STEM Unbarred: What the initiative is learning about hands-on science for incarcerated youth

AKAnagha Krishnan

Yeah, absolutely. So back in 2021, I had just started my PhD, so I had moved to Washington, D.C. to start a PhD in immunology, and I was having a great time. I was loving being in the lab, loving doing my PhD. But something just felt a little missing for me. I was feeling kind of isolated in the lab from like the greater community of DC, this community that I had moved into and really wanted to be a part of, and so I started looking for ways to kind of get involved extracurricularly outside of the lab in different volunteer organizations and different community groups, and I came across an organization called the Petey Greene Program, and the Petey Greene Program in Washington, D.C. was sending in volunteers into carceral facilities in the area to provide tutoring and educational services to individuals that were incarcerated, and I was like, that sounds like a community and a population of people that I previously had never had any experience with, had not interacted with. Let me just let me get involved. Let me see what this is all about, and I started volunteering at a youth carceral facility in Washington, D.C. the D.C. Youth Services Center, as a volunteer tutor, and so I would help students during their study hall with kind of whatever classwork they had in kind of a one-on-one setting. And at the time, I was one of a very limited number of volunteers who had a background in STEM, and so I often would work with students on their math and science homework, and we would, you know, get to talking about you know what they were learning in class, how they felt about class, and over again, I would hear, “Oh, science is my least favorite subject.

It’s so boring. I don’t really like it, and as a scientist, it made me really sad. I was like, “Why don’t you like your science classes? They should be so fun. And so we started talking more. I started sitting in on some science classes students had really got a sense of how students were learning science, and one of the things that really stood out to me was that students did not have the opportunity to do hands-on science labs, and I think if we think back on like what got me excited about science, it was those science labs. It was watching a science teacher light a Cheeto on fire. It was like launching a bottle rocket or having a volcano like that you made in class explode.

And these students weren’t getting those opportunities both while they were in the facility, but for many of them, even in their science classes before they were incarcerated, and so we started thinking about. I started thinking about well, how can we bring these experiences to students? And so we, I asked a crazy question. I said, Hey, can we maybe do a DNA extraction like in inside the facility we can extract DNA from strawberries, and to everyone’s surprise, the answer was yes. Let’s try it out, and so that was the first demonstration we did with students. Students had been learning about DNA in class; they’d learned about the structure of DNA, but they’d never held it in their hands, and so it was an incredibly rewarding kind of first experience to watch students who had asked questions like, “Well, how do I know DNA is real if it’s so small I can’t see it?

Suddenly holding it in their hands, being like, “Oh my gosh, like it looks like snot, and watching that joy and that first kind of hands-on experience with students was really exciting.

AKAnagha Krishnan

Yeah, I think that’s like a great question. So I think there’s a couple of layers. I think to this. So the first layer is that the way we teach science is very different. It’s not universal. It’s not like every you know middle school or high school student is receiving the same quality and the same types of science experiences. And I think sometimes it’s easy for us to kind of as scientists or as people who are excited about science to think back on our own experiences and feel like oh everyone must have you know done the same types of had the same types of scientific educational experiences that I did but the reality is that really is not the case so that would be I think the first layer and I think the second layer is that sometimes we think about science as the actual scientific facts, like the oh, like you know these are you know four base pairs, or you know these are like chemical bonds, or these are physical principles.

And on some level, science is those things. It is it those facts that you know we all take to be true, but I think the step beyond that, and what where science really gets exciting is the process of doing science, the process of discovery, the process of knowing something, the process of setting up an experiment to ask a question, and then answer it, and that I think, if you think about what do I want someone to take away from a science course, yes, on some level it’s the facts, but on another level it’s also the process of here’s how we discover these facts, here’s how we feel confident in these facts that we as a society like hold as scientific truth, and I think part of having a good science experience is being able to go through that process and experience that journey for yourself.

And I think if we don’t give students those opportunities on some level, we’re failing them. So,

AKAnagha Krishnan

We just wrapped up our third full academic year of demos this particular year. So we’ve been doing this for essentially three full years, and so in the time we’ve done a whole slew of different types of demos that span different scientific topics, ranging from you know, we have biology demos where students get to look at you know plant and animal cells under the microscope. We have ecology demos where students have looked at a dogfish that was dissected, and students can identify the different organs within the dogfish, like understand their functions. We have an ecology demo where students get to do a little like insect petting zoo, like understanding the role that different organisms play within an ecosystem.

