For Star subscribers: Hoping to help close STEM achievement gaps, the University of Arizona's Colleen Kelley is producing a comic book series. It's called M.C. Detective Agency: Chemical Solutions Required. .
Kathryn Palmer After seeing inequities in science education throughout her 25-year teaching career, a UA chemistry instructor is taking a novel approach to solving the problem:
And that underrepresentation in higher education carries over to the STEM workforce, which includes lots of jobs with high earning potential. Despite some gains for women in recent years, those jobs remain dominated by white and Asian men. That’s because “all of the tools they had used before organic chemistry were based on math. Even if they didn’t understand any chemistry they could ‘math their way through it,’” Kelley said.
The stories were so effective that she kept telling them when she started teaching at The Gregory School in Tucson, which is where she worked before coming to the UA in 2018. Students responded so well to the stories, that eventually she started writing them down. “Everyone is trying so hard to remedy , but we can’t remedy it unless we go back to fourth grade,” she said, noting that kids need to get comfortable with chemistry early on so they’re not intimidated and confused when they get to high school and college.
She recently launched her own startup, Kids' Chemical Solutions, as part of the current cohort of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps, which helps scientists figure out how to amplify the reach of their research. ‘Fun and easy to understand’To bring her vision to life, she enlisted the help of a graphic designer and the artistic eye of a former student, Mackenzie Reagan, to help conceptualize the characters into professional quality figures.
She’s exposing her daughter to Kelley’s way of teaching chemistry through storytelling with the idea “that because of her young age, these concepts will come early in a digestible way.” “There’s a lot of research that shows that students from certain groups do not perform well on those exams, not because they don’t have the knowledge but because those exams are not the proper tool to explore their understanding,” said Talanquer, who also chairs the American Chemical Society’s division of chemical education. In that role, he works with K-12 and college educators as well as industry leaders to enhance the teaching and learning of chemistry.
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