This week team STARRS continued the journey to creating lessons that we hope teachers and students could use in San Pedro. 

Incorporating Anti-Racist Education

We have adapted some of the lessons developed last week to include culturally sensitive anti-racist education. Shannon Audley, a Smith College professor of Education & Child Study, provided the team with resources on how to appropriately include this in our exercises. Anti-racism is the practice of recognizing, challenging, and changing the values, structures, and behaviors that perpetuate systemic racism (Ontario Anti-Racism Secretariat). We hope to include this in our lessons while taking an intersectional approach, where we not only consider ethnicity, but also the other multitudes and intersections of identities. We hope that we can design lessons that are STEM-focused and that recognize power imbalances among communities while empowering students. 

Coral Ed Alum Panels

We wanted to gain insight into how teachers are connecting with students virtually and how we should adapt our lessons to be accessible to our campers. To accomplish this, throughout the week we were able to interview past Coral-Ed members on their experience in San Pedro and their more recent teaching experiences. The five Coral-Ed alumni, all of whom have gone on to pursue educational career fields after their Smith College education,  shared their experience with the transition into online learning and how to engage virtually with campers.

Video Resources

We have created a list of engaging educational videos and websites for teachers or students to access. We hope that these resources may also be helpful for future Coral-Ed teams when developing their lesson plans for camp.

Plan for Next Week

The goal for next week is to complete a daily plan for the youth and reef camp as well as to conduct another interview with a Coral- Ed alumni. 

– Genesis Canizales & Team STARRS