Perceptions About Women in Science and Engineering History
Heidi Reeder Communication Seung Youn Chyung Organizational Performance & Workplace Learning Lynn Lubamersky History Pat Pyke STEM Station Cheryl Schrader Chancellor, Missouri S&T Leslie Madsen-Brooks History Janelle Brown EXPLORE Magazine Thanks to Boise State University College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs for funding. BACKGROUND: For at least forty years, women’s history scholars have investigated who is responsible for advances in science and technology. Their findings have dismantled assumptions that have excluded women’s scientific contributions. While the role of women in the history of science has been recovered, it is uncertain whether this information has made its way into the classroom and into cultural consciousness.
Probing stereotypes through students' drawings of scientists
The Draw-A-Scientist Test is an assessment tool devised to explore and measure children’s stereotypical views of scientists. We administered this test to a group of 49 undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in a teacher certification program. While this was originally intended as a purely pedagogical exercise, we were struck by the degree to which the drawings so produced resembled, in stereotypical content, those usually produced by children. This suggests that stereotypes of science and scientists formed during childhood, presumably via the influence of the media, remain largely unaffected by the subsequent passage through high school and college, despite the fact that numerous real-life figures of science teachers and scientists are presumably encountered throughout those formative years. We argue that this state of affairs has subtle and far reaching consequences, and is worthy of our collective attention.
Historias de mi barrio: contemporary art in a community at high risk of social exclusion
Abstract Historias de mi barrio is a piece of pedagogic research aimed at highlighting the way art can articulate the relationship between the educational context and a neighbourhood at high risk of social exclusion. The starting point for this study was to ask whether this type of research, centred around the arts, was suitable in complex contexts and whether it might eventually lead to pedagogic improvement. The results gathered, and indeed the work carried out by the artists and university lecturers involved, together with pupils 6–12 years old and their instructors in a state school, provide evidence of a positive answer – and notably of the necessity of knowing about the socio-economic reality of the student cohort when planning learning projects and of the importance of the arts as a crucial element in education.