Research Interview

This was a video interview transcribed by google docs. Please excuse any typos.

Molly- Could you start by describing what your job is?

Marcy- So am I in the STEM coordinator for the University of Northern Iowa and what that means is that I am I survived the Provost Office I work with academic affairs and that means that I bridge all across the entire campus not one department or one college and I primarily work with faculty and staff that also students as well on projects that involve STEM fields of science technology engineering or math research,outreach and education and connections between education and stem careers. And I do that primarily I think I have 4 things that I do I create community across campus for STEM so I wrote one of the things I do if I have a monthly meeting and I run a Google group for faculty who self-identify as interested in STEM topic so that ranges from physics professor who research deep cold as a topic to people in our foundation who are really loved robotics competition to curriculum and instruction faculty and all the whole life all that. I work with faculty who are doing outreach activities primarily at camps or school visits that are on those topics. I work with copy on interdisciplinary projects so I've met with a lot of brand new faculty when they're new to campus and I listen to them talk I listen to what they say about with their research areas are and you know when they're new they get introduced to everyone in their department but even though we think of UNI was very small it still is a city and so because I can also make connections with faculty from other departments that may have similar research topics or maybe they evaluate the research in the same way maybe not the topic is the same but their research is the same and there are other people there that they should meet and in that way I help to help build grant proposals that are interdisciplinary in scope.

Molly (4:19)- So you’re working with PhD student professor, masters students or just people with people doing their PhDs?

Marcy- Yeah my primary audience of the people I work with every day is mostly faculty and staff. I have I have 9 undergraduate to work for me and they each are from a different department and they have to work together to talk about their part of our outreach piece, so anytime there's an event that bring either K-12 teachers are K-12 students to campus that event can request some of our STEM ambassadors sometimes they lead activity. sometimes they just are like a group leader but when they're moving from building to building they can talk about their degree and in a way that's really knowledgeable about whatever their degree is.

Molly (5:57)-- There are a lot of different definitions of STEM and a lot of interesting reasons why schools implement it, so in your job and in your experience, how is STEM education different than traditional models?

Marcy- Yes I want to start with like my the definition of down that I agree with the first stem project that I ever worked on was started in either 2000 or 2001 I can't remember which and it was a project in which NASA was seeking experienced Girl Scout trainers to become like basically the voice of Science and Engineering in Girl Scout council and they had as one of their major Partners WGBH the production house for Zoom, and at the time they were building Design Squad as a program and so they were doing they were doing all this research for Design Squad and they have latched onto this idea of STEM education so that's where I came from and I think that lends towards the definition that I really like and I sent you the link to this document. Comes from a 2012 report that was written for Congress was very easy to read and the whole point of that document was to give an overview of STEM education at the federal level and it so that definition is that STEM education refers to teaching and learning in the fields of science technology engineering and Mathematics typically including formal and informal and grade levels from preschool through post doctorate. So that's a very wide definition and it is like the governor's STEM advisory Council uses a narrower definition because that's what they, not that they necessarily disagree, but that's the focus of the work that they do I think. But I like that definition because it honors where I came from. Before I worked for UNI I worked for the Iowa Academy of Science. And the Iowa Academy of Science was founded in 1875 and it is an Professional Organization for scientists and engineers and it used to be for mathematicians as well the mathematicians broke away in the 1950s. But the biggest accomplishment from the Iowa Academy of Science and I think the biggest reason that it has lasted all these years it creates this platform where all people who work in these fields in the state of Iowa are welcome to come and share what they've done in the last year. and for the most part all of these fields your peers are not the people in the office next to you. If you’re studying some specialized moss then the people who are your peers are the three other people in other countries were also studying that moss.

(9:30) That specialization started to happen around the end of the 17th century and right then is actually when they were the first calls for wait a minute we're specializing too much and we’re losing track of each other and that means their discoveries we are not making because we're not seeing the big picture. Now I think it’s good that we did that specialized because we’ve made incredible discoveries in medicine. If we had only generalized, you definitely can say we wouldn't have some of the cures that we have had and treatments that we've had and medicine and in energy use and creation and in building construction those types of things and in specialized materials.

