More About Dr. Oliver
As director of WSU Spokane CityLab and an adjunct faculty member in the Science Mathematics Engineering Education Center at WSU Pullman, Sylvia Oliver knows how important it is for today’s students to be prepared for a future in which science and math play a leading role. But many students, especially those in high-needs schools, don’t have access to the necessary science and math education to prepare them for college, let alone for careers that require strong backgrounds in those areas.
That’s where CityLab comes in. “A multi-tiered program at the WSU Spokane campus, CityLab provides after-school math and science enrichment opportunities for students in low-income elementary and secondary schools and inquiry training for middle, high school, and community college teachers. The program also provides summer science camps and all-day biotechnology workshops for underprivileged students who wouldn’t otherwise have access to the technology, equipment, or educators who are trained to advance their futures in these critical areas.
Under Dr. Oliver’s direction, CityLab has received nearly $1 million in private, state, and federal support. The program has directly served hundreds of teachers, and has directly and indirectly benefited thousands of students throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Dr. Oliver has found that teaching students through an inquiry-based teaching model centered on creating “teachable moments,” or experiences that allow the students to participate in hands-on activities, is the best approach to their learning.
“We have developed certain models that we have found to be very successful and we can drop in pretty much any content into that teaching infrastructure. I call it the stealth approach to learning because the students are absorbing information without knowing it,” she adds jokingly.
It is a teaching method that didn’t come naturally to her at first and is a significant departure from the lecture-style teaching she originally used. “My mentor Howard Waterman, the co-founder of CityLab, recruited me in the mid-90s to give a talk to his high school students because I was a woman scientist. It was just a horrid experience—truly the worst experience I’ve ever had in my life,” Dr. Oliver says of that early high school visit. But Waterman kept encouraging her to come back, and eventually she learned to teach more effectively to the group by offering hands-on activities.
“I was doing breast cancer research and so I gave them information about cancer, but I was just a talking head. I was out of my element totally,” Dr. Oliver says, recalling her earliest classes. Eventually through repeat visits she realized that she needed to rile the class up a bit and so one year she brought in donated organs from people who died from cancer. “I became my own body exhibition and it became a teachable moment—it was great,” she says.
CityLab has received grant funding to create programs geared directly to elementary and secondary students. One after-school science program provided materials and models for teachers to teach science effectively to fourth through sixth graders.
“That was our target, because the kids have no place to go and they love to learn and they just love science and everything we do is hands-on—it’s all hands-on—no dittos,” Dr. Oliver says. Initially, the program stared in eight schools—it ended up in twenty-four.
“We were the second most popular program after midnight basketball. How can you possibly beat midnight basketball? So we were really thrilled to be able to do that,” she adds.
That model became the basis for funding on other grant projects, including a federal grant from the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) to implement a health careers program for upper elementary students in an after school and summer science model. It also was the model for a grant with the Spokane tribe of Indians and the Kalispells of Couer d’Alene, and for another health community foundation grant working with the Spokane Tribe of Indians.
“We took the context of physical activity and nutrition, and put that into our model of after school and summer camp activities for these kids on the reservations, and we’re still doing that,” Dr. Oliver notes.
The program is also developing relationships with the community college. “We’ve partnered with Spokane Community College’s biotechnology program and received a three-year $900,000 National Science Foundation grant to do professional development training in biotechnology for middle and high school teachers. (The program is one) that they can take back into their schools and excite kids about biotechnology and biotechnology careers,” Dr. Oliver says. Grants like this help to bring the CityLab’s program closer to co-founder Howard Waterman’s vision for the program—an emphasis on the creation of a professional development center for teachers focused on the inquiry-based teaching model.
A workshop Citylab sponsored last summer for 32 teachers and counselors to inform them about careers in biotechnology included an exercise to calculate the total impact the group had made on students, based on the number of years in teaching and on an approximation of how many student were reached during those years. “We came up with a total of 83,000 students reached. So, you see the impact. If we can provide effective teaching models and the needed resources, we can impact huge numbers of students,” Dr. Oliver says.
Counselors and teachers at the workshop agreed that biotechnology was one of the top five careers students needed to be counseled about. Yet, “We were the only program in the nation that included counselors. It was a very powerful experience for the counselors and so they are going to go back to the students and say ‘you have no idea what I learned’, Dr. Oliver says. As she sees it, that alone represents a huge change for students in high-needs schools.
“When you talk about potential careers in biotechnology these students don’t even have a clue what you’re talking about,” Dr. Oliver says. Through CityLab they will now have a vision of what possibilities the future may hold.
“Their world is going to look so different than what our world looks like right now, and they are going to have to prepare themselves to find the invisible doors,” she points out. “Every time they get more education, more science, all of a sudden more doors start opening for them. I tell them, you don’t have to walk through those doors, but you want to give yourself the opportunity to do so, and the best possible way to do that is to be prepared for rigorous math and science.”
While CityLab works to excite students, adult and child, in these critical areas, the students have also made an impression on Dr. Oliver. She recalls one young African-American girl who participated in a young women’s summer science camp who decided she wanted to become a scientist when Dr. Oliver let her wear a lab coat.
“I remember her so clearly—she was just a tiny diminutive thing. She tried the coat on, walked away, and then came back with this huge smile on her face and said, ‘I’m going to be a scientist someday.’ For those of us in the field we just love those stories,” she says.
But, Dr. Oliver also knows that reaching the greatest majority of students is most important. “If I have a young women’s summer science camp I reach 20 kids in the summer, but if I train a teacher—that teacher the following year reaches 300 students,” she says.
“So, where do we put our time? We’ll still do these young women’s summer science camps, but we will continue to put efforts on developing the programs that bring teachers in for professional development workshops. Because, if you can get them excited you have reached a phenomenal number of students.”
Lecture Details
More About Dr. Oliver
News Releases
WSU Spokane CityLab Partners with SCC, EWU, in Major Grant Initiative
Full Court Press ‘SPARKs’ Health Champions at WSU Spokane CityLab
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