Cross-post: The AAS Education Committee Is Soliciting New Volunteers!

This is a cross-post from the AAS Education Committee blog. The AAS Education Committee oversees the AAS's education activities. Members make recommendations, review educational activities, and implement AAS activities. Contact education committee co-chair Tania Anderson if you're interested in learning more or volunteering!

From the AAS Education Blog:

As co-chairs of the AAS Education Committee, we want to publicly thank all of the current committee members and let you know about the amazing work that is ongoing by this mighty set of volunteers. The AAS Education Committee, which is charged with the oversight of the educational activities of the AAS, is made up of 16 members from across the Society who have an interest and expertise in education, outreach, public engagement, and communication. As the mission of the AAS is “to enhance and share humanity's scientific understanding of the universe as a diverse and inclusive astronomical community,” the Education Committee thus serves a vital role in guiding the impact of the Society. Members of the committee bring their experience and network to support the whole Society’s activities in astronomy education — from public outreach, through introductory astronomy, to the training of future astronomers.

Read the full blog and get in touch with the committee at the AAS Education Committee blog. 

DEIA and Education Activities at the Summer 244th AAS Meeting

By Alessandra Aloisi, Member of the CSWA

This summer’s 244th AAS meeting in Madison, Wisconsin will be held on June 9-13, 2024 jointly with the Laboratory Astrophysics Division. The meeting is promised to be jam-packed with a lot of great scientific talks, as well as opportunities for networking with colleagues and learning more about the state of our profession, equity, inclusion, education, and outreach.

The meeting showcases strong representation of women speakers in the plenary sessions, including:

• Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh) - Lives of massive galaxies through cosmic times
• Cecilia Garraffo (SAO/CfA) - AI models for astrophysics and atmospheric sciences
• Erika Kohler (NASA Goddard) - Chemical and spectral properties of exoplanetary clouds and atmospheres
• Judith Lean (Lab. for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder) - Variations in the Sun’s radiative output and effects of this variability on Earth 
• Kerstin Perez (Columbia University) - Detection of high-energy cosmic particles as evidence of dark matter interactions
• Noemi Pinilla-Alonso (Florida Space Institute) - Surface compositions of minor bodies to understand formation and evolution of the solar system
• Teznie Pugh (University of Texas Austin) & Aparna Venkatesan (University of San Francisco) - Protection of the dark skies and the space environment

First Timer’s and Opening Receptions are on Sunday, June 9. Astronomy educators and undergraduate student receptions are on Monday, June 10.  We strongly encourage you to participate in other sessions sponsored by the AAS’s committees working with the AAS Board of Trustees to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in Astronomy. These events include the following:

Monday:

• 2 pm – 12:30 pm CT: Exhibition Theater Session AAS Committee on Employment
• 7 pm – 8:30 pm CT: Splinter Session Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities (SGMA) Meet and Greet for LGBTIA Members and Students

Tuesday:

• 1 pm – 1:30 pm CT: Exhibitor Theater Session Q&A with the AAS Education Committee

There are a lot of additional opportunities to learn more about the state of the profession, education, outreach, and diversity activities at this AAS meeting, including:

Sunday:

• 9 am – 5 pm CT: Workshop Designing, Implementing, and Refining Equitable Evaluation Rubrics

Monday:

• 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm CT: iPoster Session Community and Profession

Tuesday:

• 9 am – 10 am CT: iPoster Session Astronomy Education and Multicultural Outreach
• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Splinter Session Early Career Opportunities to Learn Science Mission Design
• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Special Session NASA’s SMD Bridge Program: Funding Faculty and Students at Under-resourced Emerging Research Institutions
• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Meeting-in-a-Meeting Community Based Astronomy around the World: Case Studies and Discussion
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Splinter Session Academic Portfolio Review and Astronomy: Potential Impacts to the Future of Astronomy and STEM Education
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Oral Session Outreach and Education
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Meeting-in-a-Meeting Starting Inward: DEIA’s Essential Role in Healthy Community Models of Astronomy

Wednesday:

• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Special Session Towards Equity in the Classroom: Implementing Progressive Pedagogical Practices
• 10 am – 10:30 am CT: Exhibitor Theater Presentation Broadening Participation at the National Science Foundation
• 12:30 pm – 1 pm CT: Exhibitor Theater Presentation Life in Hawai’i: Outreach, Education, and the Community Engagement Efforts of the Maunakea Observatories
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Meeting-in-a-Meeting Designing Community Engagement Programs from a Mutuality Worldview

The full block schedule can be found here. And please feel free to stop by and say hi in-person if you attend one of our events, or tag and tweet us.

