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Teaching the Teachers |
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In 1990 Greg Shrader was teaching high school math in upstate New York and after four years getting antsy. "If I was bored, I figured my kids probably were too," he recalls. With the goal of making the classroom a more engaging place, Shrader enrolled as a student at the newly created learning sciences graduate program at Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy. Working with the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS), its executive director, Louis Gomez, and other learning sciences faculty, Shrader immersed himself in research and curriculum design. Today he divides his professional time as an SESP research scientist and as a researcher for the educational group Teachscape, developing online support for teachers using LeTUS curricula. What makes the learning sciences program so special, say Shrader and others, is its absolutely interdisciplinary nature and its faculty's readiness to recognize graduate students' ideas and research. LeTUS, says Gomez, "makes it possible for people who care about urban education issues to work on them without being daunted by all the stuff it takes to effectively partner with schools. "We can give our graduate students access to schools, teachers and the support they need to problem-solve education issues," Gomez says. Combining education and cognitive science with a technical design perspective, students in learning sciences always do research that is grounded in the day-to-day world that school administrators, teachers and students live in. As a result, says Nora Sabelli of the National Science Foundation, its graduates possess "a unique set of experiences" and "are quickly being grabbed for the things they've learned that they couldn't have learned elsewhere." Over the years learning sciences graduate students have gone on to the University of Illinois, the University of Chicago, MIT's Media Laboratory, NASA's Classroom of the Future and the University of California, Los Angeles, to name but a few. Barry Fishman (GSESP96), who earned his doctorate in learning sciences in 1996, was in the very first group of students to enter and finish the program. He is now on the faculty of the University of Michigan's School of Education. "What I'm doing here at Michigan — and I was trained to do at Northwestern — is all about collaboration," Fishman says. "I work with teams of people with expertise in varied disciplines. They bring different things to the table because the education problems we want to solve are too multi-faceted for a single person to tackle." When he began at Northwestern, there were only a handful of departments around the country that shared Northwestern's orientation toward learning combined with expertise in technology, he says. The good news is that learning sciences programs are becoming less unusual. But Northwestern's program remains unique in the way it joins cognitive science study and technology in education research within an education school. "That's a powerful combination," says Gomez. "We're bringing together the very best minds — in our faculty and our postdocs and our grad students — to bear on the problems of education." — W.L.
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