(10:18) What the STEM movement means to me, now this isn't necessary STEM education because, STEM education came after the idea for STEM so with the STEM movement means to me is that another round of innovations, I hope, will come out of all of these specialists coming back together and sharing what they’ve learned as individuals, and that that we really have a great need for that- for geologists to talk to you know structural engineers on a professional basis and like they haven’t before and for you know all of those types of integration

(11:00) and so to get back to STEM education I like the broad definition where all of math education can be a part of STEM education. It may be that there is a fantastic research-based way to teach step counting- like 5, 10, 15, 20- that does not involve any of the other stem disciplines and it's the best way to teach step counting and if that's the case I don't think we should throw that away to do some integrated thing. But we've mostly been only doing those things like we research only math, we’ve researched only science research and technology and the direction I hope STEM education goes to and the new best practices that I think STEM education brings to education are in those integrative or integrated or integrative -and I don't know the difference between those two words- types of education where we can do real-world projects that an example

(12:16) I think your next question I might get in your next question so an example of a project activities that I think like exemplified good STEM is when I first started working for the Iowa Academy of Science I led this professional development opportunities for teachers in which we help them learn environmental monitoring and the teachers were learning to teach their students, how to collect data using protocols designed by NASA, NOAH and NSF scientist and it was data that those scientists needed for their own research but it was also data that the students could then use to develop their own projects late like once you're collecting the data like one should go out and you look at your local maximum minimum and current air temperature each month of the year then the students might say but wait a minute sometimes in January it's 70 degrees in Iowa, and it was supposed to be what's going on here and they can go answer their own.That was kind of the project. But one of the things that we would teach the students how to use a GPS unit right before I started to see some schools do a project I got invited to go see some schools do a project that another organization in the state had purchased a whole bunch of kits of 16 GPS unit and Compasses and they’d thrown in some three ring binders of activities and they brought teachers together in a day long workshop to learn how a GPS unit work and then once you did the workshop you could get this kit for free for two weeks.

14:04 So I go visit the school and they're going to learn GPS and what the students did as they were all handed a GPS unit they went outside and turned it on they waited until it the numbers came up they wrote down those numbers they turned it off they went inside they looked up those numbers on a globe or on

(me- Google Earth?)

Marcy- Google Earth wasn't there there's actually you could have use Whirlwind with NASA’s version but they didn't know about that yet right? Usually it was like a map and they’d see- oh, it said our latitude was 42.5 point such and such and to 40 -and so we're just about- and look it put it in the state of Iowa! This machine told us we were in Iowa now you know how to use the GPS. And that meant nothing to those students. So then in the Globe program which is that project what we were doing if we go outside and wait 5 minutes and we would collect data and it would give us that location. But then we gave that location to the scientist because they have to know exactly where we’re collecting our data so they can compare can compare our data to the students in 111 countries, at the time there were 70 other countries that are also collecting the data. And so suddenly there’s a reason for needing... The activity change very much. Collecting your GPS data is not overly thrilling. But because it’s a real need, and they communicated with those scientists,

(15:45) Over the years we had scientists ask us really silly question. We had one year where actually the students were going and looking at their data on the map and these were students in Waterloo and they all visited different places in Waterloo and collected data and for some reason 7 or 8 of their points for not showing up in Waterloo they were showing up in La Port. and the students said that's weird, our data is not showing up where we collected it and they called the help desk in Colorado it said you know this is really weird something's wrong can you help us? And the help desk said Oh you just don't know where you are Sounds good now that they were in Waterloo vs. let's take another look and what we found is that they're deep they had 6 backpacks and a GPS unit in one of them was calibrated wrong and it was reading like European Latitude long or something. It was reading a different map and it was off setting everything by exactly 7 and a half miles by like Southwest.

(16:55) So again so there's like a real application where at the beginning the students were like why are we doing this and at the end they understood that they help those scientists know where the data was.

Molly- Good Story

Marcy- So I think STEM education some of its best practices I think once we do the research and we haven't done a lot of research in this, are going to be engaging students in real-world problems using data to solve problems or or create things and…….. I have one more I think of it I think there's at least one more like best practice that will probably come out of it.

Molly-(18:00)- One that kind of, something that seems obvious and it is the point of my research so it’s in my head, but like, that it isn't necessary it isn’t necessarily taught- that it’s interdisciplinary. That the subjects are not taught in isolation. Our program is a pilot program and I can talk about it later, but I’ve visited a couple of different programs, elementary, high school, and rarely are teachers working in isolation either. In elementary there is some more-one class-one teacher situations, where theyre doing multiple types of subject matter at once. Would it be possible for a science teacher in a high school to teach STEM education?

Marcy- (18:55)-Yes, I think so, and in that Globe program Ideally we wanted like the math teacher the science teacher we had some teams that were math science art language art, very few cuz usually can't get everybody language arts and social studies all together and because Globe was science but also involve those hundred 111 countries you could do a lot of things that went beyond STEM. It was not envisioned as a STEM project it was envisioned as an interdisciplinary project and so the power of that of being able to end it like in the science class you could go out and collect the data and then you have real data in the Math class 2 graph and figure out what kind of graph works for this data and discover does the data make sense in using math in real ways and then the issue is okay what does that tell us about her community and they would get a landsite satellite image of their Community but it was always about 10 years old and one of the activities was for them to like paste that 10 year old satellite image and trying to make sense of it today so hot then you got like how is our community changing and a lot of students would give their kids those disposable cameras and send them out into the community to look for things and come back and talk about their community and then that might turn into an art project there that might turn into a social studies project and all of that has real meaning.

