Facilitated by Becca Price, PhD (Professor, UW Bothell)

After providing a brief overview of how pervasive deficit thinking is in STEM education, and how deficit thinking interferes with efforts to increase diversity in STEM, we will consider asset-based teaching models and develop our philosophies of teaching that value student insights. Price will critique her work on concept inventories that quantitatively measure students’ understanding about different evolutionary topics (e.g., Price et al 2014) to engage the audience with justice-oriented approaches for understanding what students know about specific topics, paying close attention to how we assess learning. We will also reflect on professional development opportunities at UNC and elsewhere that are asset-based, and brainstorm about how we can model this approach in our classrooms as well as in extra-curricular work.
Sponsored by CIRTL at UNC Chapel Hill, The SPIRE Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and Future Science Educators (FuSE).