STEM at Cal State East Bay: A conversation with Dean Carolyn Nelson of CEAS
- April 5, 2010
Last month, I started a new conversation with the university community about Cal State East Bay’s plans to transform science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and become a regional hub for STEM teaching, learning and innovation. (Read the President's column from March 2010.)
Although I have been discussing the importance of focusing on STEM education since I became president, the initiative is still in its early stages. And, as a result, I understand that there are many unanswered questions about how the university will change in the coming years and how that will affect our academic offerings and the way we teach. To help answer these questions, I will be sharing this column with other university leaders over the coming months to discuss and explore this important topic.
In this month’s column, Carolyn Nelson, interim dean of the College of Education and Allied Studies, joins me in this important conversation. Dean Nelson is a former middle school and high school science teacher as well as an education and administration expert, which gives her a unique perspective on this initiative. As part of our discussion, she shared some particularly valuable insights into the state of education in K-12 schools today. We discussed STEM subjects in particular, as well as the ways Cal State East Bay’s teacher education program can effect and model change — and indeed has already begun to do so.
Defining a quality science experience
For Dean Nelson, the importance of STEM is self-evident. She made the point that “High quality STEM education leads to high quality thinking. STEM requires students to think and synthesize data in ways they don’t do in other classes.”
Unfortunately, many students do not get a high quality STEM education, particularly students in underserved areas of our region. Dean Nelson and I both believe that STEM education should convey the joy of discovery — not just numbers and equations — but as she pointed out, unfortunately, “that’s not what students experience.”
“High quality STEM education cultivates students’ ability to pose and address problems and questions,” Dean Nelson says. “It teaches students to ask questions, cultivates a comfort level with multiple answers, ‘what if scenarios’ and creative ways to approach problems. It teaches students to collaborate and communicate results. These are all strategies for learning how to learn.”
Those skills — teamwork and creative problem solving — are key for workforce development. I’ve talked before about the value of STEM education for future careers, in which students will need a skill set for things that don’t yet exist. The only way to prepare them is to teach methodology and ensure they have the skills to adapt, becoming, in Dean Nelson’s words, “critical thinkers and life long learners.”
Our responsibility to educate teachers
The challenge then, as Dean Nelson and I agreed, is providing a high quality STEM education to all students. To those like Dean Nelson who study education in depth, the deficiency in the way American schools have taught science and math in early grades became clear several years ago. She explained that she’s often heard from faculty members who are discouraged by the students they see in their classes, who are underprepared and uninspired by the subject matter.
“But they rarely connect that to what’s going on in the K-12 education system,” she said. “What’s distinctive about Cal State East Bay is we do see that as our responsibility.”
I completely agree — and that is one of the reasons I’ve always believed our university is the logical place to rethink and reinvent STEM education. CEAS already plays a critical role in teacher education and credentialing. Working with teachers to provide tomorrow’s students with a more inclusive and engaging education that prepares them for 21st century success in new ways is a natural extension of CEAS' mission.
It’s clear that this requires more than subject matter mastery, however, from both the student and the teacher. Our CEAS graduates are well versed in the scholarship of teaching and learning. They understand that by focusing on the learner, not just on the subject matter, teachers can teach more effectively. CEAS aims to give our graduates the tools and strategies to approach these subjects in new and different ways, empowering them to reach more students and build even more meaningful and relevant connections to the subject matter.
Dean Nelson and I also noted that the U.S education system increasingly uses standardized test scores to measure quality. Yet tests often fail to assess what students have truly learned. “They can answer questions on tests, but the answers are meaningless to them.” We agreed that while standardized testing has its place, the focus should be on individual learning styles and needs.
Working in the best interests of students, not scores, is a key change Dean Nelson hopes to see in the coming years. This is especially important if the hope is to find ways to give all students the opportunity to engage and excel in the type of subject matter and learning that opens the door to career success in an increasingly technical workplace.
Cal State East Bay has a role here too; through our Ed.D. in Educational Leadership program, we can prepare school administrators to influence educational practice and policies in profound and lasting ways. Dean Nelson informed me that more than half of the research questions for the doctoral candidates focus on STEM issues in K-12 settings. The theme for the doctoral program is “leadership for social justice,” and according to Dean Nelson, the lack of access to high quality STEM education in under-resourced schools has limited college and career choices for lower socioeconomic student populations by default. Our doctoral candidates are studying ways to move beyond those historical barriers.
Interdisciplinary by nature
“We often create a false dichotomy between the arts and STEM,” Dean Nelson says. “In practice outside the classroom, discipline boundaries are blurred.” Education is interdisciplinary by nature, and an interdisciplinary approach is not only logical, but also engaging and relevant.
“Hands-on science and math give students something interesting to read and write about—it’s motivating,” says Dean Nelson.
At Cal State East Bay we are already moving beyond that traditional “silo” approach. We are creating a forward thinking model of education that realizes students do learn in different ways and do have different natural talents, but avoids other false dichotomies, such as viewing people as “left-brain” or “right-brain” or viewing math as “hard” but language “easy.”
In fact, faculty from CEAS and the College of Science collaborate regularly on a wide range of programs. These include the Noyce Scholars program and the Bachelor's Plus Early Pathway program, which have had a positive impact on the number of math and science teachers coming through CEAS.
CSUEB’s teacher education coursework emphasizes an integrated approach as well. For example, in David Stronck and Michele Korb’s Science, Health, and Safety course, teacher candidates begin with real objects in the natural world as they participate in science activities, then incorporate art, then language arts. The course also includes community service learning.
And in the Visual and Performing Arts methods course, Eric Engdahl explores how problem solving in art is like problem solving in science, asking “What thinking skills did you use to choreograph that dance and how are they like science thinking skills? Where is the math and science in this art lesson? Why is observation a key skill for actors, artists and scientists?”
Improved STEM education, improved access
As you’ve heard me say before, I believe our region needs an accessible pathway for students to study STEM at the college level, together with improvements to the K-12 “pipeline” that prepares them for college. It is essential to our role as a regional steward.
For Dean Nelson, STEM education itself is an access issue. “Inadequate access to quality K-12 STEM education has served as a barrier, limiting students’ opportunities for higher education, especially underserved students,” she said. “It not only keeps them out of careers, but it also keeps them out of the conversation entirely.”
These are manufactured barriers, of course, artifacts of a system that we aim to transform in order to ensure economic and social vibrancy in our region. Through this initiative, Cal State East Bay will help break down these barriers and offer all students the option and the opportunity to choose a high quality STEM education.
At Cal State East Bay, we reject the traditional university model that uses exclusion as a hallmark of quality. I believe it is a false measure. Other schools stringently control the quality of students coming in, and assume their selectivity will produce equivalent quality in outcomes.
Instead, let’s concentrate on what scientists call the “delta” — the change in our students from start to finish. This is where our STEM education initiative can add the most value in preparing our region’s students to join the workforce of tomorrow and succeed in the new economy.
While other universities, including some in our region, will continue to focus their STEM programs on research and what’s known as the “R1 model,” our focus is on regional workforce needs, tying STEM to career relevancy.
Or as Dean Nelson put it even more concisely: “STEM is the coin of the realm. STEM skills are 21st century currency.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion with Dean Nelson. Her enthusiasm for STEM education — and all the excellent work being done in CEAS — is inspiring to me, as I hope it is to CEAS faculty and students.
Next month, I’ll continue this conversation with Dean Terri Swartz of the College of Business and Economics, who will share her perspective on the value of STEM education for the future of business at Cal State East Bay and beyond.