Delta Internship

Through the process of completing my Internship, I worked with a cohort of other Interns in a seminar which allowed me to put my work in context with the ideas of Teaching-as-Research, Learning Communities, and Learning-through-Diversity.

It was somehow surprising to me to connect teaching and research. In the lab I am always concerned with how my experiments are working. Similarly, in the classroom, I am always concerned with whether students are learning what I set out to teach. In the internship seminar, I developed my own research question and study design and also saw my fellow interns design their studies in diverse educational settings. To me, the experience was liberating. Instead of pure trial and error, and relying on a sense for whether or not certain teaching strategies are working for students, I can collect data to get an idea for how my teaching decisions are affecting the class. I was also exposed to a vast literature on effective teaching techniques and strategies for collecting data in the classroom. Before the internship, I had a vague sense of the possibility of teaching-as-research, but my experience conducting a project and sharing the challenges and successes with my fellow interns has given me a concrete sense of what is involved, and gives me a firm basis for implementing what I've learned in my future classrooms. On a final note, I had considered teaching-as-research as something that needed to be formal like a lab experiment. But I've learned that teaching-as-research can be more informal, in the sense that I learn from my own teaching experiences and implement what I've learned in future classrooms (such as my informal use of Minute Papers).

My internship cohort was a great example of a learning community, which brought together graduate students from various fields with a shared interest in education. For example, our internship projects spanned courses from Biology to Physics where teaching strategies can be very different, and hearing what my fellow interns were trying while teaching general chemistry or astronomy expanded my understanding pedagogical methods. It also allowed us, as fellow graduate students with different approaches to research, to provide each other with diverse feedback in which we all could comment on different aspects of one another's internship projects.

The internship seminar also made me aware that my own project involved a Learning Community of elementary school teachers, UW Madison students and community scientists. Each month when all of us met to discuss Young Science Scholars, we would hear the teacher perspective, the scientist perspective, and the administrative perspective. For example, there were several instances when teachers felt the need to push back the overly zealous pipe dreams of the scientists and administrators about integrating inquiry-based activities in the classroom -- it was critical for the teachers, already stretched thin on time, to have a voice in the depth of the curriculum, and also to provide insight into how scientific concepts could be best integrated in their classrooms. I was able to learn a lot about how teachers and administrators interact, and how their voices can balance one another out. In this experience, it seemed intuitive to me that Learning Communities function best when the community is not homogenous, but there is still a common interest in the group; everyone in the group is motivated to share their perspective on how the group can works towards its goals.

Whether I intend it or not, I've often ended up working with people more similar than dissimilar to me in terms of ethnicity, age, and upbringing. Working with elementary schools in the local school district got me out of a university setting, where the teaching philosophies and sharing of experiences with my elementary school teacher partners allowed me to find commonalities and contrasts between university and elementary school science education.

For one, UW Madison college students are not as ethnically diverse as the surrounding elementary schools. Furthermore, the socioeconomic make-up of the university compared to the elementary school is undoubtably different because poorer students are less likely to continue to a higher education than more well-off students. This was true for my own education as well, considering the people I know who have or have not pursued higher education in the Biological sciences. The current trend, at least for Biology at research-focused institutions, is that ethnic and socio-economic diversity is largely gone at the college and graduate level. So my college freshmen at UW Madison are mostly interacting with people who look like them, and who came from more similar backgrounds when put in the context of the larger community. Furthermore, diversity narrows again in the transition to graduate level education so that the diversity of the TAs and faculty is not necessarily representative of the undergraduate student body. We are missing opportunities in the biological sciences, in my experience, to Learn-through-Diversity in developing research programs and curriculum for undergraduate students.

I also have since thought of the university in a broader context -- specifically, what is the role of the community in a university town in the research at the university? In general, I have also been thinking about the distinction between Learning-through-Diversity, and the use of diversity for learning. In the former, I learn through the integration of experiences from all group members. In the latter case, while it is good to seek out new experiences outside a personal 'bubble', I do not want to hand-pick diversity for my own learning; I believe the goal is instead for the learning environment to benefit from being inclusive and accepting of a variety of backgrounds and perspectives in educational and work settings.