When I was an English teacher, my neighbor in the adjacent classroom was a math teacher. We made a point of telling students that we were big fans of the other’s discipline. She told them how much she loved to read and, when she needed to leave her room, I stood in the open doorway between our classrooms to supervise her students and speak the language of math with them.
I do like math. Also history, science and world languages. But I had to pick a major my junior year in college, and so I picked English. Overarching all of those disciplines is reading and writing (hence my journalism minor).
I share the story of my math friend because there is still a belief among many students and teachers that reading and writing belong only in the English classroom. Another belief – that today’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instruction is insufficient – is fueling the current focus on STEM subjects in schools in order to encourage more students to enter those fields (and, let’s be honest, to rank higher on international tests in science and math).
Disciplinary literacy experts will tell you that reading and writing in the disciplines is critical; deep learning of the discipline cannot happen without it. Educators John Falk and Lynn Dierking argue that students do not do most of their science learning in the classroom but outside of school: from educational television, nature walks, 4-H clubs, hobbies and scouting; and, of course, zoos, aquariums, national parks and museums. They contend that this informal, free-choice learning should not be overlooked or underestimated, but utilized more.
Enter a partnership between the National Writing Project and the Association of Science-Technology Centers, funded by the National Science Foundation, to explore connections between science and literacy. The goals of this partnership are to promote science museums as valuable places of informal learning, as well as science literacy. To that end, a group of over 60 educators from schools and museums met last month in Philadelphia to explore how educators from both institutions can promote both STEM and literacy simultaneously. The result was extraordinary.
I attended this design institute with a Springfield middle school science teacher and two representatives from Amherst College’s Beneski Museum of Natural History. We spent almost three days studying science, visiting area institutions, writing and creating. We journaled and hacked; created poetry and maps. We were invited to become citizen scientists by recording observations and contributing data through apps like iNaturalist. All in the name of science literacy. We were deeply engaged in learning and communicating our learning.
Not all lovers of science will end up working in a STEM field, coding or writing lab reports. But that doesn’t mean they can’t make meaning of what they observe and express that learning in their own ways. Mary Oliver communicates her observations of nature through poetry; Annie Dillard through creative nonfiction.
Earlier this month I sent our school’s paraprofessionals on a field trip to the Beneski and the Mead Art Museum. I gave them craft supplies, journals, and the instruction to communicate a connection they had made between art and science exhibits. They loved it. What if we invited our students to make meaning of their science learning – formal or informal – through journaling, poetry, creative nonfiction or some other creative expression? I’m willing to bet they would be more engaged in observing phenomena, and more appreciative of the natural world around them.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Dillard tells of how she watched a mockingbird freefall until it nearly made contact with the earth, and remarked on how beautiful and graceful the bird’s flight was. She wrote: “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
Maybe, in the frenzy to ramp up STEM education, we should simply help students to “be there,” and let them explore ways to communicate the experience.
Leslie Skantz-Hodgson is the curriculum coordinator and librarian at Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School in Northampton, and a teacher consultant with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.