We do like physics demos where students have like built their own like magnetic speaker that they can like play music on. We like launch bottle rockets. We make ice cream. We’ve even recently done some like engineering demonstrations where students like build contraptions. We’ve done math demos where students learn about the arithmetic and algebra behind card tricks. And so, really, we what has been really wonderful about the program is that we really get to explore the full latent space of science and all the different topics and fields that exist within the space, and really give students a taste of all the different types of the diversity of things that one can do within science as a whole.

The other thing I would add on to what Jade said is that one of the things I learned being at the facility is that you know unlike being in a traditional classroom setting where you really have the same students for an entire academic year and you can really build off of concepts that you’re teaching in previous lectures. For us, our students we see them on the average stay for a young person at the facility is between one and six months, and so throughout the course of an academic year, and even throughout the course of a semester, we see a constant flux of students coming in and out. and so, a question that really arose early in the program was, well, how do we teach science such that no one is coming in feeling like they’re behind just because they hadn’t attended the previous demo, and so we have a very modular structure where each demo we do is stand alone and doesn’t like feed in or doesn’t require previous knowledge from any other demos.

It doesn’t require previous knowledge in terms of like prerequisite courses, and that’s really important because our students in one classroom can come from very different educational backgrounds. They might be in different grade levels in school. They might have had different academic experiences, different gaps in their education, and so really, each demo you come into it with no prerequisite knowledge necessary, and you leave with this introduction to one of a variety of different scientific topics, and I think that’s really exciting.

AKAnagha Krishnan

I will say the only thing I will add on to that is so yeah, absolutely. Like when we first started the program, one of the big picture questions we asked students was, you know, how do you like to learn, and how have you learned before? And as Chiara mentioned, it’s definitely I like to learn hands on, but I’ve never learned science in a hands on way before. And something that has been cool to see change over the past couple of years is we’ll ask students you know have you done any have you had any hands on science experiences before and increasingly the answer is yes and when we ask them to elaborate on okay what was that experience the experience will have been a previous STEM Unbarred demo which I think is really exciting to see because it really tells us that for a lot of the students that we work with, this STEM Unbarred experience that they have is the very first time they’re having a hands-on science experience, and it’s really setting the stage for building that science identity that Chiara was talking about.

AKAnagha Krishnan

Yeah, I was gonna say totally agree with everything Jade has said. I will say, being in the instructor capacity, you know, when students tell me nice things, I’m like, are you telling me nice things? Because I’m the one teaching you. So it’s validating to hear that you know they’re telling people in an observational capacity as well. I was gonna say so when we started the program, one of the first goals, taking kind of a step back beyond goals of these knowledge gains, was just getting students excited about their science class, and I think that’s something that perhaps for many of the people in the audience who come from the science background, it’s something that’s easy to take for granted.

I think you know, like if you think about you know your average you know advanced high school science class, everyone in that science class is in that class because they want to be, and they’re in that class because they’re excited already about science, and the students we work with, some of them, all of them, really, are so brilliant. They pick up knowledge so quickly. It doesn’t surprise me that you know those scores go up. One of the first challenges we had with students was just getting them excited, getting them to want to engage in the course material, and so one of the very first goals and things we wanted to measure was just our students engaged in their science class.

Are they coming in like wanting to fully participate in the day’s activities? And that was something that I think has been so exciting to see, both in terms of data, both in terms of you know we quantum. The number of students who either you know fully participate in every aspect of the demo, partially participate in the demo, or you know tell us hey, like today’s not the day for this. Like I don’t want to participate in this activity, and we have seen those numbers go up tremendously. The number of students who want to fully engage in our court in whatever where the demo is that particular day, and then also I think anecdotally to kind of go from like you know us bringing stuff in and student like you know students are you know tired like don’t want to participate to now we like come in students recognize me they’re like what are we doing today and I think anecdotally being able to see that being able to have students at the end of a demo tell me like this was my favorite science class I’ve ever had, which we hear you know a little bit more after ice cream, but like after a lot of our demos.