Does Astronomy Education Research have a glass ceiling?

Saeed Salimpour

By Saeed Salimpour^1,a and Michael Fitzgerald<sup>2

1</sup>Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia
²Edith Cowan Institute for Education Research, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Western Australia, Australia
^aCorrespondence: astrophysics_at_saeedsalimpour.com

The challenges associated with gender equity and equality have been the topic of much research over many decades. In the context of science, the issue of gender is even more pronounced, this is marked by efforts to engage more women in science, or more specifically STEM. However, the research has mostly centred around scientists and science research. This brief article highlights findings from a study which explored the issue of gender in the context of Astronomy Education Research (AER) – a rapidly growing field of research drawing in, not just astronomers, but also researchers from different fields, e.g., education, psychology, evaluation.

Michael Fitzgerald

The study used the iSTAR database (International STudies of Astronomy education Research) (istardb.org, link to summary paper). Over the years, iSTAR has grown to contain, or link to where appropriate, more than 1800 publications. These have drawn from major literature searches throughout the mainstream astronomy, astronomy education and science education journals, major conference proceedings and thesis collections. We presented the current status of iSTAR, at the recent RTSRE & iNATS conference in Hilo, Hawai’i, a recording of the talk is available here, and to see a fully referenced expanded version of this article, a pre-print of the article is available here.

Career Profile: Astronomer to STEM Program Evaluator

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

Below is our interview with Dr. Ann Martin, an astronomer who left astronomy to become a STEM program evaluator working with NASA.  While a PhD student at Cornell, she recognized her interest in outreach and education and developed her experience in these areas with the support of her PhD advisor, Professor Martha Haynes and Ricardo Giovanelli.  After receiving her PhD, Dr. Martin became the first NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellow funded through the NASA Office of Education at Langley Research Center. She now works for a mid-sized government contractor as an evaluator supporting NASA-funded Earth science education programs, working with STEM educators who bring NASA data into classrooms, and encouraging students to think like scientists.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. New Career Profiles are posted approximately every month.

Career Profiles: Astronomer to STEM Education Policy Executive

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

Below is our interview with Anita Krishnamurthi, an astronomer turned STEM education after-school executive and advocate.   If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. 

Some Professors are More Biased Than Others

Motivated by a New York Times article, I looked up a paper in the Journal of Psychology about a study done to assess bias in university professors.  The results were based on a large blind audit of professors in various fields and were remarkable.  In all fields except the humanities, professors systematically replied to correspondence from professors than students with white male names differently than students with female names or names suggesting non-white race.

The study was performed by Katherine L. Milkman (U. Penn), Modupe Akinola (Columbia) and Dolly Chugh (NYU) and published on-line this year.  E-mails were sent to a large selection of professors in 89 disciplines and 289 institutions  The e-mails were from fictitious students expressing interest in a professor's research and asking for a short meeting during the student's visit to campus.  The student names were chosen to suggest gender and race, such as Meredith Roberts and Raj Singh.  A total of 6548 e-mails were sent to randomly selected professors.

The result were that professors on average were more likely to reply to students with white male names than any other group.  (E-mails were immediately sent to cancel any appointments with the fictitious students.)  All e-mails were identical except for the names.  With the students sight unseen, the bias in the thinking of these academics was revealed by value association based on names.  The results are shown in the figure (discrimination in grey and reverse discrimination in black) using percentages.  The number of samples for each disciplinary category ranged from fewer than 200 to more than a thousand.  There were 850 samples for the Natural, Physical Sciences and Math.

