Showcasing inspirational people in your content area

I always find it funny that in a middle school you can instantly tell who was trained as an elementary school teacher and who was trained at the secondary level. The key? Bulletin boards.

Elementary teachers always have the greatest, most creative bulletin boards that are helpful, inspiring, and beautiful. Secondary teachers, like myself, have bulletin boards that consist mostly of lunch menus, extracurricular schedules, or displays of student work.

So if you, like me, are constantly wanting ways to utilize your bulletin boards as more than just dismal areas of sadness and creativity-killing, here is one of my favorites to help cure that: a showcase. Or, in my case, a Scientist Showcase. Gotta love that alliteration.

A showcase is a way to highlight people who have made significant contributions, are focusing on incredible feats of talent or discovery, or have an inspirational story related to your content area.

These should NOT be people traditionally found in textbooks that are constantly taught in schools. I know people like Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Isaac Newton are pillars in the community of science, but they already have their spotlight in the classroom. They have their showcase in millions of textbooks published in the area of science.

Find people who are not usually given the spotlight in textbooks. You can even have students do the legwork and have them be in charge of the research! Offer it as extra credit, an introduction to a unit assignment, or just a fun study hall time killer option.

It is important to find people who represent the people you teach. Find people of color, LGBTQ+ people, people of religions other than Christianity, any women, or people who are currently doing awesome things, not just those in the past. My first Scientist Showcase I did was in the middle of our astronomy unit, and I had just read about an awesome astrophysicist named Jedidah Isler. I had her picture, shown below, posted right in the middle of my showcase board. One of my African American students remarked to a fellow student that she had "never seen anyone who looked like her" in a science class before. How powerful is that?!

Like I said, bulletin boards are not my forte. I'm working on it...

We live in an age of people breaking down barriers to do extraordinary things never accomplished by someone like them before. Why should we not mirror that in our own classrooms? We always talk about wanting to help students be whoever they want to be, but how often do we give examples of people to look up to who are like them?

I highly encourage you to start finding people in your content area who are breaking down barriers and displaying them and their work proudly in your classroom. Give students the opportunity to explore and find their own examples of who inspires them in your content area. We all need people who inspire us to look up to. We need to show our students that their dreams truly are possible.

Now, I can't do all of the legwork for you, but if you're awesome enough to be a science teacher, below are just a few of my favorites to get you started. Some of them are already famous and have more notoriety, but they are not commonly featured in textbooks so I say it counts.

1. I highly recommend you start with anyone featured in the book, Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World by Rachel Ignotofsky, a beautiful book featuring artful depictions of women scientists that you should definitely have in your classroom, plus there's posters you can get, too!

2. Jedidah Isler - African American astrophysicist who explores blazars, quasars, and supermassive black holes, plus she has a great TED talk you can show to students

3. Jonas Salk - one of my favorite scientists because he developed the vaccination for polio but gave up the millions of dollars he could have earned by refusing to patent it so that it would be available for everyone to receive

4. Katherine Johnson - famously featured in the book and subsequent movie, Hidden Figures, as one of the women who calculated the flight path for the first manned lunar mission

5. Alan Turing - created the Turing Test for artificial intelligence which is still in use today, cracked the German's enigma machine in WW2, and came out as gay in the 1950s when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain; featured in the film The Imitation Game

Be sure to comment below with some of your favorites from your content area! I'm always looking for more to add to my list, too. Perhaps one day I'll be able to put together a more comprehensive list across multiple content areas with enough feedback!