Déana Scipio, Ph.D., Director of Graduate and Higher Education Programming
Déana Scipio, Ph.D., Director of Graduate and Higher Education Programming
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Dr. Scipio has focused much of her career on broadening participation for learners from non-dominant communities in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). She has designed and studied learning environments within formal and informal contexts and focuses on equitable design, creating spaces for learners from non-dominant groups to demonstrate and create disciplinary expertise, architecting community-university partnerships to facilitate multidirectional learning, and helping experts and mentors build pedagogical capacity. She brings this focus to her work as Director of the Graduate Program in Education for Environment and Community, School Overnight, and Community Education programs at IslandWood as she works to further integrate justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. This work entails building partnerships, conducting research, designing, and implementing a rich learning environment for graduate students who come to IslandWood.
Dr. Scipio is the past chair for the American Educational Research Association special interest group for Informal Learning Environments Research and serves on the advisory board for many NSF and private funded projects. She has served as a reviewer for the American Educational Research Association, the International Society of Learning Science, the National Science Foundation, and the Journal of Science Education. She is currently a co-Principal investigator working with Drs. April Luehmann and Todd Campbell and their teams on an NSF funded project studying Justice-Centered Ambitious Science Teaching practices (award #2101217). She is developing a research agenda at IslandWood to make certain that our work with graduate students in the EEC program and youth in the School Overnight Program (SOP) is informed by contemporary research and best practices. Research at IslandWood entails making sure that we are developing a deeper understanding of the impact of our work, learning from our students, and sharing our findings back to the field of science education and teacher preparation in informal and formal learning environments.
Dr. Scipio was a graduate researcher at the Institute for Science and Math Education and the LIFE Center; an ERC Postdoctoral fellow at the Chèche Konnen Center at TERC in Cambridge Massachusetts; and most recently, a postdoctoral scholar and researcher in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis where she conducted research to understand how youth develop environmental science agency through their participation in citizen science projects.
Selected Presentations & Podcasts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akNbE8CJZ08&t=10s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOk8KGHB_CM
EDUCATION: BA in English Literature and Biology (minor), University of San Francisco; Certificate in Education for Environment and Community, IslandWood; Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction, University of Washington, Seattle; Doctor of Philosophy in Learning Sciences and Human Development, University of Washington, Seattle.
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