It's STEM Discovery Week, and ABE is in Dublin, Ireland, for our annual meeting, working to strengthen the biotech experience for students and teachers around the world. Our Director Rebecca Lewis discusses how global efforts to broaden biotech training start with just one teacher:
Putting modern-day biotech lab equipment into the hands of youth all over the world is no small task. It requires massive coordination and iterative work to pull off. And yet, for the Amgen Biotech Experience (ABE), that work started with lone teachers. Like that saying “The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step…”, the journey to a million students begins with one teacher.
Tammy Fay, a biology teacher in the Masconomet Regional School District, remembers being one of the first teachers brought on to the ABE program in Massachusetts about 8 years ago when Harvard University began its site there. A biotech researcher by training, she fell in love with science education after realizing the lab life was not right for her and became a biology teacher.
Now as head of her department, Fay trains other teachers on how to run ABE labs. She will be sharing her vast trove of insights with other educators at the ABE annual meeting in Dublin, Ireland, later this month. The process Fay has undergone in starting with ABE in her own classroom to now training other teachers embodies the goal of the ABE annual meeting – to share best practices that will enable the program to keep effectively reaching students while also scaling up to broaden its impact.
At the annual meeting, Fay will be representing the many teachers worldwide who are part of the ABE community and also facilitating conversations among the teachers, other educators, and site administrators in attendance. Our meetings aim to bring together the key stakeholders once a year to learn from each other and hopefully chart a path forward for the program. ...