Answer the question you selected for profile question 1 here (300 words):
In and out of school, I learned science by doing science since I was a pre-schooler. Doling science experiments built the foundation for an undergraduate degree in plant science at the University of Texas. A science teaching degree the next year at the Ohio State University landed me in a high school biology classroom, which quickly became a new testbed for investigation. My questions were still about diversity, but this time they were about the diversity of students in my classroom and what experiences would engage them in learning through science, rather than about science. Teaching high school biology consumed my world for three years. With reluctance, I left teaching to follow my husband to Harvard University as he pursued post-doctoral studies. At Harvard, I worked as an assistant in a plant ecologist’s laboratory with undergraduate and graduate student researchers. We pursued answers to questions about co-evolution, adaptation, and speciation. The year at Harvard provided me with time for reflection and mind experiments, “inquiries about inquiry teaching” (Minstrell & vanZee, 2000), as I pondered how best connect my students’ learning science through doing science, just as the young scientists and I were learning and doing science in the ecologist’s laboratory. I came back to Columbus to complete a Ph.D. in science education, working in a plant phycologists, laboratory as a graduate student. Since that time, I have bridged learning science with doing science in my academic career at Texas A&M University (for 27 years and now nearing retirement).