Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (00:00):
We started to see this trend of students communicating more in English because they were excited about the science that they had been learning.

Eric Cross (00:10):
Welcome to Science Connections. I’m your host Eric Cross. In this third season, we’re exploring the theme of science as the underdog. And last time around, we delved into the data showing that compared to other subjects, science is often put on the back burner. Now it’s time to explore why it’s so important to change that and how to do it effectively. So over the course of these coming episodes, we’re gonna make the case for science and equip you with data and strategies for advancing science in your own home, school, or community. To kick things off, we’re going to spend a few episodes going in depth on the integration of science and English instruction. We know we need to dramatically improve literacy rates in this country, and as we’ll show in the coming episodes, science can be a key ally in that goal. We’ll also show how language development and literacy instruction can support science. Yes, it can be a win-win, folks. To start out, I’m joined by someone who has been studying science and language development for more than a decade. Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep is a senior science educator and staff advocate for BSCS Science Learning. On this episode, she talks about her own experience as a middle school science teacher and share some key insights and strategies from the research on integrating science and English language development. Please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep.

Eric Cross (01:36):
Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here and having this really important conversation. So I’m so glad you can make it, Susan.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (01:43):
Yeah, I’m excited to be here.

Eric Cross (01:44):
We’re gonna talk all about language development and science. But first I was hoping that you can just kind of set the stage and tell the listeners about yourself and how you came about to studying this specific subject.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (01:57):
Sure. So I am a California native. I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley and that’s where I started teaching. I have an undergraduate degree in integrated biology from UC Berkeley. And I thought I was gonna go be a field scientist. And while I was waiting for grad school applications to run their course, I took a substitute job in Montebello to kind of bide my time. And because I had a science degree, they asked if I would take a permanent placement, well, a temporary permanent placement. And I said sure. And found myself teaching seventh and eighth grade general science to a population that at the time was about 68% English language learners, in a school that you would consider urban, under-resourced with a community that was large percentage immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America. And I never looked back. I kept that job.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (03:04):
I loved it. I love the middle school classroom. I love teaching science to my middle school students and truly, truly just found a really good home for my love of science, but also my love for talking about science and helping other people understand science. So at some point I was entertained with the idea of going to graduate school. So while I was still teaching, I actually did a Ph.D. At the University of Southern California in the science education field. And once there, realized that I actually had a unique experience in higher ed, that experience of teaching with populations that are learning English or have home languages other than English, was actually not common in higher ed circles. And being from that community was also not common. And so I pretty quickly leveraged that experience to combat what I think is universally agreed as an equity issue that in my school where I taught, the district had advocated for ELs to get an extra hour of language development in order to promote their English language proficiency.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (04:28):
And, our principal wisely said, there are not enough English-only students in this school to do that without losing all of our science teachers because there’s not enough kids left to actually fill a day, a teacher’s day. And she said, these kids learn more language in their science courses than they do anywhere else, so I don’t wanna remove that. But the reality is, is that at that time–this was in the late nineties, early two thousands–if you were not proficient in English, you went to more time with language development. And that makes a lot of sense in some ways. But when you look at the big picture, you realize, well, that means those kids aren’t going to science and they’re not having opportunities to have consistent quality science learning opportunities simply because they spoke a language other than English at home. And so that’s really how I fell into this work.

Eric Cross (05:28):
And that has a downstream effect. I mean, once you start pulling students from a course, that automatically sets the trajectory for later outcomes, which we ultimately see in STEM fields where we, we don’t see the population of our students represented in the STEM fields. Now, I know this goes back a few years, but you were doing research for your Ph.D. What did you start to follow?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (05:50):
Yeah, so I eventually took a position at Cal State Long Beach, which was not by chance, it’s a Hispanic-serving institution, and that’s where I wanted to do my academic work. And once I was there, sought funding with a district to support elementary science learning. So it had a teacher professional learning component that was both summer and in-class, sort of like PD in the classroom component. And the district came back and said, the only way you are gonna get time to even talk about science in elementary school is if it’s attached to language development. And so that’s what we did. It was a three-year grant, there was a sister grant that followed–so all told, it was about a five-year program where we basically said, what if instead of following the traditional ELD, English Language Development curriculum, we modified and put science as the context for language development in the K2 bands.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (07:01):
Teachers at the district traditionally had not been excited about their language development curriculum until we said, we’re gonna take that and we’re gonna do some science instead. And then they were like, no, no, no! We love our ELD curriculum. But they hung in there with us. The project was successful enough that it actually became a K4 and then a K5 project. The district ended up having to put in a ton of money into this because the grant only paid for so much. But their schools actually wanted “in” ’cause what they heard is when we put science as a context for language development, kids were talking more. Kids were speaking in English more. Kids were writing more. Kids were engaged. And the ultimate, kids were developing English quickly and in a community where you could actually operate within the community without speaking English. These are Spanish-speaking communities and the schools operated in Spanish outside the classroom. So if you walked into the school’s office, the principal secretary, the person who manned the door, spoke Spanish. The field supervisors that the lunch supervisors spoke Spanish.

Eric Cross (08:17):
The non-teaching staff that are supporting the rest of the students outside of the classroom.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (08:23):
Yeah. Everybody spoke Spanish and they spoke Spanish at school. And even the principals came back and said, from being in this project, that the kids were coming into the office and had transitioned to communicating in English, especially when they wanted to talk about science, and they really wanted to talk about science ’cause they were super excited about the stuff that they were learning. So we started to see this trend of students communicating more in English because they were excited about the science that they had been learning. And yeah, that sold itself and we had schools jumping in.

Eric Cross (09:01):
So you started off in a situation where you were told that you had to, if you wanna get science and you had to merge it into English, basically. And is it fair to say that that’s because of testing requirements that schools have on them? Like this is what gets analyzed or what was the purpose behind that?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (09:15):
It was district policy and it was site policy and those policies were put into place for very good intentions. Students don’t get reclassified into English only, and reclassification is how you traditionally got access to all this other programming, electives, AP college prep, all those other things. And the best way to get them reclassified was to learn English, and to learn it sooner rather than later. So it was in an attempt to get kids reclassified from English learner to English proficient.

Eric Cross (09:55):
And then during that process it was able to be expanded to K4. And then with these open-minded teachers, you gave them the content, they used science as the context for learning. And then your students who were mostly emerging bilinguals and multilingual students, you found that they started speaking English more frequently. What did you make of that result? Like what did you come to after seeing all that happen?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (10:20):
So I do wanna say that there’s a couple of reasons why we think this works so well. But I have to really acknowledge that there were linguistics, second language acquisition experts that were part of this team. And we wouldn’t have been able to make any of this work if it was purely science educators leading this cause. There’s a lot we didn’t understand about language development, and they really helped us. But one of the things that we think is unique about science, there’s a few really important aspects–one is that we all have experiences in the natural world, since we can process outside information, right? We all have observations, things we’ve observed with our eyes, we’ve heard, we’ve felt, and all of those experiences build some pretty good science ideas before we enter formal schooling. You know, kids already have ideas about this.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (11:20):
We don’t have to give them language for it. They already have these concepts and experiences. The other thing is that we are inherently interested in the natural world we occupy. And so we’re curious, science is often considered cool, there are science channels and science fiction movies and science fiction books and magazines–and this is just … it’s just cool. And that tended to be the trigger, you know, when we gave kids something interesting to observe. A Ziploc bag with water that we added an Alka-Seltzer to, and strange things starts happening in the baggie. That curiosity, that excitement allowed kids to leap over any concerns they had about the language they were supposed to use in the classroom. One of the most difficult things about learning a language is using a language that is imperfect. So saying things and communicating in a language that you are not a hundred percent confident about, that you’re not sure you’re using the right words or the right tenses. But when kids were excited about this thing in a Ziploc bag, they didn’t care. They communicated however they could, sometimes in their primary language or their home language, sometimes in imperfect English, but by and large they just communicated. They did it in oral language, like listening and speaking, but they also did it in writing. And that was easy. Like we didn’t have to do anything other than provide interesting science experiences. And that’s, that’s pretty common.