Again, the ice cream demo is a demo we do to teach students chemistry through making ice cream, not just eating ice cream, but I think being able to see that complete 180 and how students feel about their science courses is really so heartwarming to see.

AKAnagha Krishnan

Yeah, what I would add to what Chiara said is, so beyond having this sort of data to for the data’s sake and for the sake of validating our program, another I think really important aspect of collecting. This longitudinal outcomes data is for the purpose of building more programs to support students longitudinally, and I think one challenge we have now is I think at the beginning Chiara talked a little bit about you know there’s many challenges within the carceral space, but one opportunity within the carceral space is this opportunity to intervene in a positive capacity, and I think we’ve done that through STEM Unbarred. I hope the others on the panel agree.

But I think one of the things we want to do is how do we continue that intervention? How do we take students who are now excited about science, and when they are you know re-entering society, how do we continue to provide them with opportunities to push that passion for science and continue to build on it? And collecting some of that longitudinal data, I think, would really help inform some of these like reentry programs and ways for us to help maintain that interest and continue to push forward that interest in science. The other thing I was going to say, I think we didn’t fully touch on this, but the last aspect that we really try to measure in our program is this aspect of connecting science to the real world.

We really want students to step away from the demos, really understanding that science isn’t just something that you do in the classroom. It’s not just something you do in a lab, and it’s just done by you know people in white coats with like petri dishes. No, like science is something that touches every aspect of your daily lived life, and we really want students to come away with a sense of that, and so we design our demos very like with that in mind. And so a lot of our demos are built around student interests, built around bridging science with other topics. So as an example, I talked a little bit about a demonstration we designed to teach students about the math behind certain card tricks.

That demonstration was co-designed with students, and so what actually happened is, you know, we had students, you know, who liked to, you know, get to know volunteers and hang out with them. And so students had had come up to volunteers and said, “Hey, do you want to see this card trick? I know how to do. And volunteers, you know, when we saw that card trick, one of the volunteers was like, “Hey, do you know like there’s math behind that card trick? And that actually led to the development of this like math focused demo that was connected to an interest that students had, and so that is kind of one example of us bridging these demos like into the real world and in students’ interests, and we want to be able to continue that.

You know, when students like leave the facility, like really show them that you know science is a part of your everyday life, no matter what you choose to pursue as a career. Science will touch it in some capacity, and a lot of the kind of work we’re doing in terms of expansion is really focused on that aspect of our goals, that aspect of the program.

AKAnagha Krishnan

In addition to kind of expanding kind of our program geographically, so to other sites, the other kind of thing that’s in the works for us is topical expansion. So expanding again, as I talked about, kind of expanding the way our curriculum is designed to focus on really practical, real world applications of science. And so one of the ways that we have been doing that, and this was actually based on student feedback, like to demos, is actually taking some of our biology demos and expanding them to focus on health literacy topics and health topics that affect students. And so this might be things like taking our genetics demo and adding a component to it that focuses on you know genetic underpinnings of disease, a topic that students have asked about at the end of the genetics demo, and part of what we’re doing to design that you know appropriately is we’re working with clinicians and residents and individuals at Johns Hopkins like School of Medicine to really kind of build out some of the scientific concepts that we have into their kind of health, like practical health applications of those topics, and so that will be one of the things we’re actually piloting for a few of our demos this fall, and we’re very excited about that.

And then also, I think I want to point out that as Chiara mentioned, the expansion that we do is a very thoughtful one. We really believe that you know STEM Unbarred is not a one size fits all program, and so when we think about expanding to new facilities, we do so you know very thoughtfully and very carefully. We spend a lot of time really understanding the unique needs of students at each facility because the needs of students at each facility are very different. I think Chiara mentioned, you know, diversion spaces and reentry spaces. The needs, the capabilities, like the capacity, all of that is different at each of those facilities.

