The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Focus on Faculty: Edna Tan, Empowering Local Schoolchildren to Succeed in Science

By Heather Hans



Students in Siler City take part in an after-school girls' science club as part of a project coordinated by Dr. Edna Tan.
 
For many faculty members in the UNCG School of Education, community engagement is not just an aspect of their lives but rather a core part of their daily work. To understand, assess, and improve education, educators must be in the field, observing patterns and figuring out how to make sure that every student is set up for success. For Dr. Edna Tan in the Teacher Education and Higher Education (TEHE) department, that means developing community-based projects to encourage participation and success in science education, an area in which performance can vary considerably between different populations of students.
Originally from Singapore, Tan has been a professor at UNCG since 2009. Recently she finished a two-year project in Siler City running an after-school program for girls in 7th and 8th grade.

"The demographics of the school were interesting to me, because my work is with non-dominant students, so I had all Latina or mixed race girls in the after school program," Tan says.

The after-school girls' science club met every week for two years. Tan helped them do a bunch of experiments based on topics and problems they wanted to investigate. Tan's project is part of a larger National Science Foundation (NSF) grant at five sites that investigates how non-dominant girls participate in an informal science program versus how they participate in the formal science program in their school. While convinced that informal science programs can be more empowering to students who usually don't do well in formal classes, Tan is also investigating how to relay that empowerment back to their formal education.

"What my colleague Angela Calabrese Barton at Michigan State University and I think and keep saying is that it's great if they do really well in an informal science program, but it doesn't matter if those skills don't transfer into the formal science program, because that is where the gatekeeping is," Tan says.

"These are longitudinal studies, because I'm interested in the concepts of identity and agency," Tan says, "So how do girls identify as science learners, as somebody who potentially wants to think about a career in science?"



Identifying with science

Tan recognizes that one of the key aspects of her investigation is the long-standing problem of a lack of role models in science.

"It's very frustrating to me, because it's really old news," Tan says. She mentions a test that has been done for 20 years where students of all levels and backgrounds have been asked to draw a scientist: "Invariably, most of them will draw Albert Einstein, or some version of him," she says.

Many scholars are looking at test scores to determine whether female and non-dominant students are catching up. "The test scores appear to be narrowing; however, the girls and non-dominant students are still not taking higher level science classes," Tan says.

Through her work in Siler City, Tan has followed some of the girls achieving high grades in middle school science, and found that even though they may be in the top of their class, they don't plan to continue studying science in high school because they don't see themselves as scientists.

"The girls who like science would say 'I lack these skills,' and the girls would internalize it as a personal thing," Tan says, "This is my personal lack; it's not something I can make up for, which is a factor of how science has been presented to them: you're either really smart, and you can do it, or you're not." However, in the same situation, the boys in the class, whose scores often aren't as good, don't see it as a personal lack but rather something they need to practice.

So, Tan wonders, "How do we build the learning environment so that the student will see the relevance between what is happening in the science classroom with her life, and see herself as somebody with something to bring to the table?"



Solving real-world problems

While still in Michigan doing post-doctoral work, Tan worked with Dr. Barton and the Boys and Girls Club to start an after-school program called GET City (Green Energy Technology in the City), in which they studied green energy issues and climate change. The group investigated the effects of incandescent light bulbs and compact florescent light bulbs by doing an energy survey of their homes. The students looked at their energy bills and determined how much money their families could save by switching to CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) bulbs, and wrote to an energy company in Lansing, Michigan, asking for CFL bulbs to be donated. The students changed the bulbs in their homes and their neighbors' homes, producing an outcome that put more much needed money in their parents' pockets.

"Science shouldn't just be a subject in a classroom to be learned," Tan says. "There has to be an impetus to learn science, and science has to better your life now, which it can."

Now the Siler City project is finished and the girls have moved onto high school, Tan is focusing on tutoring refugee children from the Glen Haven community center as part of a mini grant from the Coalition for Diverse Language Communities (CDLC), and she is also planning to start a program like GET City with the Boys and Girls Club in Greensboro.

This semester, Tan is tutoring refugee youth on Thursdays and holding an after school program with them on Fridays. Recognizing the traumatic nature of being a refugee, and also the children's desire to fit in in their new country, Tan hopes to empower them. "With the after school program, I'm trying to create a learning environment where they can be who they are," she says.

For Tan, who originally started a Ph.D. in molecular biology in her native Singapore but found it difficult to be the only female in any of the laboratories, her research and community engagement allow her to make sure that other students are not discouraged by the power structures surrounding scientific disciplines.

"The subtle, or sometimes not very subtle, message sent is you're either good in science or you're not, and you're smart or you're not, and only the really smart people are good in science," Tan says, "So, in my small way, I want to challenge that."

By challenging conventional ways of thinking about science and science education, Tan is slowly but surely making a difference in her community, and hopefully paving the way for a new generation of scientists. Community partnerships like Tan’s after-school program can have a lasting influence on both formal and informal education, demonstrating the importance of the School of Education’s focus on community engagement.

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