(Source: j-mel / stock.adobe.com)
Based on an interview with Camsie McAdams
On Camsie McAdams’s first night as a volunteer math and science tutor in West Oakland, she received a wake-up call when she met eight-year-old Sasha.
In a deadpan voice, the girl told her, “Well, good luck, because I hate math and science.”
“My heart dropped,” recalls McAdams, the daughter of two scientists and lifelong science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) enthusiast. “I realized that Sasha had not been privileged to have the experiences I had enjoyed growing up.”
That evening, McAdams embarked on a new mission to help Sasha see STEM in the world around her, taking her to nearby locations that would stretch her perception of the wider world and introduce her to the STEM connections in everything around her. Soon, however, this mission expanded.
Moved by the plight of Sasha and her peers, McAdams left her PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, to become a full-time math, science, and literacy teacher at nearby Westlake Middle School.
For the next five years, McAdams and her fellow teachers tried a host of approaches—from field trips to arts integration to family science nights—to encourage their students to embrace math and science. Sometimes, this meant taking a step back to provide them with the foundation in literacy and numeracy they needed to make sense of these ideas.
Progress also depended on the teachers’ ability to introduce students to subjects that were not part of their everyday lives. “People who’ve been marginalized can only deal with what is real,” says McAdams. “In order for them to consider things beyond their immediate world, we had to provide a curriculum that pushed them out of their comfort zone and made these things real to them, even if all we had to work with were overhead projectors, VHS tapes, and field trips.”
Despite these impediments, McAdams saw the benefits of an engaged STEM education approach with her students.
“I began to realize that STEM education was not just about preparing our students for STEM careers,” she recalls. “It was showing them how to investigate new things, solve problems, and make informed decisions. It was opening doors for these previously limited students to branch out into a world of possibilities.”
With these insights in mind and inspired by her students’ transformation, McAdams began considering how this concept could be applied at a larger scale to benefit more students.
The next 11 years took McAdams away from West Oakland to a master’s program at Harvard University; a stint as a high school mathematics teacher on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; a fellowship with the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC; and an appointment as the US Department of Education’s deputy director of STEM under the Obama administration. In the latter role, she was in a prime position to influence federal, state, and local policies and plans to improve STEM education. Still, McAdams missed being more directly involved in helping students.
When her appointment ended in 2016, she started a new job as the director of STEM curriculum at Discovery Education, the global education technology leader whose state-of-the-art digital platform—Discovery Education Experience—supports learning wherever it takes place. Through its award-winning services, multimedia content, instructional support, innovative classroom tools, and corporate partnerships, Discovery Education helps educators deliver equitable learning experiences engaging all students and supporting higher academic achievements on a global scale.
An experienced STEM education leader with 25 years in urban, public K-12 education, Camsie McAdams is the Director of Global STEM Curriculum at Discovery Education. Camsie has built core and supplemental curricula for both US and global audiences and leads strategy around instructional improvement specifically focused on STEM, early learning, and early literacy/numeracy.
Within STEM, topics have ranged from traditional principles to financial literacy and entrepreneurship. Working at Discovery Education allows her to scale up her efforts from influencing dozens of students in a single school to reaching more than 45 million students across the world.
“At Discovery Education, we’re able to create compelling digital content,” says McAdams. “Instead of struggling with overhead projectors, we’re able to make use of powerful visual images and video and audio to make these topics real to students. And any classroom or student throughout the world can access them online, so this approach is endlessly scalable.”
Recently, McAdams led efforts to expand Discovery Education’s focus to include career and professional development content.
“Kids are not given enough opportunities to learn about careers outside of their immediate family or friends and consider how they might fit in those careers,” she explains. “Fortunately, we are ideally positioned to increase career engagement and exposure as early as the beginning of elementary school.”
In the past year, this need led to the launch of a new service, Career Connect, which allows students to contact working professionals in careers of interest and hold video calls with them. To populate the service with an adequate number of professionals, Career Connect features organizations such as the National Girls Collaborative Project, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and more.
“Career Connect lets kids make connections with people in manufacturing, technology, and health science, as well as with authors and writers or tradespeople,” McAdams says. “Then it becomes a catalyst for future interactions where students can dig even deeper into the careers that interest them most and be more empowered to make that crossing from education to profession. Career Connect also becomes a lever that we can use to more methodically connect student interest and education with the actual workforce needs in a given area.”
Nearly finished with its initial testing period, Career Connect is set to open its services to a broader audience very shortly.
As McAdams continues to find bigger and better ways to bring educational access to more students across the world, she always keeps Sasha and her students at Westlake Middle School in her mind. They remind her of why she’s fighting and the life-changing benefits her efforts bring to the lives of underprivileged students.
“Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of kids like Sasha are out there,” McAdams concludes. “I’m happy to know that even one of them is using math and science to make their life better—because that makes the world a little bit of a better place. That’s my ‘why.’”
Mouser Electronics is an industry leader in supporting educational initiatives that inspire and engage students in STEM-related projects and programs. It is through its unwavering support to education, particularly at the university and secondary levels, that Mouser strives to motivate, inspire, and encourage new generations of engineers and scientists to lead us forward.
Mouser Electronics, founded in 1964, is a globally authorized distributor of semiconductors and electronic components for over 1,200 industry-leading manufacturer brands. This year marks the company's 60th anniversary. We specialize in the rapid introduction of the newest products and technologies targeting the design engineer and buyer communities. Mouser has 28 offices located around the globe. We conduct business in 23 different languages and 34 currencies. Our global distribution center is equipped with state-of-the-art wireless warehouse management systems that enable us to process orders 24/7, and deliver nearly perfect pick-and-ship operations.