The idea of a mostly student-led course has been in CSD administrators’ minds for a while. Take EmpowerED seminar and Anti-Racism 101 or some more art-focused classes such as songwriting and music productions, for example, that originated directly from student interest. The latest student-led course? EmpowerEd STEM.

The EmpowerEd STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) course is designed to make the curriculum more meaningful and responsive to what students want to learn. This approach speaks more directly to the students’ interests in certain STEM topics.

EmpowerED STEM’s goals are to provoke students’ growth in critical reading, data analysis, problem-solving, teamwork, and self-advocacy.

According to Connie Wessner, CSD Administrator, one of the most important guiding questions of the course is, “Is there a way to combine all our skills from other classes and put them into one class?” The students design their own individual STEM-focused research projects. For the past several weeks, the class has been studying in groups how to grow the capacity of the course.

The EMpowerEd STEM program currently has thirteen students. The students love the class due to its easygoing nature, independent projects, and various public experiments that encourage deep thinking on how to problem solve in certain situations.

Already in its first year, the students have been treated to multiple guest speakers that come and talk about a range of issues in select topical areas such as a virologist from Davidson College that came and talked about COVID vaccines and how they were developed. Also, a behavioral psychologist came and talked about how people make decisions and why they make them. And most recently, a civic engineer came in and talked about how to design roads for pedestrian safety.

All of these speakers were there to teach the students about the wide range of STEM opportunities that they have access to and can reach if they really want to. Wessner hopes to have more guest speakers in the future.