A new NIH grant will enable UCSF to implement a project called Pathways, which will bring together local high school teachers and UCSF scientists in an intensive, year-long effort to promote equity in the classroom and diversity in the scientific workforce
A UCSF program that promotes science education in San Francisco schools will greatly expand its reach starting next summer, thanks to a $1.33 million award from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), part of the National Institutes of Health.
The University’s Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP) is a collaboration between UCSF and the San Francisco Unified School District that aims to provide high-quality science learning opportunities to K-12 students and to help them recognize their potential. It especially targets students from backgrounds that are currently underrepresented in the scientific community.
The NCRR grant – one of 16 offered this year through the center’s Science Education Partnership Awards program – will enable SEP to implement a project called Pathways, which will bring together local high school teachers and UCSF scientists in an intensive, yearlong effort to promote equity in the classroom and diversity in the scientific workforce.
“San Francisco schools, like schools across the country, have huge achievement gaps when it comes to the sciences,” said SEP Academic Coordinator Rebecca Smith, PhD. “We want to use real developments in biomedical research to engage students and make [science] highly relevant to their lives. They will be grappling with data, learning how to use evidence and designing their own experiments, so that they can start to see themselves as scientists.”
By promoting diversity and reaching out to the local community, the Pathways program seeks to put into action two main elements of the UCSF Strategic Plan, announced in mid-2007.
The program will start in the summer of 2009 and will assign six UCSF scientists to three San Francisco schools in its first year, Smith said. In subsequent years, the program will expand to six schools and 12 UCSF volunteers, she said. The schools have yet to be selected.
In recruiting UCSF scientists, the program will “draw on a Universitywide volunteer base” ranging from medical students to postdoctoral fellows to members of the faculty, Smith said.
As evidence of the need for programs like Pathways, Smith pointed to an unpublished 2008 survey that SEP volunteers conducted in the classrooms they visited.
“We asked the students, ‘What surprised you about the [UCSF] scientists you met?’” she recalled. “A huge number of them said two things – that they were surprised some of the scientists were girls and they were surprised to see scientists from different racial backgrounds.”
Currently, SEP offers an internship program to 20 high school students per year; with Pathways, Smith hopes to reach 2,000 students over the five-year life of the NCRR grant, which was announced on Oct. 30.
“Our current internship program has been highly successful,” Smith said. “If we can inspire additional students in a similar way, as well as help promote long-term changes in teaching practice, then the sustained impact could be tremendous.
“I don’t want students a generation from now to be surprised when female or nonwhite scientists come into their classroom,” she added.
Photo by Susan Merrell
