ORLANDO, Fla. – Dr. Peter Delfyett can remember being five or six years old and sitting on his grandfather’s lap, reading the science section of the New York Times.
Growing up as a young Black boy, Delfyett said he was curious about science and dinosaurs, and questioning his Sunday school teachers about why the dinosaurs weren’t saved, and realizing that not every answer was known yet.
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“I don’t know if my grandfather was purposely pushing me towards science -- but I think maybe he really did have a secret desire for me to go into science,” said Delfyett, now a physicist, engineer and a distinguished professor in optics and photonics at the University of Central Florida.
Delfyett, who is also a past president of the National Society of Black Physicists, agrees with a growing belief in education – if you want to get children interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineer, Math) careers, get them reading.
“The reason why reading is so important is because students go and explore and discover on their own. They don’t need someone to tell them,” Delfyett said.
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Dr. Carol Ann Clenton-Martin, principal at Dream Lake Elementary School in Apopka, employs this belief in her school’s philosophy.
“There is literacy in science, there is literacy in technology, there is literacy in engineering, in the arts and in mathematics there is financial literacy,” Clenton-Martin told News 6′s Corie Murray during her appearance on the podcast “Black Men Sundays.”
“If we show students different aspects of literacy, different types of literacy, and how they can now generate excitement toward going to read about that thing they are interested in,” Clenton-Martin said, “It’s about giving students an opportunity to tap into something that sparks their interest, and then they will have a desire to go find that book.”
So instead of STEM at Dream Lake Elementary, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math), Clenton-Martin is pushing STREAM.
“As a Title I school, our scholars need to develop foundational reading skills in order to access STEM concepts,” Clenton-Martin said. “We therefore immerse our scholars in STEM and Arts integration through daily lessons when appropriate.”
Dream Lake Elementary is also a majority-minority school, according to the U.S. Dept. of Education: 357 students are Hispanic, 149 are Black and 134 are white.
More science groups are working to get more students from diverse backgrounds interested in STEM careers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
- 2.6% of Blacks and 1.7% of Hispanics are in math and computer occupations
- 1% of Blacks and 1.2% of Hispanics are in Architecture and engineering occupations
- .7% of Blacks and .5% of Hispanics are in Life, Physical and social science occupations
- 6.2% of Blacks and 3.3% of Hispanics are in health care practitioner and technical occupations
Clenton-Martin combines reading with an array of programs and clubs to get students interested in STEAM and keep them interested, including coding, STEM, Odyssey of the Mind, chess and math, clubs she encourages parents to sign her students up for.
More education programs around the country are embracing the idea of integrating reading into STEM. A 2017 study at the University of San Diego found “students who experience science through a balance of reading informational text and hands-on experiences show greater gains on measures of science understanding, science vocabulary and science writing.”
Clenton-Martin said in the 2018-2019 school year at Dream Lake ES, students who were proficient on the third-grade English language arts exams were more likely to be proficient on the fifth-grade Florida Standard Assessment for science.
Dream Lake’s STEM Club was also the overall winner in the elementary school division at the SECME Regionals Competition at UCF and placed in several categories.
SECME is an alliance of educational institutions, industries and government to reach out to underrepresented, under-served and differently-abled students and prepare them for STEM careers.
Delfyett said it makes sense.
“I tell my students, not only in my undergraduate classes but in my graduate classes as well, that science is not hard at all. What’s hard is these exotic vocabulary words. But once you read and understand these words, it’s easy,” Delfyett said. “It removes the boundaries and barriers for understanding.”
Delfyett also believes continued hands-on demonstrations are important to expose students early to STEM and keep them interested.
Delfyett was on the founding committees with astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison for the National Science Foundation’s Scientists and Engineers in the School Program, created in the 90s to get scientists and engineers talking about STEM careers in eighth-grade classrooms across the country.
“What we have found is that in middle school, kids start recognizing the opposite sex, if you might say it that way, and kids have this tremendous peer pressure to be cool kids, at least when I was in school,” Delfyett said. “And getting good grades in math and science was not a prerequisite for being a cool kid!
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“So if we could change that way of thinking in middle school, and get them to keep going in high school, we could bridge that gap,” he said.
Delfyett, who works with lasers and fiber optics, has a demonstration where he plays a James Brown song using fiber optics and is able to use a comb to “scratch” the music, like a DJ might scratch a record.
“So you have to give kids something they can relate to,” Delfyett said. “Then they can see that this is a cool person, that gives you a little street cred. It lowers the barrier, and then when you can lower the barrier then you reach a few kids.”
Delfyett said while younger kids are always fascinated by science, perception and peer pressure are probably problems that have leaked down to the elementary school level, especially with social media.
“I’d like to believe that at some point and time, when you’re young, you’re fascinated by simple tricks,” Delfyett said. “When you’re 5 and 6 years old, science is the closest thing to real magic. You know, you can do really neat stuff with science.”
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That’s what Clenton-Martin is also trying to get students to see through her teach-in and mentorship programs, where hands-on demonstrations and continuing programs expose students to STEAM concepts.
“In 2021 we had a collaboration with Dix-Hite Landscaping Firm to expose our students to landscape engineering,” Clenton-Martin said. “Our scholars were able to participate in a charrette where we discovered together how all the content areas of STREAM were needed for the world of landscape engineering.”
Clenton-Martin said she also had a partnership with AdventHealth prior to COVID and would like to establish more partnerships with local businesses and industries.
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