The results are most striking in the disciplines of business and education at the levels of 10's of percent response differences and lower in the science disciplines at the levels of few percent.  In fine arts, the bias was strongly reversed with professors replying systematically more to female and non-Caucasian students.  The only field where there appears to be little of no bias is in the Humanities.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for August 15, 2014

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of August 15, 2014
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer

This week's issues:

1. All Sparks Are Good Sparks
2. Report from 5th International Conference on Women in Physics 
3. Career Profiles: Astronomer to President of a Defense Industry Company
4. AAS/DPS Astronomy Ambassadors Outreach Workshop
5. Top Math Prize Has Its First Female Winner
6. Should Women "Man Up" for Male-dominated Fields?
7. How "The Big Bang Theory" Represents Women in Science
8. Why are the media so obsessed with female scientists' appearance?
9. Women in science: A temporary liberation
10. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
11. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
12. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

Astronomy Postdoctoral Positions where EPO is Explicitly Included & Valued

Each year postdoc applicants ask -- besides the NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, are there other astronomy postdoctoral opportunities in which education/outreach efforts are explicitly included and valued as part of your effort? 

Below is the list I've compiled so far. If you know of other opportunities, please post a comment or send me an email. I'll then post the final list to the AstroBetter Wiki, astrobites, and aas.org (if they're interested), and/or anywhere else people suggest. 

Living with a Learning Disability

I was recently contacted by a young, South African, boy who is a self-declared astronomy fanatic.  He reached out to me because his dream is to be like Albert Einstein, but he is failing his math and science classes due to a learning disability.  He fears that he’ll never be able to realize his goal and wanted my insights and advice.

I have a learning disability.  When diagnosed, my reading skills tested in the 20th percentile -- meaning that 80 out of 100 people are better readers than I.  I am also a Marshall Scholar, published author, and have a doctorate in physics from Berkeley.  During my exchange with this boy, I realized that perhaps some of my experiences regarding learning disabilities might be helpful to educators in this community (who have LD students) and readers of this blog who themselves have learning differences.

For me, the most challenging aspect of having a learning disability has been to accept how different I am, and to learn to advocate for myself such that I get the appropriate help and accommodations.  I live in a world that is set up for people who learn a certain way, I don't learn that way.  I have to work five-times harder to absorb the same information that a "normal" learner can take-in easily.  This is incredibly frustrating, time-consuming, and demoralizing.  I used to constantly compare myself to others and feel stupid because everything took me longer.  The challenge was to internalize that I am just as smart, but that I need the proper help to demonstrate that intelligence.

I was able to make real breakthroughs when I started working with an educational therapist who specializes in learning disabilities.  Many schools and universities have such professionals available to LD students.  My educational therapist helped me understand where my strengths lie and how to accommodate my weaknesses.  It was through working with him that I realized that physics was a good area for me to study.  He also helped me realize that I could more effectively process written words by using books on tape or having my computer read text out loud to me.

Joining a support group for students with learning disabilities was also very helpful. I learned about study techniques, resources, and how to advocate for and accept myself.  For instance, there is a college specifically for people with learning disabilities.  Some professors are willing to allow learning disabled students to turn in alternative assignments, like a video or audio version of the paper or an oral final exam instead of a written one.  I learned how to explain to my professors and peers why I needed extra time on written exams; how it wasn’t an unfair advantage, but merely leveling the playing field such that I could demonstrate my knowledge.  I had lighter course loads throughout my schooling.  As a result my education took longer, and I’m fine with that.

I would encourage anyone with a learning disability to try to find alternative ways to absorb information.  There are many videos and demonstrations on the web that can help you learn science and math.  Join study/discussion groups with friends, so that you are forced to explain the material to others, not just read about it.  Remember that most people diagnosed with learning disabilities have above-average intelligence.  Unfortunately, the pathways in your brain are connected in such a way that it is harder for you to process information and communicate your knowledge.  So the challenge is to find ways to make shortcuts in your brain, or find areas of study where these connections are less jumbled.  Experiment and try to figure out what works best for you.  Be patient with yourself, and know that there are many successful people in this world who have been able to overcome their learning differences.

-- Jessica Kirkpatrick