Features

The following story was originally published in the March 2018 edition of Columns magazine.

On a chilly day in November, the third grade classroom in Seattle’s John Muir Elementary School is cozy. Colorful posters cover the walls and beneath them, children fidget and giggle. The teacher, Marjorie Lamarre, urges the class to quiet down and gather in a circle on a big red mat.

Two ongoing partnerships between Puget Sound area school districts and University of Washington College of Education researchers are being extended with support from two new grants from the Spencer Foundation.

As a high school student in South Korea, University of Washington College of Education PhD student Soo-Yean Shim was already imagining alternative approaches to make science classes engaging for all students.

Her inspiration came during a transformative experience in which she joined a genetics research team at a local university. In helping the team collect data, Shim found herself making sense of the world using resources and experimental data that she had gathered herself.

A few weeks into her new job training teen volunteers at Pacific Science Center how to take up issues of equity and social justice in their work, Pilar Letrondo noticed something concerning mid-way through a session she was leading on identity.

"All the white kids sat on one side of the table and all of the non-white kids sat on the other," she said. "[I] realized that I needed to address the seating situation.”

It was a striking example of how physical spaces can impact teaching and learning, and even more so, the challenge of overcoming bias in educational spaces.