Eric Cross (13:06):
Yeah. I feel like, to co-sign on the science is cool, it is objectively, if a matter of fact, even just looking at the Oscars, like we have multiverse, you know, we have sci-fi you know, the costume designer of Wakanda Forever. We have all of these different movies that are all founded in some kind of these scientific principles. And so the idea that science is cool and organic, naturally engaging is something I think we, we all can connect to and it resonates with all of us. So I feel like is sort of your origin story too.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (13:33):
That’s the origin story.

Eric Cross (13:34):
That’s the origin story right there, to continue with this like movie theme. Now if we fast forward to today, based on all the research that you’ve seen since then, and your experience, why would you advocate merging English language development and science?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (13:49):
Well, for one, the research that we conducted actually provided some really nice evidence that showed, even though we had essentially stole minutes from language development time and inserted science. And on state mandated tests and on their students’ language proficiency measures, the kids in the program with the blended, did significantly better than students who were getting ELD instruction alone. Traditional ELD instruction. And that kind of blew our mind. We would’ve been happy if they had done just fine. Like we could put science into a student’s day and do no harm. They could get their language development; they could get science. But in fact, what we found was that they did better. That they actually gained English more quickly and it showed up in multiple measures, including the state English language arts assessment, which again, kind of blew our mind.

Eric Cross (14:55):
So just to be clear about the study that you did, you looked at two groups and one was the blended science and English language development, and then the other one was a control group. And the blended group ended up showing more improvement.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (15:09):
Yes. So there’s quite a bit of research now, this research was done in the early two thousands, and the research has built around it to really suggest that this does seem to be a more efficient way to promote language development while still maintaining students’ access to a core content area. But in recent years, the standards have shifted and that has been just a remarkable, wonderful change. And both standards have shifted. So when we did our research, we did it under the old California Science standards that were fairly heavy in technical terms. They were heavy in science concepts rather than kids doing things. And they were a much narrower focus.

Eric Cross (16:04):
And these are the standards that most of us grew up on, right? Those of us who are pretty much teachers in the classroom today pretty much grew up on what you’re talking about. Is that fair to say?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (16:12):
That’s fair to say, yes. So the new standards that we have now, the California NGSS Standards emphasize not just ideas, but they also emphasize students doing things in science. And we didn’t have to build-in language portions to the standards. They now exist. The NGSS is a very, very rich linguistic opportunity for students. And at the same time, the way we’ve thought about language development has also shifted. We used to talk about language and science… we used to think about science as a lot of words, and you had to know the words, you had to have this technical language. And we’ve sort of shifted that to really thinking about, language is no longer a prerequisite for science learning. Language is now developed through the science learning or the content learning experiences.

Eric Cross (17:11):
So now there’s more chances to integrate English into science. Have you seen success stories or have you seen examples of this? Maybe just anecdotes of teachers kind of doing this since you’ve been doing this research and kind of watching. If so, would you mind sharing one or two?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (17:30):
Yeah. And I will just give a nod to Dr. Dr. Okie Lee who’s now at NYU who has really led sort of this reconception of language and science. And one of the ways she talks about it is this notion that I enter this learning experience, I enter this observation of this phenomena with fairly naive, simple scientific ideas. And my language about it is equally simple. But as I develop more and more ideas, as my understanding of the phenomenon, what I figured out becomes more sophisticated, I need more sophisticated language. And so what we’re starting to see are these spaces where teachers are building science ideas and science and understanding along with the language. And in order to do that, you really need to know what’s the storyline arc of my science lesson? What do they figure out in lesson one? What do they figure out in lesson two?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (18:35):
What do they figure out in lesson three? How are the science ideas building over time? So that I can then look at the language that they’re using and what language supports do I need in order to allow students to not only engage and figure things out, but communicate their ideas about it. And so we’re seeing teachers blow up what we call language, what we call text. It’s not just words. It’s not just sentences written on a paper, but it’s models, it’s pictorial representations, it’s gestures, it’s this wide range. We pretty much said, let’s blow language up. Let’s like use all of the linguistic registers that we have in order to make meaning of what we’re seeing it in together in this classroom. So that’s one thing that we’re starting to see. The other thing is that teachers are really allowing students opportunities to use what we call social language, non-standard dialects.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (19:40):
The language I use at home and with my friends. Because earlier I had said, we have all these experiences and those experiences in the world are tied up in my social register. They’re tied up in my home language ’cause that’s where I experience them. And to let students have access to using that language in the classroom, especially initially in a unit, means we’re giving ’em access to those experiences that they have that are related to the phenomena under study. So I totally understand the benefit of promoting academic language and promoting language frames and forms that we use in more academic settings. But it’s a sticky wicket. You have to be careful how you tell students about the way you want them to communicate. Because when we tell them that language that you use at home with your friends and family is not welcome here, we can send a message that they’re not welcome here. And that those experiences that they have outside of classroom about how things fall, the way sunlight heats up different surfaces, where you’ll find plants and what plants you will find based on conditions. All of those experiences, we’re sending a message that those are not welcome in the classroom. And so this expansion of language, including non-standard dialects and even home language, is really important for letting students bring their whole selves into the classroom.

Eric Cross (21:23):
I love what you just said. It legitimizes the funds of knowledge, the language, the cultures that our students are bringing to the table. I remember when I first learned the word code-switching in college and you know, I’m biracial, I grew up in my home community and my school community were two different communities and I ethnically, culturally belonged to both. And I had to code-switch in order to kind of survive and be accepted into different communities. And not until I was in college did I actually understand what I was doing. Now there were all kinds of teasing and jokes that went on to how I would talk if I code-switched improperly. And in my classroom, I would see students who would explain concepts in a way that was maybe like a casual register. They just were explaining it the best way they could.

Eric Cross (22:10):
And the way they were speaking was kind of denigrated or it was seen as negative even though they were communicating their concept. And when I became a middle school teacher, one of my, I don’t know, it’s like sometimes when you teach, you get to, you change how you were taught or what you experience and legitimizing my students’ language, and they would tell these beautiful stories and in their most common like, casual language, but they’re explaining the concept brilliantly. And it was phenomenal to see this barrier be removed of saying, you have to talk like this in order to be a scientist or you have to say these right words. And, and that’s what I feel like I’m hearing that in how you’re describing kind of how science has been done and what language can do to certain groups of students.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (22:58):
Yeah, very much so. And you know, back to the origin story, you know, I grew up in a multi-generational household. My mom, my aunt, my grandmother, Spanish was their first language, but they lost it because my mom was raised in Riverside and she, you know, went to school in the, the fifties and sixties and back then you weren’t allowed to speak Spanish at school. And so they lost the language.

Eric Cross (23:27):
They weren’t allowed to speak it at all.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (23:29):
At all. I didn’t directly observe it, but that is the story that my family tells, that there was no English spoken anywhere on school grounds. And that was a different issue. Right? That was very much for people unfamiliar with some of the history in Southern California. Their segregated schools, severe racism, linguistic racism, racial racism against Mexicans was a real thing. But yet I grew up in this household where the sort of way of speaking, like I think many Mexican households, the context is everything. So you can’t get to the facts until you’ve told the whole context of everything happening around it. So we used to joke that we couldn’t send my grandmother to the doctor by herself ’cause he had 15 minutes, and she was gonna take 20 just to tell him how she got there before she got to why she was there. But this telling of the context, the telling of the story around the idea is part of the linguistic, this sort of linguistic way of my household. When I got to school, I had to learn to drop it because teachers found me off topic. You know, I still have to be careful how I express things and sometimes I’m not a fast storyteller <laugh>, and I monitor that for myself. So I can only imagine what it’s like to be a kid in a classroom.

Eric Cross (24:59):
Right. And there are so many constraints in the school day, you know, especially if you’re multi-subject and you’re elementary and you’re teaching multiple subjects and someone’s trying to tell a story and you’re just like, land the plane! And they’ve, you know, gotta tell ’em the story, but realizing that when you look at it through a lens of like, culturally, this is how we communicate, then it reframes what the student is trying to do. They’re communicating to you based on how they’ve learned to communicate and they’re including essential parts of the story. And so how do you both honor that while also, you know, certain things like brevity and being concise and things like that that they’ll have to learn. But also honoring that and making sure that there’s space for that in your classroom. Even me, I’m thinking about this where I had students record this video and it was one minute to two-and-a-half minutes explaining three concepts. And I had students coming up to me afterwards saying, Mr. Cross, I need to record two videos because two-and-a-half minutes is not long enough. And I was like, how? I even extended it. But I’m realizing and listening to you and going, they’re probably not just getting to the point. They’re probably including more context into this because that’s how they story tell and that was actually part of the lesson.

