Our Wildwood, Volume 48

“” IF WE WANT TO MAKE SCIENCE A TRULY INCLUSIVE FIELD, AND WISRD IS MODELING A SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTE BY BEING AS CLOSE TO ONE AS POSSIBLE, STUDENTS AND FUTURE WISRD MEMBERS NEED TO BE ABLE TO SEE THEMSELVES REFLECTED AND REPRESENTED IN THE INSTITUTE.

OWW: Along with Megan as Director, the student leadership within WISRD is also female this year. How does this reflect the evolution of the STEM field as more inclusive of other identities? JOE: It’s not just this year—we’ve had strong female leadership within WISRD since our founding. It started with the “Women of WISRD”, a group started in the early days of WISRD that made a real push at elementary, middle, and in upper to spark more interest and participation. Many of those younger students are now WISRD members. MEGAN: The pervasive idea in science, which is always spoken from a place of privilege, is that it shouldn’t matter what your race, gender, or sexuality is in order to do research. Yes, ultimately it should not matter, but rather than ignore it, we need to make sure we acknowledge the problem and work to make things better. It is so important to me that we make sure WISRD is a safe space for any and all who want to participate. If we want to make science a truly inclusive field, and WISRD is modeling a scientific institute by being as close to one as possible, students and future WISRD members need to be able to see themselves reflected and represented in the Institute.

OWW: What drew you to WISRD, and the Wildwood Institute Model?

MEGAN: Oh my gosh, so much! I hesitate to use the word “real”, because classroom science can be very real as well, but there’s such a difference when going from a classroom to a laboratory to perform genuine research science. It’s very difficult for high school science classes to reach these levels, simply because there’s so much curriculum to cover. Instead, “here’s a cookbook lab—I’ve done the hard stuff for you. I just want you to get the ‘aha’ moment and move onto the next chapter.” That crunch leads students to develop a fear of failure, but half of science is failing and figuring out why! JOE: For me, it’s simply a lot of fun. I would argue that you can’t really do science unless you work on something for a year or two, or in some cases, longer. We have some students that have worked in WISRD for four years. That starts to build an ownership over the work that doesn’t occur in traditional learning. A lengthier timeline opens up more time to explore and think about the next step of their work, which should be, “How is what I’m doing contributing to the community?” There’s purpose and motivation behind the work.

OWW WINTER 2023

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