“I learned that it is not about what I want (or my team or my project wants), it is about what the group wants and needs. I learned to be patient and to ask questions and restrain from giving solutions.”
Gabriela is the co-founder and program director of a community foundation that serves Ramnicu Valcea and Valcea county in South-central Romania. Passionate about science and inquisitive about how people learn, she manages a grantmaking program that encourages innovation in science education.
When Gabriela joined CA, she wanted to create a peer community of science teachers who could exchange knowledge and resources around innovative teaching methods. Over the next year, infused by the experiences and reflection space in CA, she grew the peer community through knowledge sharing workshops and explored how participants could engage in the leadership of the peer community.
Gabriela says that if STEM had been supported when she was a girl, she would have become a scientist. Instead, she has poured her abilities and energy into creating a community foundation in her native Valcea, Romania. A natural networker and connector, today Gabriela is the program manager and fundraiser at the community foundation.
Ramnicu Valcea is a city of about 100,000 inhabitants located in South-central Romania. Gabriela calls the city a hybrid of magnificent buildings and socialism-style architecture that is home to a variety of people: families, young people who enjoy cafes, busy entrepreneurs as well as people living in poverty.
As a foundation program manager, Gabriela has been able to channel her passion for science into the Științescu (Science Guy) program, which encourages innovative, easy-to-implement ideas that can make the sciences more attractive for primary and secondary school students. I believe that the kids we are helping now play with LEGO and learn programming or chemistry from experiments will stay in science and pursue their dreams. The science fairs, the science trips can be a gate opener for kids or youth that never left their area or their county. It is also important for me that more girls are encouraged to try science and technology as an option, to have this “sense of possibility” that is usually diminished in secondary school by phrases like “robots are for boys, girls learn languages or art”.
Gabriela administers grants to teachers for innovative science education projects in schools and libraries, provides them with information about events, courses and resources and organises bi-monthly meetings.
When she joined CA, about 40 people were involved and connected through a Whats app group and some were attending the bi-monthly meetings. Knowledge sharing was already happening between teachers organically. Gabriela wanted to leverage their love of science and emerging exchanges to create a peer learning community through which they could share their knowledge with others in the network in a more structured way. I hope that the sharing meetings will enable some of the participants to apply more innovative methods of teaching STEM disciplines. I also hope the meetings and the discussions will lead to collaboration between the members of the core group and the additional participants.
If these things happen, it will create a ripple effect that will help more teachers get creative when teaching their students STEM disciplines. For me, as a grant maker, this means more people interested in finding a grant or participating in events and projects. For me it is important that the community learns together and each participant has increased self-esteem.
From June to December 2023, there was a long preparation phase, with identification of the participants in the STEM community, organisation of a science fair and sharing of ideas and information online. Together with my team and the people from the core group we organised the Science Fair. There were around 400 participants at the fair and the energy was amazing. There was also a small celebration ceremony for the core group.
Gabriela’s perspective of her role changed during this period, too. She had initially intended to plan the sharing workshops herself and just invite teachers to come. However, through CA she came to see that if she wanted teachers to engage, they should be involved in formulating the purpose and objectives of the community and in organising the workshops. I will be the initiator and the facilitator at the beginning. Also, I will ask the participants from the core group to facilitate sharing meetings, to be the presenter when they are specialists on a topic. After 2-3 meetings, we will revise the objectives and invite a few other people in co-creating the planning and the process.
The first meeting of the core group was held in January 2024. There were around 15 attendees – those who had decided to contribute their knowledge and time to the creation of the community. Gabriela presented the idea of a peer learning community and led a discussion to find out what the participants would want it to be. However, this discussion did not yield many responses so she decided to try a more direct approach with 1:1 discussions with core group members.
