Career Profile: Lena Danaia and Inquiry-Based Science Education

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy has compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers, planetary scientists, etc. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Lena Danaia grew up surrounded by her grandfather’s astronomy magazines. She read through them and chatted with him about the stars and, like many of us, enjoyed gazing up at the night sky.

When Danaia went to college, she focused on becoming a teacher. While in the teacher-training program, she decided to do an honors year. She remembered how much she enjoyed reading about astronomy and her talks with her grandfather, and chose to get involved with the astronomy program. She had the opportunity to do an education-related project with a remote telescope. This reignited her passion for astronomy.

Courtesy of Lena Danaia

Danaia taught school in the United Kingdom and Australia before going through the external process of applying for a PhD scholarship program, where she chose to focus on astronomy education. Her doctoral project centered on student education in astronomy and science. This set the theme for Danaia’s work going forward—she continues to find the links between astronomy and student education.

Danaia is currently an associate professor in the School of Education at Charles Sturt University. She has consulted with many astronomers on the educational aspects of their work. “They need to see if what they’re doing is having an impact.” Danaia assesses how that work is impacting students and teachers and provides education on how to run a program. She has served as the chief investigator on several large-scale research projects. 

One of these projects is “Space to Grow,” a program focused on students in grades 9-12 in Australia. One of the main goals of the three-year project was to develop and implement a professional learning program for science teachers. The program focused on building teacher confidence and competence in using observational data from telescopes in the classroom. In grade 10, Australian students must choose whether they will continue higher-level science courses, and this program was designed to address the falling rate of students interested in these classes, including physics. 

Courtesy of Our Solar Siblings (OSS)

Students used sets of images from telescopes to analyze an open cluster of stars, calculating its distance and age, and learning physics and astronomy concepts like the inverse square law and stellar parallax. While Danaia didn’t write the educational materials, she led the team measuring the impact of the project on students and teachers. Danaia and her team published a review of the Space to Grow project in the 2012 Astronomy Education Review.

Another collaborative educational project Danaia is involved with is “Our Solar Siblings.” OSS is an inquiry-based project for high school-level astronomy that gets students out of the textbook and into real data. The program updates curriculum and materials in accordance with teacher feedback and student responses to the course.

Danaia says of this and other projects, “Most of my work has been collaborative…making sure it’s accessible and will have impact, and asking ‘What’s the benefit for our students and teachers here?’ I always try to report back to our schools so it gets back to them.”

Besides Danaia’s involvement in projects like these, she also teaches research at her university and supervises PhD students. She is also the chief investigator on several other projects, including “Little Scientists,” a program that helps early childhood educators implement inquiry-based STEM projects into their lessons.

Courtesy of Our Solar Siblings (OSS)

When asked about the challenges of working on programs like this, and in astronomy education in general, Danaia said, “Being female working in this space—lots of career interruptions—many of my colleagues haven’t had that. I find some of my colleagues and I put our hands up for many things—playing catch-up in the field—the pressure to volunteer to do so.”

Lena Danaia has published extensively on inquiry-based education in science classrooms, as well as professional development for science teachers, with a focus on using astronomy as a key component. Find out more about Danaia’s research at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lena-Danaia.