April Luehmann

I've been a faculty member since 2001, starting as a visiting assistant professor at Indiana University for a year before joining the University of Rochester in 2002, where I've been ever since. My main area of expertise is justice-centered, ambitious science teaching. I prepare middle school and high school science teachers and work with scholars to study what it means to center justice in and through both informal and school-based science education. A typical day for me involves advising doctoral students and working with research teams on projects like the one I ran in Puebla, Mexico in August, where I brought four scholars and 83 science teachers to study plastic pollution in the Atoyac River. This was the first time these teachers had thought about engaging youth in authentic problems for their community where justice is a component, particularly focusing on how the most polluted areas of the river are by people who have the least money and are often people of color. Across my 20 years of career, I've been running camps and after-school clubs every year, teaching teachers how to teach in a very different way by prioritizing the local culture of kids and situating science in that local culture so students see meaningfulness and purpose. I've developed a framework for justice-centered, ambitious science teaching that was published in top-tier journals and included in a National Academies report on equity in secondary science education. That framework and its ripple effects is definitely what I'm most proud of. My goal is to help everybody see themselves as science people, because we leave a lot of kids out of seeing themselves in science, and that's unethical. There are such easy ways to actually help everybody see themselves as science people.