of ChatGPT or similar tools like Photomath, at least in the short term.
Zingaro and Porter argue that reading a lot of code generated by AI doesn’t feel like cheating. Rather, it’s how a student is going to learn.
“I think a lot of programmers read a lot of code, just like how I believe the best writers read a lot of writing,” Zingaro said. “I think that is a very powerful way to learn.”
This story about AI and math was produced by The Seattle Times in cooperation with the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
More than 40 million Americans — roughly one out of every seven adults — have earned college credit but have no degree to show for their time and money.
Florida native Alix Petkov is one of them. He enrolled in college right after high school with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist. Unaware that this career choice required medical school — and unable to afford college, much less a graduate education — Petkov changed majors twice and found himself making only halting progress toward a bachelor’s degree.
An on-campus job in information technology rekindled his interest in computers, but the gig paid just $10 per hour, and his computer science classes covered the same things he had already picked up at work.
So Petkov quit college roughly 30 credits short of a degree, with $16,000 in student loans and a credit card balance of $4,000 from paying living expenses.
He burnished his tech portfolio with freelance computer work, applied for IT jobs, worked in restaurants and stewed over his frustrating experience, later saying that “College only destroyed me.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. Like millions of other learners, Petkov was forced into an outdated and bureaucratic model of higher education that’s not designed for how people navigate learning and work today.
Far too many learners are pausing their education long before they earn a credential because they run out of money, time or patience. Or they wind up in a program that lacks the support and structure to meet their individualized needs and goals.
Learners need better access to lower-cost, shorter-term programs that help them achieve their career goals.
Federal and state governments and postsecondary institutions can and should adopt policies and practices that will help students build career pathways and make alternatives to a college degree more accessible, affordable and practical.
To achieve this, federal and state policymakers must ease some of the guardrails meant to protect learners from making “bad” decisions — after all, some of these guardrails have stifled postsecondary innovation and limited competition between college and noncollege options, ultimately restricting learners’ choices. Students must also receive better information about college and noncollege pathways and outcomes both before they begin a program and while they are enrolled.
College isn’t always the best option for every learner.
Petkov said he received little — and often incorrect — information in high school and college about higher education and potential alternatives. No one advised him, for example, that he could save thousands of dollars by completing university-required general education classes at a local community college.
Looking back, Petkov admits he would have pursued a different path altogether if he had a better up-front understanding of the costs and courses required to complete a degree.
His story, which he shared with me this summer over a video call after I requested an introduction, illustrates why students need more transparent financial counseling and more options for using financial aid beyond the limited college options currently afforded by student aid programs.
Giving high school students information about program costs and financial aid well before they apply to college will aid their decision-making. Students should be able to use Pell Grants for noncollege alternative programs that have proven track records of moving students into jobs that pay family-sustaining wages.
Petkov said it didn’t become apparent until later that his financial aid and campus job wouldn’t cover all of his college expenses. Because he was awarded Pell Grants, he borrowed less than other students.
But Pell Grants can be used in just one setting: college. Had Petkov been allowed to use the federal subsidy to pursue a college alternative — like an accelerated tech or healthcare upskilling program from a noncollege provider — he would have done that instead.
Because of time and expense, college isn’t always the best option for every learner. Mounting evidence on program-level outcomes shows that far too many of the options that the government deems “safe” simply because they are accredited have failed learners and left them no better off than if they had not pursued college at all.
Petkov didn’t find his true path until more than a year after he quit college. While searching online for IT jobs, he stumbled on information about Merit America, a nonprofit offering low-cost programs that prepare people for tech careers. (Merit America is a grantee of the Charles Koch Foundation, part of the Stand Together philanthropic community, where the author is a senior fellow.)
Merit America built on Petkov’s existing IT knowledge to give him new tech skills that allowed him to push past self-doubt and launch a successful career. After completing the program, Petkov landed a tech coordinator’s job at a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that started him at $45,000 — more than twice what he was making in food service.
Two jobs later, he’s currently the IT director of an executive coaching firm and makes a little more than $100,000 per year. A University of Virginia analysis shows that Merit America completers see an average annual wage increase of $24,000 three or more months after finishing the program.
Merit America is among the growing number of providers preparing students for placement into high-demand tech and healthcare careers. Yet students from low-income backgrounds who rely on financial aid and loans often get little guidance about such college alternatives and may instead be advised to pursue a college degree.
It’s time to open more doors to short-term, noncollege options, so that students like Petkov can access more personalized options to help them thrive.
Steven Taylor is a senior fellow on postsecondary education at Stand Together Trust. He leads the postsecondary education and workforce policy portfolio and partnership strategy.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Ifyou’veever stumbled upon a TikTok video of a chemist in a rainbow-hued lab coat voguing down a school hallway, please know that you’re witnessing the multiple talents of Andre Isaacs (better known as @drdre4000).
In one of my favorite recent TikToks, he and two of his colleagues do a hand performance, duck walk and dip in lab coats to Azealia Banks’ “I Rule the World.”
Isaacs, an associate professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, has been cuntifying all of our timelines — turning the sterile, whitewashed academic halls of his institution into a rainbow runway. The scholar, who came to the States for college after growing up in Jamaica, gets his colleagues and students involved too, and he has become a powerful advocate for the LGBTQ+ community on his campus.
While queer joy for the masses is always worthy of celebration, Isaacs’ online persona is particularly noteworthy when we consider respectability politics. So many of us are expected to tone down our queerness at work and in other professional settings.
“For many marginalized people in STEM, it can be a really toxic environment,” Isaacs says, using the abbreviation for science, technology, engineering and math. “And the heteronormative culture is so dominant and alienating for a lot of queer folks.”
But most of us recognize by now that “professionalism” is a word very closely tied to cishet whiteness, and whenever we express ourselves fully, it can be seen as unseemly or even abrasive to others. For that reason, many of us learn to code-switch in certain academic and corporate settings that don’t allow us to cultivate the most authentic versions of ourselves.
From his online presence, you can tell Isaacs is ready to disrupt all of that by balancing his scholarly performance and devotion to his students with active, visible queer joy every day.
“There’s a part of me that always feels nervous posting, even now,” he says, acknowledging his large and supportive fan base. “I do have my own fears of being ostracized. But I always remember that I’m doing this for students who email me from high schools and colleges, and tell me that this is important to them.”
Hiding parts of our identity can be damaging to our mental health — and probably decreases the quality of our work, too. One of the major reasons so many people get burned out is because they feel unsupported in the workplace. In fact, a recent studyfound that queer people, especially transgender people, who didn’t feel supported at work struggled with their mental health and were more likely to use drugs to cope.
This discrepancy is even starker in STEM. One survey published in the journal Science Advances found that LGBTQ professionals in STEM were 27% more likely than their non-LGBTQ counterparts to have experienced minor health issues in the preceding year, and 41% more likely to have experienced insomnia. The study also found that queer people in STEM were more likely to feel socially excluded from their peers and devalued in their expertise.
“I would love for young students to see STEM as a place where they can bring their unique talents and skills, and not be worried about how their identity will impact how they’re seen or prevent them from getting opportunities to pursue science,” Isaacs says. “And actually, showing up as who you are is critical to the advancement of STEM.”
Isaacs is right. Scientific advancement is how we’re able to live longer, healthier lives. Twerking along the way makes that life worth living.
