By Andrea Yan and Henry Sun
Cover image credit: https://lsa.umich.edu/chem/people/faculty/gshultz.html
In a packed Kirkpatrick Lecture Hall on October 18th, students and faculty in the Chemistry Department gathered for the week’s Cheminar series, which addressed an unconventional topic. Ginger Shultz, the week’s speaker, is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Associate Chair for Education Development and Practice at the University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. in polymer chemistry at the University of Oregon, and after graduate school, she transitioned to education-focused research as a teaching postdoc at the University of Michigan. Her research fuses traditional hard science chemistry with a desire to improve the teaching of the discipline. More specifically, she is focused on transformative science teaching, which refers to different teaching approaches and practices that defy long-established practices in education. Rooted in social justice, transformative science teaching uses a holistic perspective to engage students from a variety of backgrounds in imagining a better world by engaging in historical, cultural, and political worldviews. In her talk, Professor Shultz shed light on the methods that educators use to engage and empower their students. She highlighted two studies, both of which focus on graduate student TAs (GTAs), which she specifically chose because of their unique role as both students and educators.
Professor Shultz’s first study aimed to answer how GTAs engage students when facilitating organic chemistry student discussion during a cooperative learning activity. In this scenario, students discussed comparisons of organic chemistry reactions that grew increasingly complex while the GTAs facilitated the discussion. They focused on two GTAs, looking for commonalities and departures in their pedagogical approaches. Their analysis revealed that the GTAs were not immediately giving answers away — instead, they asked the students questions to probe their prior knowledge and thought processes. During a post-observation interview, the GTAs said they used this strategy intentionally to help students become confident. From this, Shultz and her team noticed that there were two separate objectives at play. The GTAs prioritized not only a learning objective, which was to develop students’ numerical reasoning, but also a teaching objective, which in this case was to develop students’ confidence. From these key findings, Shultz concluded that an instructor’s pedagogical commitments highly influence their teaching practices, a phenomenon she calls “framing.”
In a related study, Professor Shultz wanted to find out how GTAs incorporated their learning experiences with equity into their teaching. Two GTAs were specifically chosen and interviewed for their commitments to equity they applied in their teaching. One of them mentioned that she was aware of the power structure between professors and students embedded in the academic culture for many years. Shultz and her team found how the GTA described an external frame (outside expectations and standards) that is in tension with her internal frame (personal beliefs and values). In their interviews, the GTAs also discussed how they had more face time with students and were positioned as more near peers than professors. Shultz and her colleagues concluded that because GTAs have closer relationships with their students, equity-focused teaching can occur more on a personal level. Shultz emphasized how these results show that GTAs, with their unique insights on education and synergy with younger students, are promising subjects for future studies.
On the other side of the continent, Professor Shultz also did educational research in rural Alaska and worked with the Inupiat, a whaling community. Rural Alaska is a particularly interesting setting for education research because, unlike the typical American collegiate environment Shultz usually studies, 70% of the K-12 teachers do not originate from Alaska and less than 5% identify as Alaska Native. Additionally, there was a 31% turnover rate among these teachers during 2020-2021. Although complications posed by the COVID pandemic are partially responsible for this jump, Shultz wanted to further investigate the factors that have encouraged teachers to stay in or leave Alaska, as well as the effects of Alaska’s distinctive backdrop on their teaching. To answer these questions, Shultz’s team focused on how relationships are formed between teachers and members of rural Alaskan communities, and how these relationships foster opportunities for culturally responsive teaching.
Among the five teachers the researchers recruited, one stood out: Bruce, a white man from the mainland US, who moved to Alaska to fulfill his passion for being a self-described adventurer. Interestingly, Bruce looked to his students to provide him with experience and knowledge: on one occasion, his students took him out at midnight to experience the Northern Lights, helping him learn about and become more aware about the local native culture. He also touched on subjects that integrated native culture, once by abandoning his lesson plan to have his class conduct experiments on a bowhead whale lung donated by the community. Finally, he designed culturally relevant curricula such as a Sea Ice curriculum connecting Life, Physical, and Earth science. Through this unique course of study, students expanded their understanding of both the local culture and the natural world: they realized how noise on the surface could transfer to water below, connecting that information to elders’ knowledge of staying quiet on the ice. Overall, he built a network of support with the community in order to integrate culturally relevant subjects into his teaching.
Through her prior studies on GTAs on transformative teaching and this case study on Bruce, Shultz discovered how nonstandard ways of connecting with students can result in more effective teaching methods and improved student engagement. She plans to carry her findings forward by coaching GTAs at the Ohio State University, helping them to better teach their students.