 Hi, my name is Andrea Gehrig and I'm an instructor of astronomy at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. And I'm here to tell you about student-created scientist spotlights and how they can be used as a tool for open and critical pedagogy. So let's dive in. You can contact me at gehrigayatlaincc.edu and I hope that you can find my slides in our session link as well. Our learning goals for this session are first to articulate the core purpose of scientist spotlights. Second to describe how the student-created approach differs from traditional spotlight assignments and to see how traditional spotlight assignments can be supported by open creators such as ourselves and our students. And finally, I want to explain how student-created spotlights can provide the basis for classroom conversations on diversity. So what are scientist spotlights? These are assignments that are developed by Shinsuke et al. in 2016 in which students review the biographical and scientific work of scientists. These can be scientists from the past or from the present. They can be from different levels of the academic establishment from professors on down to graduate students. And all spotlight assignments ask students to review information about the scientists and then reflect on what they've learned. Specifically, they always ask this question. Based on what you know now, describe the types of people that do science. If possible, refer to specific scientists. This is intended to break away from the stereotypes that many students hold of scientists. Some of these stereotypes can be harmful and they're untrue. So some of the reasons that we choose to do spotlights in introductory classes are first to represent diversity in science. Second, spotlight assignments are shown to help support persistence in STEM, especially for students from historically marginalized backgrounds. And finally, spotlights can help students see science as more personally relevant and make science a more attractive option for them. So the first spotlight assignments are instructor curated, meaning that instructors do the work of choosing the biographical resources and the scientific resources that students review. This is an advantage because instructors can choose very specifically who they would like their students to focus on. On the other hand, it means that instructors have to do the work of choosing that information and can only share a few scientists per term. So the other instructors do at least one to three spotlight assignments per term. And while this does help to integrate themes of diversity and inclusion to classes, it does limit the number of scientists that we can focus on. This is from the scientist spotlights initiative. This is a website where instructors can submit their own spotlight materials so that other instructors can use them as well. And while this is a great resource, the astronomy category here only have nine spotlights at my most recent check, and not all of them aligned with the topics that I covered my course. So generally, instructors will want to choose scientists whose work is closely related to their course content. And if there is not enough resources on a particular topic that might not be possible. So I decided to try to provide these missing resources. I decided to have my students start creating spotlights of their own. These are some of the examples of student created spotlights from my class. I asked them to create one page flyers. And they always include an image of the scientists or an image that represents that scientists work. So to choose copyright, I teach them about the ins and outs of copyright basics. Most of them choose Creative Commons copyrights for their work. And as you can see, there are many more examples of scientists here than I would be able to provide in an instructor curated approach. So this helps students to see many more possible selves than I could possibly provide on my own. I've shown that student created spotlights are effective both for the authors of the spotlights and also for the readers, when those student created spotlights are then used as traditional materials for a traditional spotlight. This paper by a Ronda at all 2021 is really interesting dive into that question. Student created spotlights are also a great tool for open, critical and responsive pedagogy. What makes them open is that students are invited to submit their spotlights to the scientist spotlights initiative. What makes them part of critical pedagogy is that students are reflecting on diversity and inclusivity within STEM. So they're critically analyzing some of the inequities that exist within the field through these assignments. And finally, student created spotlights are an example of responsive pedagogy, because they can help to leverage students perspectives and assets, all the backgrounds that students bring into the classroom with them can be expressed through their spotlight assignments. I use student created spotlights in one additional way in my courses and that is as a discussion springboard. So I like to host a discussion on my forums around diversity and science. The question I ask is very simple. Do you think diversity is important in science. And I will see some students respond to this without using specific examples. For instance, I had a student say I don't think diversity is an important factor in science, we should be focused on the theories. And another student replied that they think having as many different minds working on a failure experiment will have greater or more accurate results. But this final student responded with specific evidence pulled from a specific spotlight assignment. They said, I think diversity and science is very important by working with people of different backgrounds it promotes creativity. I think there are so few women in this career choice because of the lack of role models, even Jill Tartar, who's a noted astronomer who works on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was the only woman in her engineering program. So the spotlight assignment provides the basis for students to use these specific examples to support their assertions on this important conversation topic. I know that I can imagine extending student created scientists fall lights but I would love to hear your ideas as well. Future students might for example build on the contributions of past students. Often since I have students work on spotlights about graduate students or postdoctoral scholars, it might be interesting years from now to go back and see what have they done since that time. Future students might design a public facing website containing all of our class spotlight materials, perhaps organized by topic. And I can imagine a K 12 science outreach activity based around these spotlight materials as well. And then finally, I think it would be interesting if our class decided to map the location of our spotlight scientists and then critically evaluate our collection for its inclusivity of global scientists. This is just another lens on critical pedagogy. So I hope that student created spotlights are something that you're interested in trying. If you do, I would love to hear about it contact me at garing a at lane cc.edu.