Molly- (20:33) My next question was about kind of high-quality STEM education in a secondary level and that's kind of what you just talked about right? So have you seen I mean have you personally visited any school that kind of focused on STEM? I'm just trying to and even if you know about schools I don't know about that I mean

Marcy- So recently I have worked with schools that I would call high quality STEM schools for a couple of decades or more. But they may not necessarily self-identified as STEM schools. One would be Orange Elementary in Waterloo. It’s a K-5 Elementary School and their TAG teacher and a team of their teachers became Globe teachers really early on, but they also were involved in a state program called nature mapping, which was about identifying

(21:43)-Common wildlife in your community and they also had been trained in a in an environmental education program called EIC Environment as an Integrated Context and all of the school work together every year on projects. They had a before-school club 30 kids, and it always had a waiting list, 30 kids from second through fifth grade would come an hour early to school and first month like 3 weeks in a row and then once a month and they were kind of the organizers of the project and the motivators of the project but then every grade level would have things that they would do so one project that the school did was there is a soccer field near their school and 2 of the actual fields on the soccer field they could never actually play on because they were always too wet, so following the environment as an integrated contact protocol they said we think this must have been a wetland and then it wants to be a wetland again and they followed the protocol to go through their community and interview people who would know what the story of that land was. So this is a very social studies activity actually. and they found out no it never was a wetland. What happened when they built the school they shovel out and made that much lower than it had been before the area around the school but that should be a wetland. So then they turned it into a science project and they researched everything you needed to have for a wetland to be successful. They raised like $15,000 they got a grant to do signage. Meanwhile in that nature mapping project they collected 2 years worth of which animals insects birds mammals and snakes and amphibians were present on that property before they built the wetland and every year after, so they had all of this graph of before it was a wetland it had nothing it had crickets and after here’s all of the different species. So that was there STEM project, but like you said they did so many other things.

Molly-(24:07)- Very cool, very cool. I want to talk about my program but I’m not going to.

Marcy- I want to hear about your program.

Molly- I will tell you, I will tell you. Okay- so the question from the art teacher is what is your opinion on STEM vs. STEAM?

Marcy- When someone asks me that I always ask me what they mean by STEM and what they mean by STEAM. and I actually think that there are a lot of poor quality education things happening around the country in the world under both names and a lot of really good things happening under both names. Because I come from this background of STEM professionals who want to come together as one profession again that's where I want to honor STEM and we don't have a name I mean these are really just words right? We have a name for someone who does you know is a watercolor painter you can be a watercolor painter or an oil painter or you know mixed media and all of those people you step up and you're a painter and then you're a visual artist and then you're an artist. (25:38)- I think in the sciences science math technology we don't have that word. It's unfortunate I think that the word that been chosen for that it STEM because people outside of the profession I think see it and especially once it got brought into education as those are 4 random things that are getting a lot of attention now but the purpose was to recognize that these are four disciplines that just 200 years ago were not 4 disciplines they were 1. When you were a mathematician Archimedes 200 BC, was the King’s mathematician and he invented the Archimedes screw. So you know it used to be you are you could be all of those things in one and we don't necessarily have very many individuals who represent that, but anyway I think you’ve got my point. I want to honor that STEM and I also don't want to define- so STEM um it's meant to be comparing and contrasting how those disciplines interact with each other and it's limited to the disciplines that describe the physical world and if we if I try and put art into that does that mean I think that those of us who are scientists and Engineers put it in our own definition and suddenly you're trying to define are only as how it relates to those other things and to me art is the next step up and it's it's not only about how engineering design and art design interact with each other or or how you can you know be a scientist and best communicate your research through really good graphics it's also orchestra and poetry and plays and feeling and things beyond that. So to be you know to be really really honest I'm not sure either word is great. I have a little more problem with STEAM as a word because it seems like it's trying to fit art in at maybe the wrong level, if you’re thinking of it as like levels of things. then I would go you know you could be a biologist you can be a scientist you can be a stem professional and then you can be I don't know what the human. A well rounded human. So that really kind of my own personal.. I also run into, you know, where they say, we’re doing STEAM because we're singing in science class. We’ll there’s research that if you sing about science in science class that you learn from.. you memorize things a little better but I don't think that's teaching music.