Eric Cross (26:12):
So now I need to go back and extend their time that I’ve given them for <laugh> that project. I wanna come back to kind of, since we’re on this topic about why this is also an equity issue. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So we were talking about language, you touched on this a bit, and we were talking about integrating into science, but can we go a little bit further into how this integrated approach maybe can benefit English language learners in particular? And maybe anything else that’s related to equity that comes to mind.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (26:40):
So there’s a couple of layers of the equity issue. The most tangible and clear is student access. If we wait until students develop English proficiency to allow them access to quality science learning, we lose a tremendous number of students that could not only could they benefit from science, we could benefit from their entering this science conversation. And I was at a university and I was in a college of natural sciences and we were dedicated to increasing the diversity of the faculty. And it was a struggle ’cause the number of Ph.D. science ed or biology or chemistry academics that come from marginalized populations is very, very small. And it’s not by accident. You know, the number of students that make it into the next level, that make it into college prep courses, that make it into STEM majors, that complete STEM majors and go on to either careers or advanced degrees narrows at every possible step.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (28:01):
And so the equity issue is really one of access. And as basic as that is, it’s the easiest to solve. So that’s the first layer of equity. But the second issue around equity is how we engage these students once they’re in this space. Do we make it possible for them to see themselves as a scientist or an engineer? Are we creating learning experiences that not only allow them to use all the sense-making resources that they have, but do we make them feel like they’re valuable and useful in that space? Because there’s a lot of people that will say, I could be successful as a scientist, but I’m not willing to give up who I am in order to do that. And that’s a real thing. There’s a lot of research about like, why are they leaving? Like why, you know, is it because they’re not able?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (29:05):
Is it because they don’t see themselves as being capable? And now I think we’re looking at this as a different issue. It’s not that students don’t see themselves as capable and not that they’re not achieving. They see the cost that it will take to enter these fields and essentially not be able to be their full selves. So that’s the second equity issue. And in both cases we lose. As a society, we lose. We lose access to the full range of human resources that we have, and we lose access to their unique perspectives that they would bring to real problems facing us. It’s like all hands-on deck. We need to stop making it too difficult to participate in the conversation and we need to be more inclusive about how we invite these other perspectives and how we respect and utilize their ways of sense-making. That may not be Western science ways that we have in our books now, but hopefully those science materials are gonna change and we’re gonna start to see other ways of sense-making and other people involved in the stories that we tell around science concepts.

Eric Cross (30:29):
And just to be clear, this practice in integration, while it lifts up equity for marginalized or underrepresented groups or students who are emerging bilinguals or students who typically we don’t see representation of, this approach also benefits native speakers as well. Correct?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (30:47):
Yeah. And there’s actually a group of native speakers that come from text poor homes. It’s typical in underserved communities. Poor people living in poverty that may be native English speakers. They may not be marginalized populations. But they don’t have access to like text. And so that’s another group altogether that needs linguistic support. And then once you have all voices in the room contributing, everybody benefits because now the conversation, the building understanding conversation we’re having or the sense-making conversation that we’re having has everybody involved. And we all benefit from that.

Eric Cross (31:33):
And we see, I think one of the benefits about a country like the U.S., is we have such a heterogeneous group of people. And when we’re moving in the same direction, we’re all coming to the same problem, but from different perspectives and we’re able to come up with more innovative and novel solutions to them. And that’s kind of what I’m hearing is like as we generate scientists that are all coming from different backgrounds, we’re gonna be able to solve future problems, current problems a lot more effectively because nobody has a monopoly on perspective. Nobody has a monopoly on knowledge or the fastest way to do something or the best way to do something.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (32:11):
Right. Right. And traditionally we really have privileged particular experiences, particular ways of sense-making particular linguistic registers. And if we could just kind of put that privileged ways aside and open up space for everybody to feel like they have a voice, I think the next generation could change the world. I think they could solve some real problems. I’m truly hopeful that they would see themselves not just as capable, but as necessary in these pursuits.

Eric Cross (32:50):
So what does it actually look like today to do this work in instruction well? So to integrate the science, to integrate literacy, to take the benefits of the things that we’ve been talking about. What are some practical things that educators could do to get started, whether it’s in early, you know, K5 or middle school or even high school.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (33:13):
So I will say, I’m gonna kind of separate ’cause in the elementary space, students are primarily developing literacy in multiple languages. The language of the classroom, typically English, home language, languages, they may be multilingual. In the secondary setting where students tend to have developed social language in some language, it’s a little different. So I’m gonna kind of separate those two. So for elementary spaces where teachers tend to teach multiple things, I recommend that you get a partner. Don’t do this work alone. You cannot do this work alone. I mean you can, but it’s very frustrating and not nearly as much fun. So you really wanna take a look at what is the science that kids are going to be engaged in. Because when we look at science first and build language development around it, the experience tends to be more authentic and organic.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (34:18):
And what we used to do is we used to, like when we were talking about the science, we’d monitor the language we were using and then use that to say these are the registers. This is the language that we use when we were thinking about this. So if students are gonna use this, these are the scaffolds they’re gonna need. ‘Cause to do it, well, to do it efficiently, the scaffolds need to be specific to the science learning. So if we’re doing cause and effect, those are specific linguistic scaffolds that are different than if, say we’re doing model and systems and systems models, those are a whole other slew of scaffolds. And so you wanna be really tending to, what is the science being discussed and what is the language that kids are going to use and build scaffolds around it.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (35:10):
And then you also wanna think about what is the social language? What are the experience that kids will have either in words or pictures that I can leverage in this space. And then you wanna do that for the arc of the unit and slowly increase sophistication around those linguistic supports, as well as the science learning. But if kids have social language and they’re now in, there’s a group we call long-term English learners who have not been reclassified way beyond what the typical reclassification is. And that actually is important to think about because if you think about the kinder group, the group of kindergartners that enter a school when they’re five or six, those kids are going to go from grade to grade to grade. And as students develop proficiency, will get reclassified and they move out of this group that we’re still calling English learners.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (36:10):
So by the time you get to like seventh, eighth, ninth grade, if they’re still students in that category, they have very different needs on average than the group we started with. Often when we talk about secondary or these long-term English learners, we can leverage social language a lot more, but have to build the scaffolds more carefully around, for lack of a better word, the more academic content transferring that those social nonverbal language into more sophisticated forms. I think in any setting, you wanna utilize your resources. If I’m in a secondary space and I have a language development teacher and I’m not talking to her or him or they, that’s a problem. You need to go talk to the other people that have these same kids and talk to them about, how are you engaging in language, what are you doing?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (37:07):
Because you know, you could actually have a lesson, maybe this is a lesson about energy and you’re using a model and the kids are creating an initial model. And over in ELD land, they’re doing some linguistic supports. They’re working on some forms and functions of language. You could talk about the catapult, you could talk about the solar heater. You could use the context of the science conversation, which has a whole bunch of tangible experiences. You know, there’s the solar heater in front of you. I don’t need to keep it all in my head ’cause it’s in front of me and we can point to things and talk about things by manipulating the materials. And then I can take all of that and my ELD partner can use that as context when available. But it takes collaboration, but it’s collaboration well spent. And it’s more challenging in the initial phases of the collaboration. Once you kind of the get into the groove, it becomes a lot easier.

