About the Program

The CILS Science Fellows program aims to create a community of future leaders in the natural sciences who can effectively bridge science, schools, and informal community settings.  It does this by actively engaging doctoral students in the natural sciences in course work about the teaching and learning of science, and in the design and assessment of educational outreach work in the community.

Currently, UCSC CILS is collaborating with another NSF Center, the Center for Adaptive Optics in an effort to combine their respective professional development programs for science graduate students and expand the offerings under a new name, the Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators (ISEE).

Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries
The CILS Science Fellows program joins faculty across the disciplines of science, education and psychology to provide doctoral students in the sciences with innovative project-based courses on learning and assessment, course/class development, implementation and evaluation experiences.  The program is designed to provide students with interdisciplinary community support.  The Science Fellows come from a wide variety of disciplines making the program broadly interdisciplinary (physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, ocean sciences, etc.). Because a program such as this one provides interaction outside of home departments and disciplines, it builds a community in which colleagues can support each other in discussing new ideas, clarifying points of confusion, and debating the merits of certain designs. Fellows are able to compare their assessments, goals, and strategies and give each other advice, peer to peer. The community also serves the function of offering a social network for the Fellows to support each other in advancing in and beyond their graduate programs in the sciences. Its goal is to help to prepare Fellows to become successful future faculty members, researchers, and science educators.

Program Courses
The Fellows begin with a formal course on the science of learning with a focus on informal contexts. Later, the Fellows take advanced seminars, co-taught by a science educator and a practicing natural scientist. The seminars give the Fellows ideas about what kinds of science teaching might be productive in expanding the participation of traditionally under-represented groups in STEM, of how to represent the work of science more accurately in teaching, and encourage innovation in their own practice.

The seminars are geared to support the creation of a third year project in which the Fellows will have designed, implemented, and assessed a science outreach or education project of their own. Past student projects have included: a sea-otter observation and data collection inquiry in local elementary classrooms, a field-guide to geological process for local residents, a comic book on turtle migration for Mexican fisherman, and a science communication course on global climate change.

Making Change Makers for a New Era
Upon program completion, Fellows have mastered core skills in their own scientific discipline and in science education; they are individuals who can now navigate multiple professional communities while maintaining a disciplinary grounding in their own field of scientific expertise. Not surprisingly Fellows often go on to take leadership roles in university outreach programs, develop strong relationships with educators, present work on education projects at conferences, and obtain prestigious awards and positions. Fellows become leaders in their fields and in science education.