CCCE Associate Director for Academic Civic Engagement and Scholarship, Emily Seru spent some time at the end of the fall 2024 term reflecting with Carleton Professor of Physics Marty Baylor about the ACE components of her Physics course Classical and Quantum Optics. Marty has been teaching this course since 2010, adding the ACE component in 2014, for a total of five iterations. In this interview she reflects on the importance of doing outreach well, the ways she scaffolds her ACE project, and what students and community partners have said over the years about the impact of the ACE project.
Emily Seru: Why and when did you decide to make Academic Civic Engagement (ACE) a part of your Physics Quantum Optics course?
Marty Baylor: Part of my motivation for this ACE course comes from teaching middle and high school and realizing the importance of connecting what you’re doing in the classroom to what happens in the real world – getting kids excited about physics. It also comes from my experience as a physicist, noticing everyone is intimidated by physics because they assume it is math. I want to shift people’s perspectives on that. As a first-generation college student from a non-academic background, the connection between how science in classes related to me and the real world was pretty nebulous.
I started at Carleton in 2010 and created this ACE course in 2014. I was at Walgreens in Northfield, and I bumped into a woman who was an elementary school teacher. I talked about liking to make physics accessible. She said: “Oh, it’s great that you can make physics relate to the real world!” I think that comment crystallized this idea that scientists need to do better at communicating physics to things people care about outside of an academic context. I want to prepare my students to be able to communicate with nonphysicists about how physics relates to what they might be interested in and care about in a way that they understand. I want to help students realize how much technical physics jargon they have learned at Carleton. Although that is an important part of developing as a physics major, the other piece is to recognize that other people don’t have that physics knowledge, but can still understand. It’s our job as physicists to translate the jargon since we’re the ones who have that technical understanding.
ES: I’ve noticed that the design of the ACE component allows for a lot of student choice?
MB: The ACE project is a way of getting the students to choose a topic that is interesting to them, that’s going to push them, while they are learning from me the base level of optics with a more robust theory behind it. The ACE component of working with a community partner to develop the translation and outreach is possible because students have the space within the classroom assignments and work. I ask the students to practice what they are learning in class and use the extra time that allows them to build into the ACE component of the course.
ES: How is the ACE assignment structured?
MB: The ACE project is called their “Photonics Project”, and they have a peer component and a nonpeer component. The peer component has them choose a topic within Applied Optics that is of interest to them, and they have to learn about it. They write an introduction and background paper that serves as the reading for the presentation to their peers at a peer-appropriate technical level. Ideally, the students assess their peers’ learning with learning objectives.
For the nonpeer presentation, they choose an aspect of optics to present to a non-technical audience. Depending on the knowledge level of that audience, the topic can be more or less tightly connected to the topic that they’ve chosen for their peers. For example: if a student chooses optical coherence tomography and the audience is ophthalmologists, they can talk directly about that specific application, just not in the technical terms that they would for their peers. If their audience is a group of fifth graders, then they might be talking about how a microscope works, or they might be talking about how mirrors work. So they have a choice in how much they want to challenge themselves in the choice of the technical knowledge and maturity of the audience.
ES: What kinds of things have you seen students learn from this project?
MB: I think outreach is important, but I think that doing outreach well is even more important. Part of the way that you do outreach well is to value the knowledge of your community partner – your non-peer audience – and respect their time and what they want to get out of the presentation. I think to do outreach well, you have to have learning objectives for the people that you’re speaking to that are measurable, and that help focus your presentation. You need some way to assess whether or not you are successful in doing that, or whether it will be a waste of everybody’s time. We spend the time in class learning about all of those different aspects of outreach and community engagement in addition to making sure that the presentation is appropriate. Students do a lot of the work meeting with the community partner without me. I’m in the background guiding them. I’m CCed on emails, and they send me copies of emails before they send them out. They learn a lot about what to do when a community partner takes longer than they thought to get back to them and how to negotiate that. Since I’m the one who sets the deadline they want to make sure that they’re on track. I have the students go to where they are going to present to their nonpeer audience and observe them and interact with them in their natural state. That might mean going and observing a fifth-grade class because my students do not know what it’s like to teach fifth graders. They have ideas of what they might do, and then they go and they observe the teacher and say, Oh, what I was going to do was never going to work. That was going to be a bad idea. Students then tell me “I’m glad that I met with the teacher. I’m glad that I saw the class, and because I saw the class, I then ran my materials by the teacher to make sure that it was appropriate”. So they gain a bit of humility in learning how to work with different audiences and what they value. They also came back saying, “Wow, I didn’t think I could do that, and I did that!” A lot of them talked about their organizational skills and how the scaffolding showed them how much work it takes to make a successful project like this.
