AAUW Dialog

Project Profile: GEMS

April 20, 2009, by mandytoomey

I hadn’t been in a school setting since saying goodbye to the American School of Campinas and my teaching career last June. That’s one reason I was so excited to visit William Wirt Middle School and the 2006–07 Community Action Grant program, Girls Excelling in Math and Science (GEMS). This STEM enrichment program focuses on hands-on science exploration and mentoring between University of Maryland undergraduates in related fields and D.C. area middle-school girls.

Walking into the science classroom used by GEMS, I was greeted by student work, charts, inspirational messages, and the general sense of a good middle-school learning environment. Seventh- and eighth-grade girls shuffled in and out of the room waiting for the GEMS lesson to start. The meeting began with juice boxes, granola bars, and a fill-in-the-blank worksheet about earth science.

After watching a short video about rocks types, the 11 girls and four mentors broke into small groups to explore rock samples with magnifying glasses. Each group made their own sedimentary rock by adding different types of dirt and clay to a small cup of water. The girls said they enjoy the experiments the most. “I like getting dirty! It’s fun,” said Jasmine, an eighth grader who joined the group in 2007.

The meeting at William Wirt Middle School ended with a discussion of an upcoming field trip to the Natural History Museum. It is one of several field trips the students will take, including visits to the Koshland Science Museum and the University of Maryland Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

The GEMS project was started after program coordinators for the University of Maryland’s Science and Technology Addressing the Need for Diversity (STAND) project spoke at the AAUW College Park (MD) Branch. A productive partnership was created between STAND Program Director Joelle Davis Carter and former educator and active AAUW member Eddie Crocker, who began developing a proposal for an after-school STEM program. GEMS was first implemented in 2007 at Hyattsville Middle School and was later extended to include William Wirt Middle School.

The undergraduate mentors also benefit from GEMS. “It’s rewarding to see the interactions between the mentors and the middle-school girls,” said Eddie, noting the undergraduates’ excitement about presenting the weekly lessons. The meeting reminded me how important and rewarding work inside the classroom can be. Eddie said she hopes that GEMS can be a model for similar programs that incorporate universities, service learning, local public schools, and STEM.

A new National Girls Collaborative Project team in the mid-Atlantic region, called “MAGIC,” is working to connect programs like GEMS with resources such as volunteers, supplies, and sponsors and to increase program visibility in the community. Across the country, 13 other regional collaboratives are working toward the same goal. Find out how you can help create the tipping point for girls in STEM.

This blog was co-authored with Nicole Callahan, Program Associate for AAUW’s NSF-funded National Girls Collaborative Project.

Comments RSS

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Address never made public)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s