Eric Cross (38:16):
The meta of this, as we talk about integrating science and literacy is, and this is great advice, but it’s basically integrate your science teachers with your English teachers and co-plan and do this work together. It’s a force multiplier. One, you’re both, you’re getting two specialists together. It also, I’m just listening to just the parallels. It also resembles what you actually do in the STEM fields of collaboration working together to problem-solve, and you’re modeling for your students what you want to happen. And if I was an administrator listening to this, someone who had control, like master schedules and things like that, there also needs to be space created for these teachers to talk to each other and plan and do all these other things to kind of maybe come up with like interdisciplinary units or even just meet and begin the conversation. It just seems like such great advice.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (39:07):
Yeah. We’re professionals. We have academic degrees and credentials and experience in the classroom and yet more often than not, we leave it to the students in the seats to make the connections between my class and the class they go to next. And that’s not fair. We need to be talking to each other. So if we’re talking about argumentation, argumentation in science and argumentation in ELA and argumentation in math–we’re not even talking about the same thing. I mean, cognitively we’re talking about taking some evidence and creating a claim and supporting it, but what we mean by evidence is very different in the different disciplines. What counts as more convincing evidence changes. And yet we assume that because we say evidence in one class, the kids know what we’re talking about. And the kids are sitting there going, which one is this? Which evidence are you talking about? Because last period it was something else. And so I think we also need to really consider who’s in the best position to clarify the connections and the integration because we leave it to kids more often than not right now.

Eric Cross (40:19):
I agree. Just having those conversations and defining your terms and agreeing on them just to make it easier for students. ‘Cause you’re right, they are left to make those connections or bridge the gaps. And when you have an education system for many schools, I think most of us, it’s still pretty siloed. You’re still kind of like, especially when you’re in secondary, it’s we’re doing this or even elementary, different times of the day you do different subjects, versus the way that we experience life itself or even our professions. We’re actually integrating science and math and reading and writing throughout the day, and ebbs and flows going back and forth. And without making those explicit connections, we’re leaving a lot of things to chance, hoping that the learning’s there in such a valuable moment. Before we go, I’m wondering if you have a parting message for listeners about the topic of integrating science and literacy. You’ve already said so many amazing things, but you have the platform speaking to educators and folks out there. What would you wanna say to them?

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (41:18):
This is not an easy endeavor. The system that we operate in does not make this effort easy, but it is worth it. It is worth it to the kids in our classrooms. It is worth it to the building of a scientific community and a scientifically literate populace. It’s important to solving problems in the future. It’s important to have kids feel like regardless of how they say things, that they belong in a classroom. If we can relax the sort of linguistic demands on kids and let them enter science learning in a way that allows them to use all their resources and they’re curious, they can really leverage both areas in a way that they don’t do individually. It’s really hard to think about what it is I’m trying to say if I’m worried about how I have to say it. And so we really need to think about, when are those times that we’re gonna let kids just tell us what it is that they’re excited about and when is it that we’re going to help them craft a more formalized language around those ideas. Right now we do a really good job at that second half. We need to do better at the first.

Eric Cross (42:46):
Susan, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your expertise and your wisdom and your passion for serving the students and for bringing everybody to the table through language and through science. We really appreciate it and the listeners will too.

Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep (43:03):
Thank you so much. This is my favorite topic.

Eric Cross (43:06):
Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Susan Gomez Zwiep, senior science educator and staff advocate at BSCS Science Learning. And please remember to subscribe to Science Connections so that you don’t miss any of the episodes in this exciting third season. And while you’re there, we’d really appreciate it if you can leave us a review. It’ll help more listeners find the show. Next time on the show, we’re going to continue exploring the how and why of integrating science and literacy instruction.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
When we interview scientists, they spend a lot of their time reading the work of other scientists and writing their findings, writing grant proposals, presenting at conferences. A huge part of the work of a scientist is not just at a bench conducting experiments, but even if you’re conducting experiments, you’re using your literacy processes to think about what you’re seeing in your experiment.

Eric Cross (43:57):
That’s next time on Science Connections. Thanks so much for listening.

Desiré Whitmore (00:00):

I think it’s really amazing when we can realize as teachers, like, no, our job is not to just enforce rules on our students, right? Our job is to help students to achieve more learning.

Eric Cross (00:37):

Welcome to Science Connections. I’m your host, Eric Cross. My guest today is Desiré Whitmore. Desiré has held positions as a science curriculum specialist with Amplify Science, a professor of laser and photonics technology at Irvine Valley College, and is now the senior physics educator in the Teacher Institute at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Her current work is focused on providing support and professional development to middle and high school science teachers to help them teach through inquiry. In this episode, we discussed Desiré’s pathway into physics, the impact of educators in her life, and the importance of representation for students in the classroom. I’m so excited for you to meet my physicist friend, Dr. Desiré Whitmore. All right. So just like a superhero, STEM superhero, you have an origin story and so—

Desiré Whitmore (01:36):

How long is this podcast gonna be? ‘Cause, you know, I can talk for days, so you—

Eric Cross (01:40):

I know, I know! But it’s, it’s…so, OK. We can give us a highlight. So, you know, 30 minutes. But what would be the origin story? You can start from any point in time, but what’s that journey like?

Desiré Whitmore (01:51):

I’m gonna start at the beginning, when I was really young, just because I think it’s important. Neither of my parents were college-educated. My mother didn’t finish high school. My father went back and got a GED later. But my father’s grandmother, her name was Claudia Pairs, and she was a teacher, right? So when I was a kid, she actually kind of raised me from, I don’t know, until I was around seven or eight. And so she was very important in who I became, I think because she taught me that college is important and she taught me to think. She taught me to ask questions. She taught me how to ask questions. Just the Exploratorium likes to do. Which is why I fit so well here. She taught me to always wonder and always think about things. And I remember as a kid, she taught me to count and read and write when I was, like, three. And she would always have bubbles at her house. And I was obsessed with bubbles. I thought bubbles were the coolest thing in the world. And just how you can take your breath and create this thing that now you can see, and it’s your breath, right? It’s your breath inside of a bubble and it’s flying around and it has all these cool colors, and then it would fly up and then eventually just pop. And you’re like, where did it go? Now my breath is just up there. Not understanding, as a kid, but my breath is always everywhere. I didn’t understand any of that, but I understood that my breath was inside of a bubble. That’s my earliest memory of thinking about science, was from that. And she was not a science teacher. She was—I don’t even know what she taught. I think she was an elementary school teacher, maybe. She died when I was 12. So I don’t have super-strong memories or of understanding who she was, only that she raised me and what she taught me as a kid. But that in itself really helped me because then when I was in the environment that I was in at home with my parents, which was not at all the environment she provided for me, I always had the things she taught me in my head, right? So I was always asking questions. My mother hated it. I was always taking things apart and putting them back together. So I used to take apart TVs and VCRs and vacuum cleaners and telephones, and my mother’s like, “Oh my God, I’m gonna murder you.” And she tried a couple times, too.

Eric Cross (04:25):

Did you ever put ’em back together and realize you had extra parts? You’re like, oh, hi.

Desiré Whitmore (04:29):

Oh yeah. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. VCRs have a lot of extra pieces. You’re like, “What do you even…it still works. It’s fine.” <laugh> You know? And vacuum cleaners too. They had a lot of extra parts, <laugh> all the time. And TVs. I should not have been playing with TVs. But like I said, I didn’t have a lot of parental, guidance as a child. So, like, whatever—I’m opening up TVs.

Eric Cross (04:54):

There’s a lot of open inquiry going on in your household. Yeah. Unsupervised.

Desiré Whitmore (04:59):

Unsupervised. But I didn’t know what it was or what it meant as a kid. I mean, I used to put things in the microwave. I did so many microwave experiments as a child, trying to cook different foods or melt different things. And so I think those kinds of experiences, where I was allowed to just be curious, kind of shaped who I am today. And then I kind of got into…you know, when I was in school, I loved math. In 10th grade, I had my first Black teacher, he was my chemistry teacher. His name was Mr. Strickland. And I was like, chemistry is cool, dude. And he was not the best teacher, but he was fun. Like you were saying, he was me, and he was talking to us the way I speak. And he was so like, just kind of chill and happy-go-lucky, I guess. But he wasn’t…he hadn’t taught chemistry in a long time. So he wasn’t a very good teacher. And me and one other kid in the class were in love with chemistry. And so we would read the book and do all the homework and he’d be in class lecturing and we’re like, “That’s not right, Mr. Strickland, like, what are you talking about?” And then he’d be like, “Oh, really, Desiré? Do you wanna teach the class, then?” And I’d be like, “Yeah.” And so I would go up and I would teach my chemistry class in high school, because the teacher was trying to make an example out of me. But he was also, I think, willing to be like, “I really don’t know.” And I really appreciated that. That he wasn’t just like, “I know all of the answers and you’re wrong.” Like, he wasn’t being a jerk, right? Like, the fact that I said, “Yes, I do wanna teach it,” and he actually let me do it? That’s pretty dope. And then I liked physics in my senior year in high school, but I didn’t think it was where I was gonna go or anything. I loved music and I loved math. Those were my two subjects.