And so we really do the work. Petey Greene really does the work to make sure that all of those, the needs, the goals, the differences are all really well understood before we deploy a program. And even though we have this, you know, very well packaged kind of system that is STEM Unbarred, it’s not a rigid system. It’s one that we that is flexible to meet the needs. Of whichever students and whoever we serve,

AKAnagha Krishnan

Yeah, so I think Jade really hit it on the head. So every volunteer that volunteers with us with STEM Unbarred has a bachelor’s degree in some STEM field, and it can be as diverse as you know public health to math to chemistry, like to psychology, etc. And the vast majority of our volunteers are, you know, actively have a career in a STEM field. So we have a lot of kind of graduate students, postdocs, industry. We have a few like industry professionals, and again across a huge diversity of STEM fields. And I think one of the really cool things about that is I always say our best demonstrations that we do have been designed by volunteers that are not me and not on the Petey Greene team.

It’s often someone who says, “Hey, like I have a background in immunology, and I want to design this demonstration to teach students about antibody-antigen interactions. Can I do that? And we say, “Absolutely! Like, tell us what you came up with, and then you know those demos go through kind of the same process that all of our demos do in terms of constructing a lesson plan, building learning objectives, developing these surveys, and then they get deployed. And I’m always amazed at just how amazing they are because there are these demonstrations that have been dreamed up by subject experts, like for our students, and that I mean, you can’t get any better than that.

I think so.

AKAnagha Krishnan

Yeah, I think in the past we’ve talked a lot about building funder practitioner university partnerships, and so I wanted to talk. I wanted to expand. I think Chiara did a really wonderful job, kind of highlighting, like what our needs are on the capital side. But in terms of kind of building partnerships, I think what we would really love to see is that three way partnership where we really. Are kind of the practitioner on the ground, like running this program, modifying the program like based on what the needs are. And I think on the university side, I mean, again, like a lot of our volunteer recruitment happens from universities and kind of academic organizations.

We also in the past have used our relationship with academia to help kind of design surveys and collect data in the most effective manner, and we want to kind of continue those partnerships to as especially as we think about collecting this longitudinal data. We want to make sure we’re collecting data as effectively and as accurately as possible, and then I think Chiara talked a lot about on the funder side, really kind of having the financial means to like put all of these like big ideas into practice because these big ideas like do need to be in practice, and then I think, kind of thinking about longitudinal past, like tracking and continuing longitudinal development of students.

Like, if you run a science program out there, which I imagine many of our listeners do, or are affiliated with a science education program, and you would like a referral. Like we want programs that we can refer students to, and say, “Are you really excited about you know this physics demo? Like here’s this amazing organization that does physics demos every week or every month. Like out in the community, when you know re-enter the community, go. Here’s who you should like get in touch with. We would love, I think, it would be such a boon for our students for us to be able to make those referrals for them.

AKAnagha Krishnan

Yeah. So I think maybe kind of circling back. So at the very beginning of our conversation, you talked about how we had had a similar conversation, the two of us and Hannah about a year and a half ago, and I kind of look back and I said what’s changed, and I think one of the things we really worked on in the last year and a half was the depth of our programming was really like how can we turn STEM Unbarred into the best version of itself, and I think we really did that in the last year and a half. We really codified our demos.

We iterated on our demos based on feedback we got from students and volunteers. We iterated our demos based on kind of logistical hurdles that we have. So now we have this, we have this program. We have you know my baby that’s like the best version of itself. And what do you want to do with your baby when you have the best version of yourself? You want to show it to the whole world. You really want to expand and have that breadth. You want to have the breadth of let’s bring STEM Unbarred like to any facility that wants it and every facility that needs it and so I think Jade and Chiara really I think hit the mark like I hope in two years when we have this conversation or not even hope I intend that in two years when we have this conversation we’re telling you here’s what STEM Unbarred looks like in Philly.

Here’s what STEM Unbarred looks like in Massachusetts. Here’s what STEM Unbarred looks like on the West Coast at a facility that you know built it from the ground up based on our curriculum and the lessons that we learned. I think that would be, yeah, the dream is you know all these iterations of STEM Unbarred in these unique facilities that really then allow us to take the data we feel so confident about at in DC at the Youth Services Center and say here’s what that here’s how that data generalizes to youth carceral facilities across the country.

AKAnagha Krishnan

Thank you.