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Historically, the goal of graduate education has been to prepare future academics, and it has thus focused on the creation and conservation of disciplinary knowledge. However, today’s reality is that many engineering graduate students (GSs) go on to non-academic careers. As educators, it should be our aim to equip GSs for success, regardless of career aspirations. It is therefore essential that we shift our focus towards preparing a new type of scholar – one with a strong professional identity – rather than preparing a person for a specific type of career. We argue that helping students cultivate a professional identity has been largely missing from engineering graduate education. Connecting ideas across disciplines and applying abstract knowledge to real problems—as one does when teaching—is a necessity for the development of a strong professional identity. It is hence the integration of knowledge transformation (teaching) into graduate engineering education that led us to create the Graduate Identity Formation through Teaching (GIFT) project. In GIFT, engineering GSs are supported to construct adult-level, inquiry-based, 30-minute lessons based on specific K–6 Next Generation Science Standards. The GSs serve as disciplinary experts by teaching their lesson to elementary teacher candidates (TCs) who are enrolled in an Elementary Science Methods course. The TCs then turn this knowledge into 15-minute mini-lessons for elementary students with input and feedback from the GSs. Finally, the GSs observe the TCs teaching the lesson to K–6 students and reflect on the entire experience. To support the work that the GS do and account for the time they spend on the project, they also enroll in a 1-credit graduate course about teaching and learning which is open to graduate students from all disciplines. We will present results from five semesters of GIFT showing that project participation (1) promotes the development of GS professional identity, (2) reduces impostor feelings, (3) leads to changes in attitudes about K–12 educators, and (4) improves GSs’ skills in communicating with a variety of audiences. In the future, these results can be extrapolated to support engineering GSs in terms of their current educational activities and their future careers.
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Those Who Don’t Teach…Should Learn
“Those who can’t do, teach.” This hurtful adage continues to be common, implying that those who are teachers are somehow lesser, not quite as smart, or could not make it in a ‘better’ profession. However, one could argue that this adage – and the damage it wreaks – persists because the general public does not fully understand what teachers do and the expertise involved in teaching well. The question then becomes, how can science educators provide an accurate picture of science education with those outside the field? The assumption being that a better-educated public may be more supportive in a number of spheres. Therefore, the purpose of this roundtable will to be to discuss the unexpected findings from a project that pairs STEM graduate students (GSs) with elementary teacher candidates (TCs) for the purposes of TCs learning content knowledge for lesson planning. These findings include themes of the difficulties involved in planning an effective lesson; the difference between content and teaching expertise; seeing teaching as a well-honed skill; and, finding ways to give back to the field of education. Viewed through the lens of disciplinary stewardship (both on the part of the GSs and TCs), we see these unanticipated findings as something that could perhaps be expanded into more purposeful collaborations in the future and would like to discuss these possibilities further with others in our field. Related to the conference theme of “Why Science Education?” this roundtable presentation intends to engage science educators in considering how to support those outside the field to answer this question as well as the question, “Why Teach Science in Particular Ways?” in a thoughtful manner such that we may cultivate more advocates for high-quality science education within the general public.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1806698
- PAR ID:
- 10379268
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 Association for Science Teacher Education Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Historically, graduate education’s goal was to prepare future academics, and has thus focused on the creation and conservation of disciplinary knowledge. However, today’s reality is that most STEM graduate students (GSs) go on to non-academic careers. As educators, it should be our aim to equip GSs for success, regardless of career aspirations. It is therefore essential that we shift our focus towards preparing a new type of scholar – one with a strong professional identity – rather than preparing a person for a specific type of career. We argue that helping students cultivate a professional identity has been largely missing from physics graduate education. Connecting ideas across disciplines and applying abstract knowledge to real problems—as one does when teaching—is a necessity for the development of a strong professional identity. It is hence the integration of knowledge transformation (teaching) into graduate physics education that led us to create the Graduate Identity Formation through Teaching (GIFT) project. In GIFT, GSs are supported to construct adult-level, inquiry-based, 30-minute lessons based on specific K–6 Next Generation Science Standards. The GSs serve as disciplinary experts by teaching their lesson to elementary teacher candidates (TCs). The TCs then turn this knowledge into 15-minute mini-lessons for elementary students. Finally, the GSs observe the TCs teaching the lesson to K–6 students and reflect on the entire experience. We will present results from four semesters of GIFT showing that project participation promotes the development of GS professional identity, with implications for how we can support physics GSs in terms of their current educational activities and their future careers.more » « less
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