Eric Cross (06:51):

What was it about math that resonated with you?

Desiré Whitmore (06:55):

I think it helped me understand the world a lot better. I didn’t have strong science teachers, I guess, growing up. It was a lot of reading out of books or watching laser discs in class. That’s how old I am.

Eric Cross (07:12):

Laser discs.

Desiré Whitmore (07:13):

Laser discs. And you know, so there wasn’t a lot of…I moved around a lot as a kid. I didn’t have this straight curriculum. You know, in one year, in the third grade, I went to three different schools.

Eric Cross (07:25):

Mm. Oh wow.

Desiré Whitmore (07:26):

It was kinda hard for me to latch onto school. But with math, because I could look at math and actually understand the world in it, I could see how math can be used to describe how things work.

Eric Cross (07:40):

I almost imagine, especially with so much transition in your life, it helped make sense of things. You had a lot of transition going on, but you were able to understand the world through the process of math. And then this early exposure, it kind of reminds me my own story too. Because there were these books that would do these cross sections of a cruise ship or a machine; that’s what got me really into engineering. Kind of How Stuff Works. I would watch that on Nova, How Stuff Works. I’d always be fascinated. Even Sesame Street had a segment where they would show you crayons and how the dye was added. You remember that?

Desiré Whitmore (08:19):

Yep. Yeah.

Eric Cross (08:20):

Young Desiré, doing photronics…photronics?

Desiré Whitmore (08:24):

Photonics.

Eric Cross (08:24):

Photonics. Photonics at home with the microwave and all these other things.

Desiré Whitmore (08:29):

Sure. How ’bout that.

Eric Cross (08:30):

<laugh> Right. And then loving math. So, early, I could see this combination, sort of this alchemy, happening inside you. And then, how did that lead to you becoming a physicist?

Desiré Whitmore (08:46):

It’s not as straightforward as it seems it should be. It’s obvious to everyone. <laugh>. But it wasn’t obvious to me. ‘Cause I wanted to be a lawyer. You know, because my parents weren’t educated, they didn’t really know…both of my parents and their subsequent spouses when they broke up—so my parents and my stepparents—are all bus drivers. And so they don’t know what options are. Right? So for them it’s like, “You have to be—you can be a doctor. You can be a lawyer. ‘Cause you’re smart. I know you’re smart, so you’re gonna be one of those things.” And I was like, “I don’t wanna be a doctor. That’s not actually interesting to me.” I did wanna be a teacher when I was younger, because I knew that my grandmother was one. But yeah, I went in and I was like, “I’m gonna be a lawyer. I’m gonna be a lawyer.” And then I go to college and I was like, ‘Eh, I don’t. I hate writing.” <Laugh> Like, I love reading, but I don’t writing. So I don’t think I wanna be a lawyer. I love music and I love math. I was originally going to major in music and math, but then I went to community college because I missed my opportunity to go to university for…long story. And so I’m at community college and I was like, “You know what? I’m gonna just do something new. I’m gonna be a marine biologist.” So my major was marine biology, and then they’re helping me pick out my classes. And they had zero math there. And I was like, “Pardon me. I think there’s a mistake, but I’m not taking any math.” And they were like, “No, you’re done with all your math. For marine biology, you only need calculus. And you took all of that in high school, so you’re done.” And I was like, “No, this is not gonna work for me, dude.” So I continued taking calculus anyway and moving on in math. And then I realized that biology wasn’t what I needed, but I did love my chemistry and I loved my physics classes. So I asked those teachers—chemistry, physics, and math teachers in community college, my professors—”I don’t wanna be a marine biologist and I don’t wanna be a lawyer. What do I do? What do you think I could study? I really like chemistry and math and physics.” And so all of them, all three of these professors told me, “Oh, it sounds chemical engineering would be good for you, so you should be a chemical engineer.” And I was like, “OK, cool. No problem.” That’s what I did. So I got my degree in chemical engineering. Right. And I finished community college, studying chemical engineering. I was like, “This is really cool. This is a lot of fun. I love engineering.” And then I transferred to UCLA as a chemical engineering major. And I was like, “I hate this.” <Laugh>. “I hate it a lot.” It was just…

Eric Cross (11:07):

What was it about chemical engineering that you were just not feeling anymore? What was it that just made you go, “nope”?

Desiré Whitmore (11:12):

It didn’t—at least the way it was taught to me—it wasn’t as as…exploratory, I guess. There wasn’t a lot of theory in it. There was just a lot of “OK, pull out a ruler and you’re gonna draw a thing and then this is how you’re gonna build a reactor.” And it didn’t seem very scientific to me. The science was missing. And don’t get me wrong, I understand, now that I have a degree in chemical engineering, that it’s not that chemical engineering is not scientific. But it’s that you build up the science and then you don’t focus on it. You focus on the engineering aspect of it. Which is, you have the science and the scientists will work on that aspect. But then how can WE do kind of larger batch chemistry. And for me, that was just less interesting. It was a lot of pushing buttons and just plug-and-play equations stuff. Instead of diving into first principles of why things happen in chemical engineering. There was no “why things happen”; it was “this is what happens, so this is the next step.”

Eric Cross (12:25):

You had to go so far into your academic career to realize that this is what chemical engineering is. And we were talking about representation, and not having examples or parents; your families were bus drivers. My mom was a receptionist and executive assistant, things like that. And I was the first of many, like you…we kind of had to go through and invest all this time and money to finally get to this place to realize, “This ain’t it.”

Desiré Whitmore (12:58):

This is not for me, yeah.

Eric Cross (12:59):

This is not for me. That was a long journey to get to that point.

Desiré Whitmore (13:03):

It was. Especially because I went through community college and I took a long time in community college, ’cause I was working full-time. So I was working full-time, going to community college. Took me a while. And then I finally get to UCLA. I’m like, “Yeah, I’m finally gonna get my degree and go make money!” And then I was like, “Ooh, no.” I mean, I could go and make money, don’t get me wrong. I could have graduated and made a ton of money. But I was not happy at all and I did not enjoy what I was doing. So, while I was in undergrad, I realized I don’t wanna do chemical engineering anymore. But what do I wanna do? But then I was taking…I took a quantum mechanics class. And that class blew my whole mind. And I was like, “This is the coolest thing that I’ve ever learned in my life, and this is what I wanna do.” And so I went and talked to my professor and I was like, “Can I work for you? Can I do research? Because this is amazing and I wanna do this.” I felt it was too late for me. I had been in school for so long and I was already kind of burnt out. So I was, “I’m not going to change my major. That’s just outta the question for me right now. It costs so much money for this degree and I don’t have—I’m not just gonna waste my time and keep working all these jobs.” So I had three jobs in college. And it was like, I worked at Radio Shack, I did research for this professor, and I worked in the library, the chemistry and physics library.

Eric Cross (14:28):

I love the fact that we’ve talked about laser discs; you said Radio Shack; and we talked about the analog internet of the encyclopedia salespeople. And I know all of those things. And I’ve been through all of those things together.

Desiré Whitmore (14:43):

Just in case people don’t know how old I am. <Laugh>

Eric Cross (14:47):

For our listeners who are way younger, yeah, this is how we grew up. This is how we—these things are extinct now. There’s this element of this kind of cultural connection. I think that we experience that. It kind of it flies under the radar. People don’t really realize it until you’re in an environment that’s different from what you’re used to. And you realize that, “Oh wow. this is not what I’m used to.” And the things that I’m finding funnier, the things that I connect with, it’s not what everybody else connects with. And as a teacher, it’s the same thing, right? Like, we go in the classroom and you know, you and I are rapping about laser discs and Radio Shack and I’m trying to talk to my kids about it. And they’re like, “Yo, Cross, what is that? Are you gonna give us a history lesson? What are these things?”

