Equity Webinar Series

Equity Webinar Series

Equity Webinar Series (formerly Wednesday Webinars) are virtual workshops open to MƒA teachers, other Master Teacher programs, and people interested in learning more about MƒA. Each webinar leads with a talk from a nationally recognized STEM educator, followed by breakout sessions, where small groups of teachers discuss how these powerful ideas can be applied in their classrooms. Teachers are expected to stay for the entire session, including the talk and the small group discussion.

Equity Webinar Series

STEM Education That Cultivates Just, Thriving,

and Sustainable Worlds p Speaker: Megan Bang, Ph.D.

WEDNESDAY, OCT 12 ONLINE  INQUIRY, PRACTICE, AND LEADERSHIP

Societies grapple with profound issues, such as racial justice and income inequality, amidst rapidly shifting ecological systems and changing climates. Given these realities, what knowledge, reasoning, and decision-making skills do students need to navigate these challenges and become successful students and members of society? In this talk, Dr. Bang will present findings from a project implementing interdisciplinary field-based science education grounded in cultivating socio-ecological systems understandings. She will share educational tools that thoughtfully integrate cultural, power, and identity issues to support equitable STEM education.

Dr. Megan Bang (of Ojibwe and Italian descent) is a Professor of the Learning Sciences and Psychology at Northwestern University. Dr. Bang studies the dynamics of culture, learning, and development across the life course. She is interested in knowledge organization, reasoning, and decision-making about complex socio-ecological systems and their intersections with identity, cultural variation, history, and power and focuses primarily on regenerating Indigenous systems of education for the 21st century. Dr. Bang is also a member of the National Academies of Education and serves on the Board of Science Education at the National Academy of Sciences.

Supporting Multilingual Students’ Scientific

Sensemaking Through Translanguaging p Speaker: María González-Howard, Ph.D.

WEDNESDAY, NOV 30 ONLINE  SCIENCE

What counts as language, and how is a language used for scientific sensemaking? Narrow views of language and science practices have long perpetuated inequities in science education for multilingual students. In this talk, Dr. González-Howard will discuss developing new, more expansive understandings and pedagogies for supporting multilingual learners. She will adopt a translanguaging lens to unpack how language and languaging are central to scientific sensemaking via science practices. She will illustrate these ideas with classroom examples and share resources to help teachers reflect upon and update their instructional practices.

Dr. González-Howard is an Assistant Professor in STEM Education at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores the intersections of teaching and learning science with multilingualism. Specifically, she focuses on supporting multilingual students’ engagement in science practices through translanguaging. Before receiving her doctorate from Boston College, she was a middle school science teacher in mainstream and sheltered English instruction classrooms in Texas and Massachusetts.