Jana Bouwma-Gearhart
Jana Bouwma-Gearhart
Dr. Jana Bouwma-Gearhart received her doctorate in Curriculum & Instruction (2008) and her master’s in Science Education (2003) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Bouwma-Gearhart also served at UW-Madison as a researcher for the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research (WCER), for which she studied the effects of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) and its various teaching professional development programs on STEM departments’ graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty. Afterwards, she spent four years as an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky where she was co-director of both the STEM Innovation Laboratory and the STEM Teacher Training Unit of the Partnership Institute for Mathematics and Science Education Reform, both with intention to bring academics across disciplines to improve STEM education and research K-20. Her recent research, broadly speaking, concerns organizational change concerning STEM education at research universities. She has served as the lead researcher on a Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) project attempting to documenting postsecondary educators’ working across disciplinary boundaries towards improving postsecondary STEM education, often facilitated by university-based endeavors concerning STEM education. Dr. Bouwma-Gearhart’s most recently awarded NSF-Transforming Undergraduate Education In STEM grant will investigate how STEM faculty make pedagogical decisions in response to relevant data and their professional realities, and how their cognition is enacted and responded to by students in their classrooms. Dr. Bouwma-Gearhart is a former secondary school teacher and has taught biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, biotechnology, and criminalistics in the United States, the United Kingdom, Costa Rica, and Japan. Dr. Bouwma-Gearhart is the author of over twenty published peer-reviewed publications and research reports.
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