ES: Do you find that the act of having to teach other people and different kinds of audiences helps reinforce the content in the course?
MB: Most of them are going into the school systems to some extent, whether it’s an after-school program or during class time for the students. They’re trying different things out on me. I’ll ask: “Okay, so can you explain that to me without using this jargon, this jargon, this jargon, and this jargon?” A similar thing happened when the students sent their handouts to the fifth-grade teachers and got feedback from them. They realize: “Oh, okay, this isn’t clear. How can I make this clearer?” To make it clear, you have to understand it on a deeper level.
ES: What feedback have you gotten from your community partners over the years?
Some community partners, particularly, a lot of the schools, are over the moon that college students are coming into the classroom. They’re role models for the kids. They’re showing them they might be able to do this, and science is cool, and that sort of thing. My students did a presentation to the police department twice about optical cloaking, which is redirecting the light so that you are hiding something kind of like Harry Potter and the invisibility cloak. After the first presentation, I ran into the police chief, and he said: “Yeah, we’re still talking about that presentation!” It was so cool. Depending on the student and how well they understand what the community partner needs, I see community partner feedback range from: 1. Wow, this is cool, and I’m looking forward to using this new information, to 2. This was cool, but I don’t quite see how I can use it. The range reflects how well students connect and spend time with their community partners listening and understanding their audience.
For me, this assignment is helping students understand what it means to be a professional in the field more broadly. As a physicist, I don’t just sit around with content, knowledge, and skills. I’m active in a broader physics community, and I bring my interests and passions to that broader physics community. I connect with sub-communities that also have similar values and interests that I do. So for example, within the physics community, there is JNPIR. They give talks about how they do physics outreach in the community and how they measure the impact of that work. Now, if my students decide to go into physics, they know that there’s a community to support them to do that. Being a physicist is more than just what I teach and the research that I do, I have a passion for outreach, and I can bring that outreach into my classes. Hopefully, they’ve learned some skills, even if they don’t specifically want to do outreach. I want them to understand that their work as a professional in their field is bigger than the little job that they sit and do at their desk. To me, it’s more important to help students develop authentic connections between their interests and values. As a professional, I try and model those interests and values and how they can be fulfilling.
ES: What has been most challenging about this project?
When I first started doing this project, I had enrollments of eight to ten students, and managing each student doing an individual project with an individual community partner was manageable. Now that I have enrollments on the order of 20 students, I’ve had to think about how to manage individual accountability, but not have individual projects. I did once try to have 20 community partners, and I nearly died! Now I have students work in groups that support accountability with each other, while also meeting the needs of the project and being able to assess each student individually. If I have four students who are presenting at the elementary school, each of them does their presentation, and each of them has their assessment questions and tools, like using a common Kahoot game to ask their assessment questions. So they each have an individual component, even though they’re working for the same community partner. I talk with them about how they can each be accountable in the group function and not just rely on one person to manage all of the aspects of the group.
I’m a highly structured person, and the project was and always has been highly scaffolded, but some pieces have been added. For example, when I started, I did not have the students meet with the community partner, or they met with the community partner, but they did not observe their audience, or they didn’t see the space where they were presenting. These are things that I now require that they do ahead of time so that they can see all the options for where you’re presenting and the available technology. I don’t want them showing up and not knowing they should have brought their computer and projector. I’ve also added, based on the community partner feedback, an evaluation form for the community partner on the student’s work. Those get mailed or scanned and emailed directly to me, so the students hand the community partner a self-addressed envelope that comes back to me so that I can improve the ACE part of the project each year.
ES: What advice do you have for other Carleton faculty wanting to build an ACE component to their course?
MB: I think it has to be something that you’re passionate about and committed to. It’s not going to go exactly right the first time, so how will you build in feedback mechanisms so that you can learn and improve? If it’s something that you’re just doing because you feel like you need to do it, it’s going to be hard to overcome those challenges or do right by the community partner relationships. I’ve included the ACE component five times now, and I have always iterated something that I learned from the various feedback mechanisms, whether it’s from the reflection essays of the students, the form that I get back from the community partners, or the course evaluations that I get from students. Certainly working with the CCCE has been important in connecting with appropriate community partners that understand what we’re trying to do. There have been years where the community partners just completely fell through, and I don’t want the students to know that I have a backup plan, but I do have one! I want them to do their due diligence in trying to make this work, but I also don’t want it to be so overwhelming and stressful. Every year when I’m preparing for this course, I ask myself “Do I want to do this again?” And each year so far I answer: “Yes, yes, I do want to do this again.” I have to have a reason why it is pedagogically important for the students, and why I value doing it, and I need to do that thinking about nine months in advance.
