Troy Sadler: Hands-On Science
Science starts with washing dishes.
At, least, that’s how it worked for Troy Sadler. Long before the Ph.D., the published articles and the grants, Sadler was a kitchen drudge in the palace of science.
“My first job was in a lab that studied population genetics in daphnia—a kind of water flea,” he said. “I washed dishes. Then, when I’d been around a while, they let me take care of the bugs.”
It may not sound like fun, but Sadler says the work made him what he is today. As a professor of science education at the University of Florida’s College of Education, he is now trying to make sure a new generation experiences science in meaningful and authentic ways.
“For thousands of years, apprenticeship was a primary mode for teaching any trade,” Sadler said. “There’s a reason for that: people learn by doing, and they learn when their learning has a social context.”
Improving the early science experiences of K-12 students is a passion for Sadler. When he’s not teaching the next generation of science teachers at UF’s School of Teaching and Learning, Sadler is hard at work on his piece of Science for Life, a multi-million-dollar effort, undertaken by UF and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, to improve science education for students from kindergarten to grad school. Or he’s working on projects like the Smallwood Scholarship, which allows students from low-income backgrounds to work summers in UF labs with practicing researchers.
Sadler’s obsession is increasingly becoming a preoccupation for U.S. policymakers. As the global economy grows increasingly competitive, many in government are becoming concerned about the relatively low number of American students choosing careers in the sciences. When they look down the pipeline, at the interests and academic performance of kids not yet in college, concern becomes alarm.
Sadler has a few ideas about why students are turning off to the sciences.
“We seem to have a box for ‘school science’ and a box for ‘real science,’” he said. “We’re not giving them the chance to see the connections between the science they’re learning and the real world.”
Sadler can’t remember when he wasn’t interested in the sciences—but even so, he didn’t choose this career without a nudge.
“I always felt a sort of pull from the life sciences,” he said. “There was something there, and I didn’t know what it was.”
As an undergraduate at the University of Miami, his interest led him to that dish-washing, bug-feeding laboratory job. He learned a lot about the research going on there—a look at how water fleas and their prey evolve in response to each other. He also learned something equally important: how a real-world laboratory runs on a daily basis.
“After about two years, I was running the lab, at least in terms of day-to-day operations,” he said. “And I was conducting my own experiment there. As you might imagine, it really changed my understanding of my science classes.”
UF researchers have long known the value of this sort of on-the-job training. In fact, for nearly a half century, the university has hosted the Summer Science Training Program for high school students who want to spend their break doing real-life science. Not surprisingly, SSTP graduates routinely go on to get advanced degrees in the sciences.
Hoping to expand the program to more young people, Sadler appealed to the Texas-based Smallwood Foundation for a grant to fund SSTP tuition for kids from low-income Florida schools. The first class of Smallwood Scholars started the program this year.
Sadler would like to see students across the country doing real science of this sort, right in their own high schools—and he isn’t the only one. Last year, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute gave UF $1.5 million to research ways to bring more meaningful science education to students at all levels of the school system. With colleagues in the College of Education, Sadler contributes to the initiative, called Science for Life, through evaluating the impacts of authentic research experiences on student learning outcomes.
Sadler says teachers anywhere can enhance student learning by building units around socioscientific issues—issues, like global warming or hurricane preparedness, that lie at the intersection of scientific theory and everyday life. Much of Sadler’s study is devoted to finding new ways to bring these issues into the classroom.
“It doesn’t have to be something big like the melting of the polar ice caps,” he said. “You can find issues closer to home, like what’s going into the local landfill.”
For Sadler, teaching science at the high school level is the second best job in the world. He loved his four years as a teacher in Alachua and Pinellas County schools, but missed doing his own research.
The best job is the one he has now—a professorship that allows him to mix teaching time with his own scientific inquiry.
“I don’t miss daphnia, but I would miss the inquiry and the process of research if I didn’t have it,” he said. “Water fleas are interesting, but I’m much more interested in how kids learn.”