Desiré Whitmore (15:35):

Yeah.

Eric Cross (15:36):

And I found myself having to stay connected to pop culture, because I teach 12- and 13-year-olds all day. And it’s great for keeping things relevant for my students. But when I talk to my friends that are my peers, they’re like, unless they’re a teacher, they’re like, “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

Desiré Whitmore (15:55):

Yeah. I have a friend who’s also a middle-school teacher and she’s always coming to me with all this. I’m like, “What are you talking about?” She did the Glow-up Challenge, but she did the Glow-down Challenge. So she invented a new thing. She’s like, “No, I couldn’t do Glow Up ’cause that’s too much. So I did the Glow-Down Challenge.” And it’s the cutest thing ever. And the students think it’s amazing. And I’m like, “That’s awesome. But I have no idea what the point of that is.” <Laugh>

Eric Cross (16:21):

And there’s this theme, too, that when we talk about teaching kids STEM, there’s this soft part of it, this relational piece of it that you mentioned, of this connective aspect that in a certain way kind of even superseded the content knowledge that your teacher even had at that point, where you’re going up and teaching the class. But just the fact that someone looked like you or spoke like you or connected with you in a certain way made a big difference to who you are as…well, the trajectory of where you went.

Desiré Whitmore (16:57):

Yeah.

Eric Cross (16:57):

“I like chemistry. It resonates with me.” And it’s something I think can get lost. And I think just to kind of a good segue, I use Amplify my classroom, and one of the reasons why is because of the representation that is in these videos. And you were part of crafting this for…was it the fifth grade?

Desiré Whitmore (17:21):

I mean, it was K–8. So I was—

Eric Cross (17:23):

OK, so you were doing the whole thing.

Desiré Whitmore (17:24):

Yeah, I was a part of the K–8 science team. My title was science curriculum specialist. But in reality I was hired to do the engineering internships, mostly. Which are middle school. And to be a sim developer. So sims K–8. I worked on several of them in both middle school and elementary. Yeah.

Eric Cross (17:47):

What was that like for you? When you were designing curriculum? ‘Cause as a teacher, it’s, you know, I think with teachers it’s kind of…I would consider myself, if I was gonna use hip hop as a metaphor, I’m more of a DJ than an MC. Where I wanna remix things that exist, versus, I don’t wanna write the lyrics in freestyle. So I don’t want to go and write the curriculum completely; I wanna take something that’s solid and then I want to go ahead and remix it. You are great at both. What was the process for you, being on that team, designing? How did you go about making, “OK, we’re gonna create this experience for kids”?

Desiré Whitmore (18:25):

It was, it was amazing. I learned so much, so much. It was the best job I had before I came to the Exploratorium. The process was amazing, because it wasn’t just me, right? It wasn’t just me. It was a whole team. And each unit had its own team. So we had a scientist, which I was the scientist we had. So we had a scientist; we had a literacy specialist, because it was really important to increase science literacy so that students understand not just that science exists, but “What are the terms that are used in science and how can I speak and act a scientist? What are the things that scientists actually do in their real life?” Then we had an assessment specialist and then we had a simulation specialist. And so, on the units that I was on, sometimes I was both the sim developer and the scientist, or sometimes I was just the sim developer and I got to work alongside another scientist, which was always fun. And so it was really nice, because I was working alongside master teachers. People who had been teaching for years, and they were able to help me better understand. ‘Cause I’ll come in and I’ll be like, “Yeah, there’s a unit on light waves, let’s come in and teach this unit on light waves!” <laugh> I was the sim developer and scientist on that unit, and there was another scientist working on the unit, but they were like, “Well, Desiré literally builds lasers, so I think she should be the science developer.” So we kinda had two science developers on that one, which was fun. But I come in and she’ll come in and she’ll be like, “Yeah, I think this is where we wanna go and this is what we wanna teach.” I’m like, “No way! Like, that’s not accurate, right?” And so I can come in, but then I’m coming in with all this crazy lingo, right? I’m up here. But then also I have taught kids about lasers and optics and photonics my whole career. So I’m also very capable of bringing it down to where kids need it to be. What I don’t know is how effective that is, right? When to do it and when not to do it. When to bring the level up; when to bring the level down. And so working alongside these other teachers and assessors really helped me to do that. And so for me it was just two years of deep learning experience. I learned—every single day at work, I learned something new. Which is something that I value and I’ve wanted in my career, my whole life. We made active decisions in that room. Like, “We want to interview scientists who are scientists of color or who have different abilities or who have different representations in all kinds of ways.” Right? And then we also have these fake internships, or not even the internships, but just in the general units. And we actively wrote scripts for those. And we actively wrote in those scripts, like, “This is a Black woman. This is an Indian woman. This is a Jewish man in a wheelchair.” Like, we specifically dictated exactly who we wanted in these videos, because we knew that representation was super-important and we knew that we wanted students to be able to connect.

Eric Cross (21:35):

Right. One of the things, I appreciate what I’m hearing a lot in that is the amount of intentionality that went into this. But even now as you’re reliving it, you’re still almost iterating on how could we improve it or how can we make it different or reach more people. And I think that goes towards when we’re talking about including more people and inclusion. Like, it’s not a binary thing. You’re always modifying; you’re always iterating; you’re always redesigning and improving to be more inclusive, to reach more students. Because you know, to your point, part of it is, “Yes, we wanna do this really awesome science curriculum,” but the other part of it is there’s more to it than just your content. And I think now more than ever…I use—we just finished the food bar unit. Metabolism. And in there there’s a simulator. They always ask me when I show the videos, “Are these, are these real people? Are these real situations?” And I tell ’em, “Well, the story is real, but these are all fictional actors. But what’s actually happening happens. It’s real.” And they get really into it. And I think one of the other things is with your simulations—especially the engineering units—there’s no one right answer. And so my students who want to go, “Mr. Cross, I wanna make the best bar! Perfect 10, best taste, cheapest!” And I’m like, “All right, good luck!”

Desiré Whitmore (23:06):

Yeah. Go do that.

Eric Cross (23:09):

Casue there’s something called trade-offs! It could happen! And they’re like, they’re trying. They get into the code. They try to open up the Inspect Element, when they feel like hackers.

Desiré Whitmore (23:17):

Yeah, they do. But these kids like, they’re so smart and they’re so resourceful. And I’m just thinking like, maybe that’s how we challenge them more, right? Sometimes we can give them these kinds of things where it’s like, “Go and create a program, ’cause that’s the level you’re at <laugh>. Go and create this program to do something similar that’s related to the work that we’re doing.”

Eric Cross (23:38):

I’ve had some of my own students redesign—I have one student who redesigns every assessment I give him. I give the project; I give the options for the final goal; and he always chooses—if I give three options, he always chooses option four. If I choose two options, he’s choosing option three. And so he’ll go into Google Sheets, he’ll pull all the data and then he’ll construct his own kind of spreadsheet with all the probabilities of different things.

Desiré Whitmore (24:06):

You tell this kid to make a GitHub right now <laugh> so that he can get a job as soon as he’s done with high school. <laugh>.

Eric Cross (24:12):

He’s amazing. And we did this one project where students had to design a Netflix show to show their understanding of metabolism. And they had to do four episodes. So I gave him a template. It’s not from me; it’s from, I think, EdTechPicks.org or something. And it looks like the whole Netflix splash page. They took photos, did the whole deal. He created NOTflix. Everyone else did Google Slides. His Google Slides was interactive. So when you clicked on different boxes, it actually took you to the next splash page of that show. I mean, it was….

Desiré Whitmore (24:48):

That’s fantastic.

Eric Cross (24:49):

It was, it was. I recorded his presentation. It was brilliant.

Desiré Whitmore (24:53):

But that’s amazing. And that speaks to your strengths as a teacher and why you’re an amazing teacher. Because you see the students and what they’re trying to do and you work with them; you meet them where they are. Right? There are so many teachers who would just be frustrated with that student. And it’d be like, “No, these are not your options. Your option was to do what I told you to do.” And there are many teachers who would do that. And I think it’s really amazing when we can realize as teachers, “No, our job is not to just enforce rules on our students. I mean, that is part of the job, because that’s what school was when it was created. But our job is to help students to achieve more learning in what we’re trying to do. And so the fact that you are so good with this student and that you encourage him to go above and beyond when he can, I think it’s so amazing.

