Having recently been awarded a Burroughs Wellcome Fund grant through the Student Science Enrichment Program, Enfield and Hamel hosted the first Science Slices event on Thursday, March 3. Science Slices is a monthly science café for Alamance Burlington School System middle school students and their families.

Hamel welcomed students and their families to the program that began with a light meal served outdoors at the Elon Experiential Campus. Thirty-six people from across the county got to know one another and shared their passion and interest for science.

After dinner, Hamel shared with the group about her research studying insect communication. She and her students study how interactions between species shape insect signals and behavior. Students and their families held and observed Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches and Bess Beetles – a local native species – as the big insects hissed and squeaked.

Finally, participants engaged in an interactive modeling activity, in which they used sound makers and tried to find other individuals of the same “species” – matching their sound to the sound of another person in the room.

At the end of the evening, several families and students asked about the next Science Slices event, which will be on April 7, 2022

Hamel and Enfield were supported by Melaine Rikard, an ABSS middle school teacher, Faith Minor ’22 and Ainsley Shan ’22, both of whom are Elon undergraduate students.

The #ElonEd students who taught were Colleen Cody, Marlies Emmelot, Danielle Marzullo, Emma Mustacio, Kristen O’Neill, Emma Pippert and Allie Wrin. The program was a project in Associate Professor Mark Enfield’s Principles of Learning and Teaching Course.

The program involved the teacher education students in analyzing and interpreting the Engineering is Elementary curriculum kit, A long way down: Designing Parachutes, which was purchased through a CATL teaching and learning grant.

The teacher education students formed a professional learning community that co-planned a week-long, half-day program based on the curriculum kits.

Finally, the team co-taught the program to approximately 30 children in kindergarten through fifth grade. Throughout the week students learned about air as matter, how air creates drag, components of parachutes, and the designed, built, tested, and refined (using the Engineering Design Process) their own parachutes.

Students said:

• I liked that we got to see Felix Baumgartner breaking the sound barrier jumping through space (4th grader).
• That we get to create our own parachutes and that we get to learn about parachutes. It is fun that we get to learn about science and math in it too (3rd grader).
• I liked that we get to bring home pinwheels and parachute toys because we can do things with them at home (2nd grader).
• It was fun to drop parachutes outside (1st grader).
• Going outside and running to feel the wind slow me down with the parachute on (Kindergartener).

Happy, smiling faces along with laughter and multiple requests to know when our next STEM program would be offered anecdotal evidence of program success. Hearing students use terms and apply that knowledge to design their own parachutes provided informal evidence that they learned about engineering design, how parachutes work, basic ideas about air as matter and how air is a fluid that can create resistance.

For Enfield, seeing excellent teaching from seven rising star teachers made all the effort worthwhile.

Through support of Elon’s PACE Program and with encouragement from the inquiry requirement, Mark Enfield, associate professor of education, working with Sara Rosenthal '16, who majored in special education and elementary education as a teaching fellow, collaborated to provide four years of weekly after-school science programming to area children.

Working in two different afterschool contexts, the team planned and taught weekly science lessons. Every week, after the sessions ended, Enfield and Rosenthal each wrote reflections on the day and compiled these during the year. The result was a book published by Brill/Sense publishers available now. 

The book narrates the experiences of the two teachers creating and leading an elementary after-school science program at a public housing authority community. The narrative employs a reflexive ethnographic approach to examine the reflections of each teacher during one academic year. The result is an exploration of the teachers’ understandings of socially just teaching, their pedagogical transformations and a vision of how science as a discipline was important in terms of enacting a culturally sustaining pedagogy.

The reflexive ethnographic perspective enables consideration of the implications of teachers’ positionality in teaching science to marginalized and/or underrepresented students in informal learning contexts.

Through these examinations, the book explains how collaboration was vital in the teachers’ efforts to become insiders in the setting and engage in culturally sustaining pedagogy. The book also narrates the teachers’ development leading to articulation of a framework identified as the zone of pedagogical potential.

Finally, the book uses the teachers’ reflections to consider the affordances of learning science. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications from this research for promoting equitable practices in informal settings, as well as the potential for those practices being useful in formal settings.

The first-year COR110 students had visited two fifth-grade classes throughout the fall as a service-learning experience. Enfield designed the experience to connect with the common reading, “Make your home among strangers.” Enfield wanted Elon students to have first-hand experiences that would provide some context to lives of potential first-generation college students. 

The elementary school these children came from focuses on leadership and college preparedness. Therefore, partnering with the school offered Elon students opportunities to meet potential first-generation college students and it offered the elementary children an opportunity to meet current college students.

51±¬ÁÏÍø every other week throughout the semester, Elon students traveled to the elementary school to meet the children during lunch when the would talk about their lives and share about experiences at college.  Each week, the fifth-graders eagerly awaited the arrival of the Elon students. 

Following each visit, the Elon students discussed their observations and experiences in class, drawing on those experiences to write informally and formally making connections to their course readings. Toward the end of the visits, students and teachers began talking about having the fifth-graders come to Elon to visit the campus.

On the day of their visit, the fifth-graders arrived on Elon’s campus at 9:30 a.m. Several dressed professionally, demonstrating their pride and enthusiasm about the visit.

Approximately 90 students along with teachers, teachers’ assistants, and bus drivers settled into the LaRose Digital Theatre for an orientation and opening session. Enfield welcomed the students and gave a quick overview of the day as well as about college education. 

The students headed out on a self-guided tour of campus following a scavenger hunt designed by Admissions Office. After their tour, fifth-graders heard from Amy Johnson, director of the Elon Core Curriculum, and Terrry Tomasek, director of Elon Academy. 

Following this, Enfield led the students in a brief activity about dissolving and states of matter. Finally, the highlight of the day was having lunch at Colonnades Dining Hall with the Elon students they had been meeting all year. The fifth-graders were so excited to eat in a college cafeteria.

The visitwas supported with logistical help from the Elon Core Curriculum, generous support from a Kernoodle Community Partnership Initiative Grant, and planning and organization by Enfield’s COR110 class.  At the end of the visit, Enfield asked, “what was the best part of the day?” The response from one fifth-grader? “Everything!”  

The , supported by a Hultquist Award through the university’s FR&D committee, focuses on teachers’ uses of different genres of texts to support science learning in lower elementary grades. The research demonstrates that purposes for reading and making predictions about texts are contextualized activities that are driven by how different individuals perceive these activities.

The findings have informed Enfield’s understandings about how to prepare future elemenatry teachers to use texts integrated in science learning.

The article reports on a study of teachers’ actions when reading different texts in the context of elementary science teaching. The findings highlight that teacher actions can support students engaging in inquiry provoked during reading events. The study revealed that purposes for reading and the notion of making predictions were contextualized activities that impact the nature of students’ engagement with texts. The implications from this study are to consider fundamental and derived senses of literacy when developing integrated learning experiences in science.

The article can be found at:

To read the article, click on the link to the right.

Funds were given to Elon by the Hultquist family for faculty development, and Elon targeted the Hultquist Award for faculty members in their first year at the university.