Making Science Visible within the Latino Community

It's not surprising that most children, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, say they would like to be a firefighter, or a doctor, or a police officer. Those are the people they see within their communities. Young students rarely see a scientist or an engineer; their work is done in specialized facilities and is generally invisible to the community at large, including students and their teachers.

Argonne National Laboratory's Latino Club aims to change that by making science more visible, particularly to the Latino Community.

Hispanic Educational Science and Engineering Day

In September 2005 Argonne National Laboratory's Latino Club set the stage for what could become a model of outreach to Latino students when the Argonne Hispanic/Latino Club held its first Hispanic Educational Science and Engineering Day.

An Argonne scientist has the undivided attention of some of the 37 middle-school students and 6 teachers who toured several Argonne facilities, including the Advanced Photon Source. In a pilot project, students from grades 6 through 8 of the St. Francis of Rome Catholic School in Cicero, Illinois, came to Argonne for tours of several Argonne facilities, including the Advanced Photon Source (APS). Unlike most APS tours, however, the students came not just to listen to what the Argonne scientists had to say, but to ask questions. And ask they did.

The students had been selected by their teachers based on brief essays on what they like about science. Selected students received information packages beforehand and came to the tour ready to ask questions that would enable them to complete their assignments--slide presentations to the Argonne tour guides, prepared in teacher-led groups. The students had only about 20 minutes at the end of their lunch period to create the presentations. Each student was required to participate, and each was required to speak. This accomplishment was viewed as "monumental" by the Argonne tour guides, who also were energized by the students' interest in the subject matter and their array of questions.

The APS tour was not a field trip. It was an opportunity for interested and curious students to draw on the expertise available at a world-class research facility to digest information and summarize it for dissemination. An additional benefit was the relationship established between Argonne staff and teachers at the Cicero school, which is expected to lead to many more opportunities for this type of outreach to the Latino community.

Teachers as Research Interns

The success of Hispanic Educational Science and Engineering Day was the impetus for Gerald to arrange for a Hispanic student to do an unusual undergraduate student research internship at Argonne.

Averi Escalona will spend the summer of 2006 at Argonne under the Argonne Division of Educational Programs Pre-Service Teacher (PST) Program. That program gives future science, math, and technology teachers experience and understanding of the research process through close work with a staff scientist on a real project. As in other undergraduate intern programs, PST participants engage heavily in research. Averi's internship involves working in Argonne's Electrochemical Analysis and Diagnostics Laboratory, where batteries and fuel cells are tested, to hone her research skills. But she will also work with Rex Gerald getting to know the research programs and staff in other parts of Argonne, and will work with Argonne's Latino Club on various outreach activities. She brings with her a great deal of experience in organizing large science fairs and similar events. In late April Averi was a college team leader for the Viva Technology program given by HENAAC at Keller Regional Gifted Center (on Chicago’s south side), co-sponsored by Motorola. Averi also has played key roles in activities with the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHIP).

Argonne's Latino Club hopes to increase the extent and impact of its outreach activities. Rex Gerald believes that people like Averi can provide the much-needed organizational and "people" skills needed to make that happen. By working at Argonne, Averi will establish a network of scientific and engineering contacts. By working with the Latino Club, she will be able to draw on the resources and experience of the Club and other organizations such as HENAAC that have been established to help bring more Latinos into science and engineering. This approach can create a powerful and effective tool for making an imprint on the Latino community, and could serve as a model for enriching pre-service teacher internships to benefit students and their schools, as well as Argonne.

Reaching In

Rex Gerald recently completed a semester of teaching science on Saturdays at the KIPP Ascend Charter School in Chicago, located in one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods. The student population, grades 5-7, is largely African American and Latino.

Reaching these students was particularly challenging, and involved "reaching in"—taking science to the students in their classroom, rather than bringing the students to science at Argonne.

In his class, “The Argonne Adventure: Extreme Science,” Gerald used his inventiveness to engage students and keep them involved in projects such as studying the electrical conductivity of pencil lead. Students learned skills such as resistance, voltage, and current measurements, careful data recording, multiple graphing of data, and the method of linear regression for data analysis. More importantly, the students were then challenged to expand their understanding of the physical meaning that the data held. This particularly challenging component of the students' work was perhaps the most rewarding for the students as well as Gerald because it led to the exploration of the connectivity of resistance measurements to the tactile/experiential information that the students were very familiar with—namely how soft a pencil writes, the darkness of the line that it makes, ease of erasures, etc. The students further learned that all No. 2 marked pencils are not the same, and that the slope of the line of a pencil's lead linear position vs. resistance graph (the linear resistivity) had a direct correlation to the students’ perceived writing quality of the pencil. The pencil is a commonplace item but the science was real.

Gerald involved Rocio Díaz, a previous student intern, and William Thompson, a high school student he had mentored through two science fairs, as teaching assistants in this highly successful class.

More Information

For more information on student opportunities at Argonne and on Argonne's Chemical Engineering Division, visit www.cmt.anl.gov/Students/default.shtml

 For more information on Argonne's Latino Club, visit http://hispanicclub.anl.gov/  Rex Gerald served as president of the Latino Club in 2005.

 For more information on Rex Gerald, visit http://www.cmt.anl.gov/Science_and_Technology/Basic_Science/Staff/Rex_E_Gerald_II.shtml