Eric Cross (25:49):

Well, that brings me to my favorite group, organization, and the phase of your career of where you are now: The Exploratorium. And I wanted to kind of rap, talking about what you do now. Because the Exploratorium—I tell people, they go, what is that place? And maybe you can tell us what it is and then what you do. But for me, I’ll just tell everybody: It’s Disneyland for science teachers. And I love going there. I not only love going there because of what I receive from it professionally. Many of the PDs, I don’t even call ’em PDs—just communal learning experiences, that I’ve had that have been led by you and Lori and, and Tammy and the rest, and everybody that’s there have been incredible. And I have so much fun. Emotionally, I get excited when I go. When I’m on the plane, I’m like, “Here we go!” And then we go and we’re making fudge or we’re blowing darts with marshmallows across the room in the theme of Boba Fett. There’s just these rad things that are going on there. And it’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced before. So maybe we can close with talking about what the Exploratorium is, what you do there, for people who’ve never been and have been a part of it.

Desiré Whitmore (27:19):

I’m gonna give you what my definition of the Exploratorium is.

Eric Cross (27:21):

That’s what we want.

Desiré Whitmore (27:22):

So, the actual definition is, we are a public learning laboratory. We are known as the Museum of Art, Science and Human Perception. Cool. But, like, what does that all mean? Right? And I think your description of the Disneyland for science teachers, I think that’s a perfect description. ‘Cause for me, I tell people like, “Oh, I wanna go to the happiest place on earth.” And for me, that is the Exploratorium. And yes, I work there, and yes, it’s still true for me. So the Exploratorium is this huge museum. It’s an interactive science museum. And art—we have a lot of art. And it’s all about learning through doing. It’s not about learning science by going up to an exhibit and reading the little paper next to it. It’s like, no, you go up to an exhibit and you interact with it and you teach yourself science. The goal of the Exploratorium is really to help people understand that learning science, doing science, isn’t reserved for only scientists. Doing science is something that everyone in the world should and does do. And so helping people understand that everything we do is science is kind of the point of the Exploratorium to me.

Eric Cross (28:35):

Even the building itself…one of the other cool things too is, for people that don’t know, it’s the size of Costco or two.

Desiré Whitmore (28:43):

Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Cross (28:44):

It’s immense! And even the building itself teaches. Like, you have that whole workshop, dead-center in the middle of the floor where they’re designing things. It’s like inside-out. And then I remember going to the one experience where I think it was Eric who showed us that it’s one of the few facilities that is actually cooled by the Bay water. And there’s only a couple of those in the state that can do that. And it has a platinum rating, something wild that. So even just the building itself…everything that if they can extract every ounce of science teaching in that, it’s in there. And you are in a very important program for me. And can you talk a little bit about maybe what you’re doing in T.I.?

Desiré Whitmore (29:33):

So I am in the Teacher Institute. I’m a physicist in the Teacher Institute. And the Teacher Institute is a group of teachers and scientists. And our job is to basically support middle school and high school science teachers and teacher leaders in the state of California, but science teachers around the world, in their pursuit of science teaching. And by support, I mean we provide professional development. We provide other things, communities of practice, and we go and do workshops in certain places. We go to India to teach Tibetan monks and nuns science. And we go to Costa Rica to teach teachers all over the country of Costa Rica about science. And so our job is really, to help science teachers feel more secure in their science teaching and help to retain them in the field, because a good science teacher is so important in helping our students thrive. And so our job—and we take this very seriously—is to help science teachers thrive. And we are made up of PhD scientists and veteran classroom teachers. So we have on the one side teachers who have been teaching middle school or high school for years. One of my coworkers, Zeke, who I work with the most, he was a high school physics and environmental science teacher for 21 years before coming to the Exploratorium. And then me, I was never a classroom teacher. I was a professor; I was a physics professor at a community college, and I was a researcher. So my deep knowledge of physics and current knowledge of physics—or knowledge of current physics—combined with Zeke’s extremely experienced pedagogy is really how we work together as a team. And it’s not just Zeke, right? We’ve got a geologist on the team, Eric Muller. We’ve got Tammy, who’s a middle-school bio teacher. We’ve got, Julie Yu, who is a chemical engineer, PhD, and also a prior middle school teacher, former middle school teacher. We’ve got Hilleary Osheroff, who was a PhD biologist who used to work at the American Museum of Natural History. We’ve got Lori Lambertson, who was a middle-school math teacher. And so, you know, we all come together to bring our experiences both in and out of the classroom and in and out of the research lab to provide teachers with the best inquiry-driven stuff we can. And we’re very—we’re so equity-focused, because we believe that that’s important, right? We know that the impact of our work is, I think, why most of us are here. It’s why I’m here. In undergrad, my grad school, and my postdoc, I would go into classrooms. I would go into science museums and teach science to people. And I probably reached out to maybe…over that whole time, I would say a couple thousand people, right? Maybe a couple thousand people total. That’s great. But over 15 years of reaching out and only reaching a couple thousand people, that’s rough, right? And now I’m at the Exploratorium, and I know that if I reach one teacher, right? If I can teach one teacher…let’s say you. How many students do you have in your classes a year?

Eric Cross (33:11):

Two hundred a year.

Desiré Whitmore (33:12):

You have 200 students a year that you teach. So if you teach for 10 years, that’s 2000. That’s 2000 students. So I have, by teaching you today, assuming that I’m actually teaching you something that’s gonna be useful for you—

Eric Cross (33:29):

You do! And you are!

Desiré Whitmore (33:30):

You are going to be impacting these 2000 students over the next 10 years. And of course you’re gonna be in teaching for much longer than that. But let’s just say in 10 years, that payoff is so much higher, right? And you’re one teacher. But I have 30 of you in my workshop! And so if all of these 30 teachers each teach 2000 kids over the next 10 years, then I’m actually doing something. I’m actually changing the way that students see science, through changing the way that you see science. Right? And so I take my job very seriously, as we all do. Like, we’re so invested in our teachers. And it’s not that we don’t care about students, ’cause we absolutely do. But we understand that without good teachers, students aren’t going to be able to thrive, as often as they would otherwise. I was able to do it somehow. But I’m one. There are so many other kids who could have gone into science who didn’t because they felt they never connected to it. So our job is to try to help teachers connect to it. And an important part of that is allowing you all to experience science as a learner. We want you to play and have joyful experiences. We want you to enjoy science and to try to think about it from the perspective of your students. Walk in their shoes. So that when you then go back to your classroom, you are able to think about like, “Oh yeah, you know, my students totally asked the same question that I asked, or that another teacher asked in the workshop because they had the foresight to think about that’s what my students would ask.” Right?

Eric Cross (35:02):

Well, I think it’s really effective to create empathy for the learner. Because I find myself in that position. I don’t know if some kind of memory displacement field happens to me when I sit in those workshops, but Hillary will ask a question that I know the answer to and I’m like, “I don’t want to answer the question. I don’t—I might be wrong.” And I teach the subject! And I embody what it’s like to be a student. And when I leave, I might have to go back and reference exactly what the lesson was, but I remember how I felt when I didn’t know. And very rarely as teachers do we get put in positions like that. And so it helps me be in the position of my students emotionally, of what it’s like. Even even the intentionality of how do you ask questions and not showing an affect on your face when somebody says the right answer or the wrong answer.

Desiré Whitmore (35:55):

Well, I’m still learning that. I’m not great at it. Julie is the mast.

Eric Cross (35:59):

Julie’s got it nailed.

Desiré Whitmore (36:00):

I’m still trying to learn from her. She’s amazing. And I really would like to get there one day. But I’m still not there. I’ll be like, “Oh! Oh! Well, that’s…”. I have a terrible poker face. So I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, but you think that? Maybe…”. That’s a piece of it that’s really important, right? It’s this not giving away the answer, even when you have the right answer. Allowing people to ask the questions and explore and become invested in the problem, before giving away the answer. That’s something that I learn here at the Exploratorium. And like I said, I learn every day. And it’s something that I think is so important for us as teachers to learn and try to implement. Because oftentimes you’ll come and you’ll have students who are like, “I’m too stupid. I don’t know the answer.” And then somebody else will say the answer, and then the student is like, “Yeah, I was right. I’m too stupid.’” But it’s like no! But if you have that student actually think about it, then the student—once they do hear the right answer—they might be like, “Oh yeah, that would make sense.” Instead of “I’m stupid.” It’s like, no, this is, “I explored this and I figured it out on my own.”

