Teaching STEM Students with Dawn Tamarkin

Welcome to Episode 110 of the Think UDL podcast: Teaching STEM Students with Dawn Tamarkin. Dr. Dawn Tamarkin is a Biology Professor and Chairperson in the Department of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at National University which has multiple campuses with its main campus in San Diego, California. Almost half of the enrolled students at National University are in the military and many are first generation college students with an average age of 33 years, and most students attend National University online. Dawn is also the founder and CEO of CellZone, Inc., a company that makes models and other manipulatives for science instructors to help students better understand and connect with learning complex science concepts. We will discuss how Dawn accidentally became a business owner through her own UDL teaching journey. In today’s conversation, Dawn will explain her theories about how STEM students learn a bit differently from, let’s say humanities students, because of the course material, how she started making models because of a particular need in her class, how using hand-held manipulatives has changed her teaching, and what shifts we need to make in our own teaching to help our students thrive. She also provides several free resources that she created with a National Science Foundation grant that outlines how to teach STEM courses using UDL. You’ll be able to find those resources on the ThinkUDL.org website.