Our Wildwood, Volume 48

GIVING VOICE A conversation between community members

Megan Noel and Joe Wise

Since its inception 10 years ago with a grant from the E.E. Ford Foundation, the Wildwood Institute for STEM Research and Development has been singularly helmed by veteran educator Joe Wise, whose 40 years in science education helped guide the fledgling institute into a robust laboratory of student-led research, discovery, and innovation. With his retirement at the end of the 2021-2022 school year, the torch is passed to Megan Noel, WISRD’s first female director.

OWW: The Institutes at Wildwood flip the script on traditional classroom learning—a distinction that even trickles down to the nomenclature used. Students are not “students”; they are “members,” “scientists,” and “researchers.” Likewise, “teacher” doesn’t effectively describe your roles. How do you define your role as directors of WISRD? JOE: My role in WISRD is that of a chief operating officer, which looks and acts very differently than a classroom instructor. It’s my responsibility to manage day-to-day operations, maintain equipment and a safe environment, and provide guidance as needed—but it’s the members who are the principal investigators. I don’t give lessons. It’s the members that are in charge of the direction of the research. They are accountable to a WISRD Board of Directors, made up of their own elected members, who oversee the larger picture of WISRD and maintain it as a research institute. MEGAN: I’ve never been a chief operating officer, but I have been a lab manager—and I very much see the role in that context. While working in a research lab, my whole role was to make sure everybody had everything they needed, everything worked, and if anything needed to be serviced, that was my job. Within WISRD, however, there’s also a pedagogy aspect that I really enjoy as an educator. It’s a fine balance of determining how much guidance I provide to students, versus how much I encourage them to find the answers and research on their own.

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