Eric Cross (37:08):

Things keep coming back to how this experience and the process of them learning science even outweighs the content of it. ‘Cause the content is almost easier to share, it’s easier to get, you can look it up really quickly. But in your story and in many other people’s stories, the exposure, the experience, how they’re going through that process—I know that’s something that I’ve learned a lot in just watching. Not teaching science, but actually the science of teaching. Sitting in the workshops and watching how we’re treated as students, how you interact with us, and then being able to take that back to the classroom. And just to add onto the value that it’s created, I think one thing that it’s also done is given us community. And in addition to being able to impact students, it’s also been able to build resilience in teachers. Because we as teachers can feel very isolated. And especially now when things are incredibly difficult, and every teacher’s experiencing Covid and shutdowns and low staffing across the country in different ways, when you don’t feel you have community or people that you can connect with, it just makes everything feel exponentially harder. And you’ve done a great job at being able to build community with us in our community of practice. The Exploratorium has been able to do that. And it’s something that I’m super-grateful for probably more than anything else is that through these last two years, being able to connect really made me feel like, “OK, we’re gonna be able to do this.” And it’s not just about Cross or my other teacher in eighth grade or my sixth grade teacher who’s doing this. That message, I think, is really, really important. I wanna ask this: Was there a teacher or an experience that impacted you or inspired you throughout your educational career? You know, kindergarten all the way to college? Was there a moment or a person or anything that that really stuck with you, that you felt maybe influenced who you became? Met you where you were at? I know you mentioned your chemistry teacher at that point, but is there anyone else, or was it that person that was really the person who sticks out for you?

Desiré Whitmore (39:21):

There actually have been a few. Of course, the first is my great-grandmother, Claudia Pairs. But I think in the fourth and fifth grade I had the same teacher. She stayed with us going from fourth to fifth grade. And fourth grade was a new school for me. New town. I was the only Black child in the school, me and my sister. And my teacher recognized that I had no real help at home, I guess? And she really kind of…she saw that I was really smart. She would give me extra assignments when she could tell I was bored. It meant that someone outside of my house cared about me in a way that I didn’t feel cared about at home. Her name is Ms. Comet. Mrs. Comet.

Eric Cross (40:11):

Like…comet?

Desiré Whitmore (40:13):

Yeah. Mrs. Fran Comet. And I’ve tried looking her up as an adult and I can’t find her. But I work with so many teachers, and I know how hard teaching is and how degrading it can be…or demoralizing, I guess, to not be appreciated. And so I know what it feels to me when a student has reached out and shown me like, “Hey, I’m now in dental school,” or “I’m now getting a PhD in science,” and I’m just like….

Eric Cross (40:40):

I got a message this morning on Instagram from a student. And none of my students use their real names in their Instagram handles. So I got a message from Moonshine. <Laugh> And I was a seventh grade teacher. And through deduction, deductive reasoning, I figured out who it was. This person’s now in college and they responded in that…you know, you get one of those every once in a while. And I feel it just fills your tank. It’s just so important that we—it’s funny because, kind of to your point, we don’t realize who or how we’re making impacts on people. And in what ways. We just know that we are. And I tell other teachers, I said, “You have one of the few professions where you fall asleep worrying about other people’s kids.” And it’s the words that we speak, the things that we do, people are always watching. I know, no pressure, right!? Hopefully, someone listening can find Ms. Comet.

Desiré Whitmore (41:37):

Ms. Comet. Teacher at Buena Vista Elementary School back in the ’80s. But your talk about this impact, it reminds me of the thing I wanted to say, but I didn’t. But I’m gonna tell you right now. I mentioned how science was not a priority when I went to school, in my hometown. That’s Lancaster, California. But recently I got a phone call from a family friend and she was so excited. And she called me to tell me that her daughter was super-excited when she picked her up from school. Because I was in her classroom. She said, “Auntie Desiré was in my class today! And she works on lasers! And she does spectroscopy! And I wanna learn about spectroscopy now. So can we call Auntie Desiré?” And I was like, “Wait, what?” My friend was kind of confused. She’s like, “Desiré didn’t tell me she was in town.” She had no idea why her daughter was saying I was in her classroom, ’cause I was not physically there. And then I had to put the pieces together and I was like, “Oh my God, your daughter’s in eighth grade already.” It made me feel really old, ’cause I know this girl from a little baby. But I was like, “Oh my God, that’s the eighth grade unit on light waves for Amplify that I wrote, and I’m featured as the scientist.” Because we have real scientists in the units. And they featured me in that one, in my laser lab. And so this little girl who knows me really well, who lives in my hometown, is seeing representation in science. She doesn’t necessarily know I’m a scientist. She knows that—I don’t know what she knows about me. She just knows I’m Auntie Desiré and, you know, I like gumbo at Christmas. That’s what she knows about me. <Laugh>. And so she comes back and she’s so excited ’cause now she knows so much more about me. And she knows that if I can do it and I came from where she’s at, she can do it too. And she was super-excited. And I was just…it brought me to tears. I was just crying in the car. I was driving <laugh> at the time and I was like, “This is amazing. Work that I did is teaching you and all of your friends in this tiny little town that you live in. And that to me is so important because now this little girl knows that, like, she knows me as just a normal human right. Who likes Star Trek and Star Wars and The Owl House. And now she’s over here like, “Oh my gosh, this normal human wrote the science curriculum that I’m learning from.” Which I think is just so fantastic. And it really brought home for me kind of the importance of my work and why I’m doing what I’m doing. And that’s pretty awesome. And I get messages from Instagram, you know, from teachers who are like, “Hey, did you work on this? ‘Cause you were featured in the video, but did you write this light waves unit?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And they’ll tell me, “I have students, this is their favorite unit. I’ve gotten notes from students saying, ‘This was my favorite unit in all of middle school.’” And I’m like, “Ohhhhhh!”<Laugh>

Eric Cross (44:33):

That story just gives me chills. Because I just can imagine how surreal that must feel. And you’re directly making that impact on those kids. And I’m glad that you shared that story so that everyone can hear it, because it’s a powerful story and I lived—I feel I was living it through you, just now, as you were discussing it.

Desiré Whitmore (44:54):

Yeah.

Eric Cross (44:54):

And I feel that way in the classroom to a small degree, because I get to have—when my students create posters of scientists that we don’t typically see, I’ve got you on my list of scientists, and I’m they’re like…And I’m like, “I can call her!” Like, “Mr. Cross, you KNOW her?!” I’m like, “Yeah, she’s a friend of mine! I was talking to her the other day!” And they’re like, “Whoa. She works with lasers?!”

Desiré Whitmore (45:17):

<Whispers> I do.

Eric Cross (45:18):

Desiré. I’ve held you for so long and—

Desiré Whitmore (45:23):

Yes, I’m sorry! I told you, I talk so much! I’m a teacher!

Eric Cross (45:26):

No! No, no, no, no. It was great! I wanna honor your time. Can you tell everybody where they can find out more about you again?

Desiré Whitmore (45:33):

So first off, you can find me on Twitter at Darth Science, D A R T H S C I E N C E, and you can also find me at Instagram at Dr. Laser Chick: D R dot laser chick. Even though I don’t post on Instagram that much. I also have a website, which is laser chick dot net. I’m still working on it. It’s not the best website yet. But, you know, it’ll, it’ll be better in the future.

Eric Cross (46:02):

Would you be willing to come back later on in the year and do a part two?

Desiré Whitmore (46:07):

Oh, for sure. Yeah. So I can actually finish telling you the story of how I got into physics! ‘Cause I totally didn’t. ‘Cause I’m all over the place.

Eric Cross (46:15):

So, everybody, cliffhanger! Next time she comes back, she’ll continue to tell us the story. Desiré, thank you so much.