Wright Center for Science Education
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wright Center for Innovative Science Education is a science education center housed at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, as part of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Created in 1992 to honor the entrepreneur H. Dudley Wright, the Center is funded by the Fondation Wright de Geneve, Switzerland, and currently directed by Eric J. Chaisson since its founding. It stresses innovation and dissemination in science education, articulated in the following mission statement:
The Wright Center is dedicated to the creation and sharing of novel instructional techniques and interdisciplinary resources for pre-college teachers. Through its fellowships, workshops, seminars, and a variety of public-outreach activities, the Center provides leadership in the training and retraining of science teachers to use innovative methods to stimulate young minds. [1]
To this end, the Center’s goals are fivefold:
- to improve the teaching of science at the pre-college level
- to encourage young people to pursue science as a career
- to explore innovative methods to communicate natural science
- to test and disseminate novel educational products and activities
- to share the excitement and wonders of science with the general public.
The Wright Center, including its Teacher Resource Room and Science Visualization Lab, are headquartered within Tufts’ Science & Technology Center.
The heart of the Wright Center is its fellowship program. Each year, teachers of natural science are chosen through open competition to spend sabbatical time (up to a full year) at the Wright Center. These are "master teachers" who have demonstrated expertise and commitment to science teaching at the elementary, middle, or secondary-school level. The fellows work individually and collectively to create novel educational products, curriculum modules, hands-on activities, and summer workshops.
Full-time and part-time Wright Fellows, along with education graduate students from Tufts, reside at the Wright Center. Fellows have come from most states of the U.S., as well from school systems in Europe, Africa and Asia. Each fellow benefits from time in residence within a fast-paced university community, and each gives much back to other pre-college teachers who attend workshops and seminars on such diverse topics as biology and ethics, satellite imaging, practical chemistry, earth and environmental studies, marine biology, relativity physics, space science, aerospace engineering, art and general science, as well as use of the Internet and world wide web in the classroom.
From the Wright Center web site:
The Wright Center seeks not to develop a whole new science curriculum—the elusive perfect curriculum that is probably unfeasible. Rather, it honors the diverse interests and objectives of each year's faculty and fellows, thereby creating a wide spectrum of educational programs, products, and activities, among numerous teaching aids and technological tools designed to help improve the science literacy of the next generation.[2]
