How can community engagement projects empower STEM students?

Suitable for 14-19-year olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom, STEM clubs and at home.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 geography, (environmental) physics and (atmospheric) chemistry.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• This resource introduces the work of Associate Professor Morewell Gasseller, an environmental physicist at Xavier University of Louisiana, USA. He leads a STEM education programme that equips undergraduate students with vital skills for careers in STEM and empowers local communities to tackle environmental problems, by building and deploying air pollution monitors.

• This resource also contains an interview with Morewell and some of his students. If your students have questions for Morewell, they can send them to him online. All they need to do is to go to the article online (see the Futurum link below), scroll down to the end and type in the question(s). Morewell will reply!

• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy) to prompt students to reflect on Morewell’s research and challenges them to create their own air pollution monitors.

This resource was first published on Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

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