������ý����

Dr. Andrea Drewes, who came to ������ý���� in the fall of 2019 as an assistant professor in the Department of Graduate Education, Leadership, and Counseling, first realized she had an aptitude for teaching science back when she was a student at Hunterdon Central High School.

“I always loved the problem-solving approach that we take in science, and how we can try to satisfy our curiosity about nature and the world around us,” she recalls. “I have specific memories of being in upper-level science courses and being about to find different models or descriptions to help my peers with what we were learning. The teacher was doing a great job, but explaining things one way doesn’t necessarily meet the needs of all the students in the classroom, and I found myself being able to give parallel explanations.”

She began her undergraduate education at Brandeis University. However, it didn’t offer a science education major at that time, so when she became certain that a career as a science teacher was for her, she transferred to the University of Delaware, where she earned her degree in chemistry education, with a minor in biology and East Asian studies.

She spent the next five years teaching middle school science in Ocean City, Md., and during this time she took a temporary leave to work for an environmental group on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. “I would go into local classrooms and help teachers and students to get a better understanding of their natural environment,” she says, “because many of them, even while they walked by these beautiful beaches and amazing mangrove forests, didn’t really understand them or appreciate the complex ecosystems surrounding us.”

This experience would have a career-changing impact on her. “I returned home and went back to teaching at the same middle school, but it made me realize that I loved working with other teachers to help their students see that science isn’t scary.  It can be very manageable, fun, and engaging for teachers and learners alike.”

This led her to take a job as Coordinator of Teacher Professional Development with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, the organization that manages the Bronx Zoo. “I worked with local teachers ranging from kindergarten through high school, who would come to the zoo for professional development. Through our Online Teacher Academy, I also worked with teachers virtually from around the world. Our goal was to really infuse conservation messages more effectively into their classrooms through science instruction.”

During this time, she also began doing research into the impact the zoo’s programming was having on teachers and their beliefs about the value of science in their classrooms.

“I realized that I really wanted to enhance my own ability to conduct meaningful educational research,” she says. So, she went back to the University of Delaware, where she earned her doctorate in learning sciences, which focuses on the science behind how we learn and how that knowledge can be used to improve education.

While she was in her doctoral program, the subject of climate change became a major focus of her work. She was involved with a National Science Foundation grant called MADE CLEAR (Maryland and Delaware Climate Change Education, Assessment, and Research). Through this project, she helped to design and implement climate change professional development for teachers to assist them with integrating this scientifically and socially complex topic into their science curriculum.

Her dissertation focused on climate change teaching.

“I investigated how science teachers come to identify as a teacher of climate change,” she says. “This started seven or eight years ago, when it was still fairly controversial to include the topic in the classroom, so I sought a better understanding of their motivations and reasoning for choosing this topic to include in their science instruction.”

At ������ý����, Dr. Drewes is working with post-baccalaureate students looking to earn a teacher certification or a Master of Arts in Teaching degree.

She finds that it is particularly rewarding to be teaching career changers.

“Because I have such a wide, varied life experience in and out of the classroom, I really appreciate the fact that they want to use their backgrounds and the unique experiences that they’ve had and bring that to their students."