Resources

The Science Education and Civic Engagement: An International Journal explores constructive connections between science education and civic engagement that will enhance both experiences for our students. The Journal focuses on using unsolved, complex civic issues as a framework to develop students’ understanding of the role of scientific knowledge in personal and public decision making, along with examining how such knowledge is embedded in a broader social and political context. In addition to examining what students learn, we also investigate how this learning takes place and how it can be evaluated, documented, and strengthened. By exploring civic questions as unsolved challenges, we seek to empower students as engaged participants in their learning on campus and as citizens in their communities. Since many pressing issues are not constrained by national borders, we encourage perspectives that are international or global in scope

We have recorded and packaged some popular webinar events including our flagship SENCER Summer Institute presentations and keynote talks. These are available to watch at our YouTube channel. The video below is popular early webinar on how to design a SENCER course in an hour!

The SENCER models are curricular approaches to improving science learning and supporting engagement with complex issues. Through the “lens” of a matter or set of matters of public consequence, a SENCER model course or program teaches science that is both challenging and rigorous. SENCER models have clear learning outcomes. They seek transparency in their connection of classroom and related activities and the learning that is desired. Outcomes are assessed continuously. SENCER models reflect the intellectual curiosity of the faculty who developed them. At the same time, they respond to student interests, including personal interests, as well as public or civic ones.

SENCER Backgrounders are intended to provide intelligent, general readers with high quality syntheses of some of the complex, capacious civic issues that SENCER courses sometimes use to teach basic science. The idea is not to explain the science, but to connect some of what is known, and as yet unknown scientifically, with some of what is at stake civically. A second goal is to identify where scientific knowledge sheds light in such a way as to make civic choices more optimal. Though science is only occasionally the final word on what choice one should make on a complex civic issue, it is worth knowing what science tells us as we deliberate and take into account matters that go beyond science.

Backgrounders cover topics such as synthetic biology, the Human Genome Project, human rights, HIV/AIDS, nanotechnology, and teaching.

Funded through the National Science Foundation’s TUES-II program (DUE-1322883), the Engaging Mathematics (EM) three-year initiative aims to significantly increase the use of the SENCER model, and other reformative pedagogies, by a national community of mathematics scholars capable of creating, implementing, and sustaining reforms in mathematics education.

The curricula developed by our partners, packaged as teaching manuals, so that instructors outside our project may implement lessons, activities, or curricula developed through Engaging Mathematics into their own courses.

Assessment

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