Educators That Rock!: Stephanie Chasteen
Stephanie Chasteen.
Dr. Stephanie Chasteen, who blogs at sciencegeekgirl, is a physicist, a writer, an education consultant and an audiophile who climbs mountains in her spare time.
While earning her doctorate in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Chasteen got restless. She realized that though she loved science, research wasn’t her bag; she wanted to communicate science to the public. She began taking journalism classes and freelancing while continuing her physics courses and research. After being selected for a prestigious science communication fellowship through the AAAS, she was placed at NPR’s science desk in Washington, D.C., as an intern.
Upon graduation, Chasteen landed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, where she helped teach science to K-12 teachers, and created science podcasts on teaching tips for K-12 teachers. Chasteen now works at the University of Colorado at Boulder, studying how people learn physics.
In an interview with findingEducation, Chasteen likened her career path to that of heat-seeking bacteria: “I looked for what seemed interesting and intellectually ‘warm’ and moved in that direction and then reassessed.”
fE: When did you first become interested in science?
SC: Back in middle school. I remember, ironically enough in home economics class, hearing a physicist described as “somebody who learned how the world works” and I thought that sounded pretty cool. So I thought, “Oh. Maybe that’s what I’ll do.” I also came from an academic family so it wasn’t that big of a leap for me to consider going into science.
fE: After college, you spent time in Guinea, West Africa, with the Peace Corps. Is there anything that you took from that experience that’s helped you in your work today?
SC: In the Peace Corps, I really learned that my type of scientific way of seeing things and my Western way of seeing things wasn’t the only way. Being among people who thought so differently from me and saw things so differently from how I did, really made it much easier for me to work with a lot of different people throughout my life, because I have a deep respect now for different people’s viewpoints.
For example, when I was in Guinea, there was a terrible lightning strike and several people died. It was a terrible tragedy, but their explanation for it was not anything like mine. I was looking at it from a scientific viewpoint. They saw it as retribution for something that those people had done; that was their explanatory framework. And I realized that while it might not be the scientific way, it was the thing that was important to them, and I had to respect that.
fE: On your blog, you describe your career path as similar to the way bacteria moves. Can you explain the connection?
SC: I remember when I was trying to figure out just what kind of career I wanted, I felt like I had to have some kind of single-minded march towards a goal and that was how you achieved good things. When I was in graduate school, it became clear to me that that wasn’t how people came to do what they were doing.
Bacteria, for instance, thermophilic bacteria and acidophilic bacteria, don’t know where the hottest spot in the petri dish is. They sense what direction it’s warmest and they move that way. And then they sense again what direction is warmest and they move that way. And so they end up on this sort of meandering path to the hottest spot and that’s sort of been how my career path has gone. I looked for what seemed interesting and intellectually “warm” and moved in that direction and then reassessed. And it’s taken me in a fabulously fulfilling direction I never could have foreseen in the beginning.
fE: In what ways has the Web impacted science teaching?
SC: It’s much easier for teachers to share information and ideas amongst each other. If we’re talking about K-12 teachers in particular, most are very isolated. The physics teacher in a high school is often the only physics teacher. He or she doesn’t have a colleague to turn to and say, “How do you present this material?” But the Web gives you this instant access to a broader community, and their experiences and teaching ideas.
But the problem for teachers has been to find the good stuff on the Web, because there’s so much. There are some great projects, such as the National Science Digital Library, that actually organize a lot of good teaching materials together in one place, and they’re all vetted for quality.
fE: You’ve written on your blog about teaching using the lecture format. Do you think that this is still something that can be effective?
SC: Yes, I do think that it can be effective, but I think that the way that we lecture necessarily has to change. If you can get lectures from a Nobel Laureate on YouTube, why do you need to go sit down and listen to lectures in a lecture hall at your university for 50 minutes? You’re not getting a lot of value from being in that room.
I think that lecture has to be augmented with other engaging things. For instance, if the instructor lectures for 10 minutes and then ask a “clicker question” (a question where students consider their answer and discuss it with their neighbors), then your students are getting something valuable from being in that room. They’re getting the information, and a chance to process it and to check their understanding. It’s called “formative assessment.” The teacher and the student can see if they’re on the same page.
fE: There’s a lot of talk in education reform about students being over-tested. You’ve written a little about testing on your blog. How do you feel about the issue?
SC: I think what you’re probably referring to is an article from the blog about a study called “The critical importance of retrieval for learning” by Karpicke and Roediger.
Testing can be really beneficial for memory because the act of trying to retrieve information actually helps you remember it. If you’re at the grocery store and you’ve forgotten your grocery list and you try to remember what’s on that list, the act of trying to remember what’s on that list will enable you to recite that list again later. Even if you don’t get it all right, you’re going to know more of the list than if you hadn’t had that chance to retrieve it.
There are also some new studies that show that if you give a test as a pre-test, but you don’t give students the right answers, it prepares them to better understand the lecture. Testing can be helpful for highlighting what it is that’s important in the reading or in the material so that students are clued in to that material.
fE: Tell me about the podcast series you did at the Exploratorium.
SC: There are just two main series. One was called SmallTalk, which was a half-hour variety show on nanotechnology. We had an interviewee each time and then we had a quiz show called “Nano news or nano nonsense.”
There was a longer running series I did called Science Teaching Tips. These were a series of 5 to 10 minute podcasts where I tried to get expert teachers in the Teacher Institute to share their wisdom with the broader teaching community.
fE: Besides finding cures for diseases, how can science be used for good?
SC: Science can really help us live our lives. By that I don’t mean it can create useful things like Teflon and Kevlar and high-tech windbreakers, but rather that it gives us a way to understand the world that we live in. And that is a very empowering thing. By noticing something like the way that the cracks are shaped in the pavement, and being curious about them, you can try to find out about your world by investigating the patterns around you. It’s just very enriching.
Stephanie’s Favorite Sites:
PhET: Interactive Simulations
ScienceBlogs
Exploratorium: Teacher Institute: Podcasts: Teacher Institute Science Teaching Tips
Exploratorium: Science Snacks
The National Science Digital Library
