Being an astronaut means being the ultimate crossover between pro athlete and pro mathlete. Before joining NASA’s Astronaut Corps, Mae Jemison studied chemical engineering at Stanford University, then got her medical degree from Cornell. As she prepared for the 1992 STS-47 shuttle mission, she had to train her body for both the extreme accelerations of launch and the zero gravity of spaceflight. On Wednesday, at the Beyond Innovation conference at Levi’s Stadium, Jemison talked about how the worlds of sports and science education interact.
The Beyond Innovation meeting was organized by Beyond Sport and the 49ers Foundation to bring together experts and educators from across the science, technology, engineering, and math education ecosystem.
“Kids are born interested in science. I don’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t interested in how the world works,” Jemison said. But the important part is what happens as children turn into adults, she explained, “whether you continue to go into it as a profession.”
As a kid growing up on the South Side of Chicago, Jemison watched the TV broadcasts of NASA’s Gemini and Apollo flights, and believed she would grow up to be an astronaut. She also wanted to be a fashion designer, an architect, and a dancer. She graduated high school in 1973, and enrolled at Stanford aged just 16. In 1992, as her career arced upwards, Jemison would become the first African American woman to reach space.
A big part of her success, and perhaps a lesson to reinforce for STEM educators, was dreaming big, and having someone to back those dreams. Her parents gave her the confidence that she could break whatever boundaries she wanted to, whether they were in science, life, or sports.
“I wanted to be a professional dancer,” Jemison said, “but I also played intramural football at Stanford—the only broken bone I ever got in life was playing intramural football.” Back then, she was one of two girls on each IM team. On that particular play, she went out long for a pass. As she connected with the ball she fractured a finger on her left hand. But, she said, “I caught it, and I held onto it, too.”
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For Jemison, science has always been more a way of looking at the world than a distinct and separate subject. “When I think about sports, I don’t think of the world as: Here’s science, here’s sport,” Jemison said. “It’s all interwoven. Science really is critical thinking. It’s assessing something.”
She resigned from NASA in 1993, feeling that she had other things to do, especially in her advocacy for science education. She founded the Dorothy Jemison Foundation, an organization whose goals include building science literacy, in honor of her late mother, an elementary school teacher. DJF’s main event is an international science camp called The Earth We Share. Jemison is also a board member of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, and, of course, a figurine in LEGO’s Women of NASA series.
“I think the major thing you have to do in education is to allow students and people to understand that it connects to their world,” Jemison said. “You don’t teach it as a sterile subject that’s in a book and it’s by rote memorization.”
The best way to learn and understand any activity, Jemison believes, is to try it. “I could look all day, and listen all day, to Shirley Bassey singing,” she said. “That has nothing to do with me being able to sing like Shirley Bassey. I can look all day at Steph Curry shooting three-pointers. That’s not going to do anything. I might know where the three-point line is, but it’s by doing it that makes the difference.”
That is essentially the approach taken by many educators who are using sports to teach STEM. Running around a football field can teach about forces and inertia. Attempting to build, and throw, a football from cardboard and tape can teach about aerodynamics. Many other activities start from the sports setting, and teach everything from photography, to electronics, to nutrition, to sustainability.
“What sports does is it teaches things the exact same way we as humans learn,” Jemison said. “We learn through our intellect. We learn through our physiology, our physical aspects. And we learn through our emotionality.”
More than anything, sports can engage people, focusing their attention in the here and now. And that focus can be directed into education. During her keynote speech at Beyond Innovation, Jemison counseled the attendees that “the best way to teach STEM is really hands on, hearts on, minds on.”