What Do Scientists Look Like?

So I started this blog last year, and then did nothing with it...Whoops! I've been having this urge to start it back up again though, so here I go!

There's an activity out there where teachers ask their students to draw what a scientist looks like, and the results are overwhelming! Most students end up drawing an old, white man in a lab coat with beakers full of bubbling liquid. Seriously - google it! A quick google image search will show you exactly what I'm talking about. They don't draw women, they don't draw children, they don't draw scientists in the field, they don't have multiple races represented. The picture below (straight from a google image search) is the norm...


I haven't done this activity in a while, and I'm happy to say that last time I did there was a great variety of what the scientists were doing in the photo (typically connected to the student's favorite science area), and we had both genders represented, but we still lacked diversity. :(

Some of my students don't see themselves as scientists, and I can understand why. Many of the scientists that come up in our learning represent only a portion of our student population. Therefore, I decided to do a bulletin board highlighting a diverse group of scientists, and to make it extra cheesy - I put a mirror at the bottom. After all, the goal is to get them to see themselves as scientists! I'm a little ashamed to say that I had to do some research to find scientists that represented our school population. I feel like I should be able to rattle these out of my head far easier than I could! Looks like I still have some of my own learning to do!

While I know I don't have EVERY background represented, I'm hopeful that all of our kids can find someone with whom they can relate. I also put some of our neighborhood scientists in the mix (our partners for the St. Louis Box Turtle Project - more on this later), and a former student! (I'm sure I started teaching at 14 because there is no way I'm old enough to have former students doing this stuff!)



Anyhow - first learning of the school year, everyone who does science is a scientist, and since we all do science, we are all scientists.

The next couple of days I'll be working with our third graders on their science note-booking immersion days. What's that??? Well, come back and see!