STEM Learning Through Community Engagement

Dr. Matthew Wolfgram is an anthropologist of education at the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Wolfgram has studied Ayurvedic medical education in South India and social interaction in U.S. STEM classrooms; currently, he uses ethnography, participatory action research, and qualitative research methods to study how students experience college and careers, with a particular focus on the factors that impact the experiences of low-income, first-generation, refugee, and/or minoritized college students. He has recent publications in New Directions for Higher Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Harvard Educational Review and Teachers College Record.

Dr. Morewell Gasseller is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Xavier University of Louisiana. His academic training is in experimental condensed matter physics, where he used scanning probe techniques (Scanning tunneling and atomic force microcopy) to study nanoscale systems and structures. Dr. Gasseller started his teaching career at Grand Valley State University in 2010 and has always believed that all research programs should provide opportunities for undergraduates to make substantive contributions. His interest in environmental monitoring and atmospheric physics began in 2015 when he taught an Advanced Earth Science class to education majors at Xavier. This GLOBE based Advanced Earth Science class (IPSC4010) gave him a great opportunity of linking his research with what he was teaching in class. One aspect of the class is to use hand-held sun photometers to measure the Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) of the atmosphere. Since 2015, Dr. Gasseller has participated and ran many GLOBE workshops, where he trained teachers and private citizens to perform many atmospheric measurements, including those for aerosols. He has served as a mentor for many undergraduate students and is committed to the idea that research is an extremely valuable facet of an undergraduate education in science.

Dr. Sonya Doucette is a sustainability leader at Bellevue College (BC), where she is Chair of the Sustainability Curriculum Committee, the Sustainability Concentration Coordinator, and manager of the Climate Justice in the Curriculum Project. She is currently PI of a 3-year NSF IUSE grant that funds the C-JUSTICE project. She authored an introductory sustainability textbook Sustainable World: Approaches to Analyzing and Resolving Wicked Problems (2017, 2nd edition). Prior to BC, she was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University (2010 – 2013). In addition to completing a textbook, she conducted sustainability education research at ASU (Connell, Remington-Doucette, & Armstrong 2012, JSE; Remington-Doucette et al 2013, IJSHE; Remington-Doucette & Musgrove 2015, IJSHE). One manuscript was highly commended as Outstanding Papers in the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education’s Annual Awards for Excellence. From 2008 – 2010, she was a post-doctoral teaching fellow in the Program on the Environment* at the University of Washington. (*now College of the Environment.) She began her academic sustainability career in 2007 when she became active in the Curriculum for the Bioregion (C4B) initiative at Evergreen State College. C4B seeks to infuse sustainability into all curricula, in all disciplines, at institutions of higher education in Washington State. She remains active and recently (2014) became a member of the regional steering committee for this successful, ongoing initiative.