The McCall Field Campus is a unique program in that its design is grounded in research and literature. We take educational theory, put it into practice, monitor the success of these practices through our own research, then circulate our findings back into the literature world. This creates a beautiful loop that has been circulating and molding since Karla Eitel first arrived.
Karla, currently a faculty member and the director of education, has been here since the beginning. Since 2002, Karla has played a large role in not only sculpting the curriculum here at the McCall Field Campus but also the culture and mission of our program. During an interview, Karla shared her story with PhD Candidate Ellie Hudson-Heck and described not only how her research has sculpted the McCall Field Campus experience but also how MFC has contributed to her own scholarly curiosities.
EH: Have your research interests influenced the program at MFC?
KE: “A large sum of my Ph.D. work, focused on curriculum theory, informed how we teach our graduate students at the McCall Field Campus. Our graduate students learn as much from each other, through peer learning, as they do from our faculty. In addition, the faculty’s teaching style models how we want our graduate students to teach, which reinforces the idea of “you teach how you were taught”.”
EH: Has your experience at MFC molded your own research interests at all?
KE: “Yes it has. Through conversations with kids, I realized they thought of science as a far off world that they were not a part of. This realization led me to my scholarship interests surrounding the concept of STEM identity (the way that people think about science: who does it, how we do it, and if it matters to them in their lives). Through my work in STEM identity, I worked on many projects focused on how to make science a more diverse field. After a while, it became apparent to me that we were inviting diverse participants into the field of science, but not diversifying what it means to participate in science. This is a topic that has really sparked my curiosity.”
EH: Has your interest in diversifying what it means to participate in science influenced the program here?
KE: “This idea has informed a lot of our work here with residential programs, which focus on pointing out science and acknowledging their ability to do science, and many of our summer programs have also benefited from this research interest.”
Through multiple conversations Karla has shared her future goals for MFC with me: as our program continues to grow, her goal is to implement current scientific research being performed at the McCall Field Campus back into our K-12 curriculum. The McCall Field Campus has a wide variety of ongoing scientific research projects led by faculty, visiting Ph.D. students, and our current graduate students. She hopes that teaching science concepts through real scientific research will shed light on the scientific world and allow students to not only feel more included in science but also encourage a broader way of participating in science.
Karla’s scholarship activities have played a direct role in creating the unique experience students receive at the McCall Field Campus and her future goals for the program will strengthen it even further.
I hope you enjoyed!
~ Ellie
