| A new school year offers us educators a new beginning, and a chance to take steps towards teaching in a way that aligns with our values. We hope that your year is off to a great start, and that the URC resources below are useful to you as you consider your curriculum and pedagogy. 1. The URC Continues to Grow We’ve added a new lesson plan, Colorism (temporarily offline for revision). It explores how colorism can contribute to the exclusion of potential great scientists. We are also nearing the completion of a lesson on the myth of the model minority. In the past year, we’ve had 31,000 visitors to the URC website, and a recent tweet brought dozens more educators to our mailing list. We’re excited to see this free resource finding its way to the teachers that need it. Please keep sharing it with people in your community! 2. 2022 User Cohort Roughly 30 URC users met bi-weekly last Spring to dive deeper into the URC. 94% felt like it was a great use of their time, and the conversations were  . We’ll likely be running another opt-in user cohort this year, so keep your eyes on the URC User Slack for information if interested.3. Underrepresentation Curriculum Group on Slack Speaking of the User Slack, we’ve got an online community of more than 500 users ready to discuss all things URC. We just started a new channel for Canadian URC users. Editor Danny is currently sharing how he’s using the URC with physics graduate students: Next, we did the Data Analysis lesson. However, I mixed it up a bit by showing some graphs that showed ethnic/racial, gender, ability, and sexuality demographics for the USA, and then challenged them to do some internet research to find the information for physics. I think this makes sense because, as physics grad students, they are beginning to see themselves as part of the discipline, and I want them to think about how to find this sort of information on their own. We (the Editors) are still trying to figure out how to get the most out of this community; if you’d like to join, you can follow this link…and if you’re new to Slack, this explainer might be useful. 4. Presentations and Professional Development Since our last newsletter, the URC Editors have run workshops at the 2022 Biannual Conference on Chemical Education and provided professional development for Math for America, Eckerd College, the Fred Hutch Science Education Partnership, O’Bryant High School in Boston, the New York City Department of Education, South Seattle College STEM and business faculty, and two-year college STEM instructors around the country. These workshops are one of our primary means of spreading the word about the URC at the moment; if you know of a school, college, district, or professional organization that might want to hear from us, you can request a workshop or presentation using this form. Thrillingly, we’re starting to see URC users like you running their own PD using our materials, too. 5. Contributing to Research We continue to be excited to study how URC lessons may benefit students. If you are in a position to do so, given your local constraints about sharing student information, we have developed a pre/post survey that can help provide us quantitative answers to some of our questions. Please contact Danny (danny.doucette@gmail.com) if you have any questions. We are so grateful for your investment in transforming science education! The Editors of the Underrepresentation Curriculum: Abby, Andrew, Angie, Chris, Clausell, Dana, Danny, Elissa, Johan, John, Moses, Rachel, and Shinae |
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