Robotics demonstrations. Microbiology lessons. Strategies for using 3D printed cells as learning aids for visually impaired students. These were just a few of the highlights of this summer’s Pages & Pathways: The Science of Learning event, a one-day PreK-12 STEM conference hosted by UND's College of Education and Human Development on August 1. We talked with conference organizer and UND faculty member Ryan Summers about how it went and what his team has planned for next year.
What is the conference about? Who attends, and why?
This conference is geared toward PreK-12 educators, to bring them together for a day of professional learning.
This is our second year of holding this conference. It went well enough last year that we were committed to not just doing a STEM conference this year, so on June 19 we held a literacy conference as well. So over the summer we've done two of these events in total.
Thanks to the funding provided by ND EPSCoR, the attendees only had to pay a $20 registration fee. North Dakota educators were eligible to get a free professional development credit, or PDE credit, which can help them maintain their license, and that's like a $50 value. It's also nice because it's provided to them on a structured day. We had over 200 individuals that attended the event, and 105 took advantage of the free credit we were able to award.
We had the day divided up into four slots of time. Two in the morning, two in the afternoon, and within each of those slots we had eight different sessions. We were inundated with folks who said, “I've got something I'd like to present. I've got something I want to share or do.” So it grew larger than we expected.
How did this conference come about? What inspired you to start it?
What highlighted the need in the state and in the region was that many other organizations that in the past who would have offered this kind of professional learning simply did not bounce back after COVID. We were hearing from teachers that they really needed this kind of event.
We thought it made the most sense to structure an event and try to bring people to one location and engage them in person. The idea for this came to be that we would do more like a conference style event and really try to make it attractive to teachers in the region.
This is your second year of the STEM education conference. What has changed since last year’s event?
One thing that we didn't have last year that we really wanted to work toward this year, and we were successful in doing, is that we wanted to bring in some featured guests to be headliners at the event.
Through a connection at the National Center for Science Education, we were able to bring in Dr. Wendy Johnson, who is one of their science education specialists, and she was willing to come in and lead a session at each time slot during the day. She was really interested in hands-on work with teachers. So she led sessions all day, presenting about topics like data-driven science education and evaluating sources of (mis-)information.
We also were really fortunate to make a connection with Alisha Kelim at North Dakota’s Gateway to Science. Alisha was willing to give a lunchtime talk. She works as an onsite educator for Gateway to Science. She's also been a writer for North Dakota's new computer science standards, working closely with cybersecurity and AI and some other issues that are really timely and on a lot of educators' minds. And we knew that she would be a wonderful person to talk about some of those issues that many teachers are wrestling with, especially STEM teachers. She gave an extremely engaging presentation about growing with AI in the classroom.
We also dramatically increased the number of exhibitors. In our first year, we had people that we already knew, and we were able to reach out to. But this year things changed so much. We had people reaching out to us because they had heard about the event. We had more than a dozen exhibitors this year, and some of them were like the UND Safety Office, who provided free goggles and safety equipment to science teachers, which is always welcome and appreciated. But we also had NASA's TechRise Student Challenge, which is not located in North Dakota at all, and they reached out to us. We had so many people tell us, “We haven’t connected with teachers in your region. We'd like to be at your event.”
What kind of feedback did you get from participants?
We have some educators that are really interested in a longer workshop-style experience. So I think that's a structural change that we may try to accommodate in the future. If you want to come and sample lots of things that might be an option. But if you want to come and spend three hours learning about something in depth, maybe that's an option, too.
What are your future plans for the conference?
One possibility is, instead of doing two separate one-day conferences, to do one two-day event. We can really make it worthwhile for teachers to come, especially if they travel from a further distance.
What did you learn from this year’s participants?
Teachers are juggling a lot, and it really is incredibly inspiring to me to see how many of them just want to continue to learn. They really are trying to be the best educators they can be. That's not something I didn't know, but it's always something that is really inspiring for me to see.
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