Over the following months, Gabriela and the core group organised 8 workshops around 7 topics ranging from computational games and arts in STEAM to robotics and aerospace. Two of the participating teachers were especially involved in co-creating the workshops. One or more teachers acted as mentors at each workshop, sharing an innovative lesson with the workshop participants. Altogether there were 90 distinct participants and 179 participants, ranging from 17 to 65 years of age. More than a quarter attended more than 4 workshops. One participant said: “All I can say is that you can’t help but see something new, coming to such activities, and we as teachers have to learn something new every day to be prepared for our students.”
Gabriela was keen to engage teachers from outlying villages but found it challenging because of the distance and transportation issues. She asked core group members to bring new participants to each workshop: We called upon people to bring a friend, so that they feel welcome from the beginning, we covered transportation where it was needed. With some help from the core group, we managed to have in some meetings educators from rural areas, high school kids from a robotics team, parents, teachers from technological high schools. There are engineers, electricians, librarians, doctors in chemistry, physicists, primary and kindergarten teachers, Montessori teachers, principals, teenagers. The group and the perspectives are diverse.
Influenced by CA discussions about shared leadership, Gabriela sought to gradually engage core group members in leading the initiative so that it would become self-sustaining. From the beginning, she invited them to facilitate and co-organise workshops, but few were ready to commit to this level of engagement. My hopes are a bit higher that people can get involved in the organising part as well. There was also a second meeting of the core group in March, where they said they cannot take over the organisation of workshops, they can only lead them as mentors, promote them or other learning activities inside the group.
However, as the school year wound down, she saw indications that some teachers’ interest was strong enough to maintain their peer connections. At the moment, there are some hopes that the community will grow (or at least function) without my help. For example, a mentor from last year contacted a mentor from this year to create a workshop for her school. They are both from rural areas (a librarian doing a project with VR and a language teacher passionate about STEAM).
Nonetheless, at this point in the process, Gabriela was still the one initiating meetings: They are not happening without me organising them. I found a volunteer that keeps track of the resources and of the communication on e-mail with the group.
During the summer, some of the core group members volunteered in summer schools in rural communities (10 mentors, in 2 rural communities, working with 50 students for 5 days), where they put the learning from the workshops into practice and shared information with teachers in these areas.
In September 2024, the core group once again organised the science fair, which drew over 500 participants and 150 volunteers that exhibited more than 30 projects.
Considering the long-term effects, Gabriela noted: All the teachers that participated are now connected with each other and some created partnerships beyond our involvement. Some teachers from the smaller communities gained self-confidence and went from being beneficiaries to mentors for other schools / other communities, even in bigger towns or the city. We have a school week where children are engaged in diverse activities, so these teachers became the ones holding workshops for children in other schools. Additionally, at the end of year, Gabriela shared that some teachers have begun organising some collaborative activities without her initiative and she sees this as a very positive sign.
Gabriela has also shifted her thinking about who should lead in a community project. A project is not about your objectives, it’s about opening up the space – asking people, what would you like to happen with the resources we have? We are actively doing that with almost all our projects now. As the first step we sit with the people who are involved, and ask where would you like this to go?
Looking beyond the Science Guy project, she recognises that there is more work to be done to change people’s preconceptions about certain community members such as with people with disabilities, migrants, the elderly or Roma. I constantly think about entitlement. Sometimes I can do something about it, when it is my control and I can invite people and ask for their opinion on how to present things, I do it. But…we take a lot of decisions for people without asking them. In response, she is paying close attention to slowing down and listening to people more, and has become involved in another project to encourage public libraries in the city to create spaces and opportunities for migrants in the community.
The Science Guy peer community will continue to grow, as another cohort of teachers joins in 2025 and builds on the pool of existing participants.
Gabriela also has several other ideas to deepen teachers’ engagement. She would like to create a network of Science Guy program managers across Romania to support exchanges between teachers in different counties with similar interests. She is also trying to involve some of the local chemistry and physics teachers in NASA teaching programs to enable them to see new perspectives. Finally, Gabriela and the core team are trying to involve teachers in creating a course about STEAM methods that could be delivered at county (and possibly national level) with Ministry of Education approval.
Watch a video about Gabi’s project.
