CIRTL Spotlight: Sarah Wright

Katherine Friedrich

Enthusiasm for environmental education and ethnic diversity has inspired Sarah Wright, a graduate student in botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to do an internship with CIRTL’s Delta Program and to conduct a series of workshops based on the training model of the CIRTL Diversity Team.

After working at an environmental newspaper, High Country News, Wright became attracted to biology education and pursued a graduate program at the UW-Madison. Through a job at a summer research opportunity program for ethnic minority students, she discovered that she wanted to incorporate diversity awareness into her teaching.

Climate change has been a long-term source of creative ideas for Wright. She has conducted field experiments to determine the response of wild lupine to variation in latitude. Wild lupine is the host plant for the Karner blue butterfly, an endangered species. This butterfly was named by the writer Vladimir Nabokov, and is unusually beautiful.

Although Wright began her research project with hopes of becoming a professor at a liberal arts college, she found field work disappointing. “I planted 3000 plants and watched a lot of them die,” she said. Instead, after participating in the Adult Role Models in Science program, Wright found herself increasingly drawn to communicating science to elementary school students.
   
Ever since she first learned about Delta, Wright wanted to participate. “It was kind of like this carrot dangling out there,” she said. “Someday I’ll get to do this stuff I really want to do.”  

Once she became a Delta intern, Wright developed her interest in environmental education to fruition. She wrote a year-long curriculum for an elementary school class on Madison’s east side. Many of the students were English language learners. Students studied the timing of life cycles of local species – a subject known as phenology – by visiting a woodsy area near their school.

“A lot of it was ‘What is science? What do scientists do?’” Wright said. The activities also included writing and math. She said the students reported that they liked science and being in nature, and that their scientific skills improved as a result of the curriculum. The final product of the internship was a guide to teaching phenology in the elementary classroom, which Wright has since presented at an environmental education conference. 

At the same time that she was doing her work with elementary school students, Wright joined the first session of the CIRTL Diversity Resources Workshop in spring 2007. The workshop has motivated Wright to deliver three interactive diversity presentations. “The more you talk about [diversity] with other people, the more comfortable it becomes,” Wright said.

Wright delivered one presentation, a teaching assistant training at the UW-Madison College of Engineering, together with Judith Burstyn, a chemistry professor who has led the development of the Diversity Resources. Wright was impressed by Burstyn’s poise and facilitation skills. “I would feel 100 times more comfortable doing a workshop by myself after doing one with her,” Wright said.

11/13/2007

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