Science Teachers Seeing More Opportunities For Girls
Science Teachers Seeing More Opportunities For Girls
Posted
Jackie Gorski-jgorski@timesuniononline.com
Science Teachers Seeing More Opportunities For GirlsEditor’s Note: March is National Women’s History month. This is the second in a six-part series of interviews with successful and influential area women.
Science-based careers can be available to anyone of any gender, according to three area science teachers.
Abbi Richcreek, Project Lead The Way teacher at Edgewood Middle School, has been teaching in public education since 2004, coming to Warsaw in 2007. Richcreek taught at Warsaw Area Career Center for 10 years and she said she believed this is her fourth year teaching at Edgewood.
She went to Ball State University and majored in Japanese and industrial technology education. From there, she went to Colorado State University and got her master’s degree in science, specializing in engineering and technology education.
Jane Hunn, sixth-grade science teacher at Tippecanoe Valley Middle School, went to Illinois Wesleyan for college, majoring in chemistry. At Tippecanoe Valley School Corporation, she taught seventh- and eighth-grade schools. When the middle school was built, she taught eighth grade. In 2012, the sixth-grade teacher retired and Hunn switched to teaching sixth grade.
Rose Love, science teacher at Warsaw Community High School, went to Ball State University, majoring in biology/life sciences and earth science. She has taught at the high school for 22 years. She teaches the biomedical courses as a PLTW teacher.
Due to the classes Richcreek took in college, she said she was used to being one of the few, if not the only, females in her classes.
“That doesn’t bother me, and you have to know it doesn’t bother you,” Richcreek said. She feels she asked more questions. She said her interest in science overcomes anything that could be seen as an obstacle.
Richcreek recounted an experience she had when interviewing for jobs. She went to a middle school around the area where she grew up.
“I was so excited because it was going to be my first teaching position. I had my portfolio. And at that time, it was a female principal who said I was too blonde and too cute and literally said that the guy in the waiting room that was interviewing after me would get the job,” Richcreek said. She said she just smiled, thinking, “What was I going to say?” and just finished her interview. “Of course, I never heard back. But it was definitely crushing to think, here you are prepared for the work world and you have your portfolio, you have all your tools essentially and to find out ...”
She did get a job at Marion High School. Her high school science teacher was an administrator at the school and that’s how she got her foot in the door because he knew she would do a good job.
Hunn said when she went to college, there were more men than women, mostly driven by the fact there was a high percentage of those students going into pre-med. Some of the lower-level classes had more women because the school also had a nursing school, but once she got into the higher-level classes, less women were in the classes.
Hunn said she hasn’t had any issues with teaching at TVSC, calling the Valley community a family.
Love said when she went to college, the classes were predominately female when it came to her life science classes and predominately male in the earth science classes. In her geography class, the university hired her on to teach the lab portion of the class. The feedback from the lab was they learned more from the lab portion than the lecture.
Love also talked about her experience teaching at WCHS. She noted there is a high percentage of female science teachers.
“I liked working with students and I also liked hands-on work,” Richcreek said of why she wanted to teach science.
Hunn, who has been teaching since 1977, said many of her family members were teachers, so it was a kind of a family business. She had a family friend that was a high school chemistry teacher during the space race and he was doing workshops and community programs. The family friend came into her first-grade class one day and her interest in science was ignited.
Love said her father majored in geology and taught her science from a young age. She also had a female science teacher her freshman year in high school, noting she guessed you could call that teacher her inspiration, solidifying her career.
By middle school, students kind of know, but they don’t really know, what they want to do with their futures, and “we give them opportunities to seek that out and to create interest” in a certain subject, Richcreek said. While Richcreek said she sees students of both genders in her PLTW classes, she says she feels that females are more likely to take the classes than in the past because she is a woman as well.
Richcreek said she has not seen more females become science teachers in her tenure, but did note people with an interest in the subject should not let any mindset or anything similar deviate from pursuing that interest. She said that’s how she carries herself and she tells all of her students they can do anything they want, they just have to go at it. Richcreek said it’s all about being a good mentor, as well.
Hunn said she didn’t have a female science teacher until she was in college. Even then, she said there was one female teacher in chemistry, one in biology. They were highly thought of in their departments, but they were outnumbered by men. She said it was more of the times of when she went to college, as women weren’t going to college to be in the sciences, mainly going for elementary education and nursing. “Those were the women’s fields at that time,” Hunn said.
She noted all three science teachers at TVMS are female.
With her middle school students, Hunn said she thinks the interest in science is more on an individualized level now since classes are more open. Universities may still be tipped more in men in engineering classes, but it is more open for women to explore those fields.
Hunn said TVSC has had several students go into science fields and said it depends on where life leads the student if they go into a science field or not. She noted if her teachers had been asked if she would have gone into a science-based career, they would have said no.
For the biomedical classes Love teaches, she said she found a good portion of students who take the classes are female, comparing it to the life sciences classes Love took in college. She noted most of the time, her students are going into nursing. Love’s daughter took some engineering classes while at Warsaw and Love said she “was definitely” outnumbered by the boys.
Richcreek said she definitely sees a benefit of STEM education because students how meaningful is and they are more able to finish a project when they see they’re incorporating more than one subject and that creates interest in that type of education. When students are doing hands-on education, they’re collaborating with other people, which students can translate into real world experience.
Hunn said science-based education can be applied to other areas, as it helps people become better citizens by allowing them asking if the source is valid and not taking things on face value.
Love said people solve things differently, so that’s why there needs to be more women in fields like engineering.