Molly-(29:00)-Right, Totally. Now, I'm trying to think of a follow-up question that more specifically talks about -and I don't know if you need to talk about it any more-but like, maybe you don’t-I’m just thinking about how it is applied to to education. And not that I necessarily want to hear about bad STEM, or STEAM programs, I totally understand like them as a discipline and professional level movement is totally different than what you know vs. steam debate is an issue so I don't know if I need to talk about it anymore but I do maybe I'll come back to you with the better because I see the difference and I hadn’t thought about that before.

Marcy (30:00) I had some conversations with art educator in the Gallagher-Bluedorn and I had she help me understand cuz I’ve even been an artist, but I didn't do formal art training and so we talked about honoring Art For Art's Sake learning actual art and then art as a tool for other disciplines and then she this third one I do not remember at the time when it was you know the STEAM gets at one of those three ways to do art and I want our student on the art side I want our students I want every student to have opportunities in every kind of art there is all the way through K12. At the Iowa Academy of Science meeting a few years ago actually the science teachers meeting we had a group that came and talked about the people who had won Nobel prizes and were at the top- the top engineers in their fields all these people and each one of them had also was also a published poet or also was in an orchestra or also was a cellist or something like that and then at the end they said so this is why we need STEAM and I just wanted to scream this is why we need orchestra this is why we need art class! (31:26) Separate, and this is why and it wasn’t that...because I know it wasn't but then again this is getting at... it's not all we're going to sing... but it wasn't that they sing in science class that made them a Nobel Laureate it was that they were very well-rounded person who gained experience in all these different areas and found a way to put that all together probably for their profession and their personal life and maybe that's where we have we do tend to over simplify and teach everything separately and so I think it is best practice in all areas of Education to at times do those very distinct individual things but you've gotta get to the more integrated real life- nothing in real life is just math or just are or just anything else.

Molly-(32:30) Very well said. Thank you. All right.Um, lets see, I don’t know if I, so have you, I don’t know if I need anything else..co-teaching

Marcy- I was going to say I haven't read enough about interdisciplinary co-teaching I would go look somewhere else.

Molly- But you do hook people up with interdisciplinary research areas? So have How do people act with research and research has been focused back from you or do you see the projects that come out of the research that comes out of that and have you seen that benefit the people that you have helped?

Marcy- Yeah so I've only been in this job just just exactly two years and so a lot of I'm still working with a lot of people that we're trying to get they have really good projects that deserve Federal funding and we're still trying to get them all together though not all of them have come to fruition. I would say that even after my first year some of the evaluations I got on our program were that the faculty involved felt like they were a part of the bigger Community because we made these introductions across disciplines and based on that then we tried even harder. Our group originally I inherited that group that meets every month and it's always been self identified but it's primarily been people who worked whether their physics or engineering or Elementary education they're the people who work in education so it's that the physics education faculty in physics and we have worked really hard to bring in the others and I think that's really beneficial to everyone but especially to them and they have said you know that they have gotten to meet people across campus

Molly (34:30) I think that would be really powerful, in a positive way. It’s not a meeting where you’re discussing protocol

Marcy- Usually I start with you tell me what your research is about Help support you in that weather is just making you a friend you can talk to about it or we can go get that seek out this Federal funding.

Molly- So part of my conundrum as a teacher who wants to do new things and do things the best, People don't know how did my conundrum as a teacher who wants to do new things and do things the best thing is to try to figure out what you know there's all of these little areas and name that things are called what is the best practice at the heart of all of that you know so when I think of it as a movement or a schools are being labeled STEM schools and your job is a STEM program you know so what does the future of STEM education look like you see it changing is there anything like on the horizon and you just kind of have absolutely no idea?

Marcy- the things I hope is that we do start at the federal level I hope we do start getting some research back on what these interdisciplinary project what the benefits of those projects are and then what are the essential elements of those projects and how do we integrate those projects into other subjects how to rebuild that that environment as an integrated context with some research done in the nineties actually by Hootie and Liberman and they got a little flack for not being Scientific with their data but they found a lot of really good benefits to students dealing with real-world problems in their classes and of course they said it had to be a real world environmental problems but as I start to look at a lot of the science and engineering projects that are coming out the engineering is what creates the context that's the other thing besides real world using a context for a real-world context for Education the engineering becomes the context for understanding the science and that build a stronger Connection in the student's mind more motivation for them to learn it and so I think that what I hope the direction it goes is that we do some more research to back that up and trying to find what really what really do we mean by STEM education and also place based education project based, I think there's a lot of words that are thrown around and there end and and sometimes there's a definition of what that is and sometimes there isn't.