Blog Series from the Xplorlabs Educator Fellowship: A Year of Sustainability and Safety Science in Review

Celebrating the Completed Projects of 2024-25 Xplorlabs Educator Fellows

The final group of Distributed Xplorlabs Fellows is composed of educators who are incredibly familiar with Xplorlabs resources. Each of these Fellows applied for the Fellowship program because they’d gotten a taste of Xplorlabs in the past – and couldn’t turn down the chance to bring action-oriented safety science into their classrooms!

Nancy Schunke

Nancy Schunke, a passionate Southern educator for high school students in the Frenship Independent School District, specializes in STEM education with an emphasis on engineering and physical sciences. She applied to become an Xplorlabs Educator Fellow after learning about the ULRI-sponsored platform at the 2023 Conference for the Advancement of Science Teaching, hosted by the Science Teachers Association of Texas. At the conference, Schunke participated in several Xplorlabs workshops, where she quickly identified meaningful connections to both her content area and her extracurricular robotics club.

As a part of the second Xplorlabs Educator Fellowship cohort, Schunke utilized Xplorlabs resources to foster a stronger culture of awareness and safety in her competitive robotics club. She also discovered that many of her students, particularly young women, are interested in engineering but not robotics; her Xplorlabs-based lessons provided a unique entry point for this group, positioning more of her students to see themselves as scientists and engineers.

Throughout the program, Schunke was also thoroughly inspired by the Imagining Preferred Futures component of Action-Oriented Pedagogies (AOPs), a pedagogical framework that couples student learning with real-world community action. When Imagining Preferred Futures, students are invited to consider what type of future they would like to live in – and how they might help create it. Schunke acknowledges that educators are often tasked with meeting students where they are, but less frequently have the opportunity to ask them where they want to be. Watching her students take ownership of their futures was an exciting and empowering experience for Schunke, who has started to help them lay the groundwork for E-waste solutions in their communities.

Nancy Schunke was an ambitious member of the 2024-25 Xplorlabs Educator Fellowship cohort, and she will be missed next year! We look forward to hearing about more of her work as she shares her experiences on her school campus, within the robotics community, and through informal science education programs in the upcoming school year!

Ann-Margaret Somers

Ann-Margaret Somers, an enthusiastic leading educator for eighth graders in Georgia’s Cherokee County School District, specializes in physical science subject matter. She became an Xplorlabs Educator Fellow because she has had the pleasure of watching other teachers at her school thrive in collaboration with the local Xplorlabs team and their affiliated community partners. When the opportunity arose for her to join in on the action, she just couldn’t refuse!

As a part of the second Xplorlabs Educator Fellowship this school year (24/25), Somers was immediately committed to Xplorlabs.org’s The Science of Fire Safety. As a house fire survivor herself, Somers’s connection to that pathway’s content is personal and enduring. She began incorporating the pathway into her classroom as opportunities arose throughout the year and explicitly as part of a unit on energy and heat. Starting with her own childhood story, she hooked her students right away by illustrating how important fire safety technology can be. With her guidance, they were then given time to explore different resources within the pathway, learning how quickly fire can spread, watching comparative burn videos, and getting hands on with real sprinkler heads. Despite the fact that Somers introduced this new unit just days before a school break, her students were engaged and excited to learn more. When they returned from holiday, they dug deeper into fire sprinkler design and how the concepts of fire safety relate to physical science concepts like conduction, convection, and radiation.

Ann-Margaret Somers was an excellent addition to the Xplorlabs Educator Fellowship’s 2024-25 cohort! As a leader in her school’s science department and in her school district, she is constantly in pursuit of new ideas, strategies, and resources that she can share with fellow educators. She believes that Xplorlabs resources are a natural fit for many curricula, and she’s already on the lookout for more lessons that she can use to model those connections. We look forward to seeing the results of her unwavering dedication to leveraging real-world events in the classroom – soon to include even more safety science phenomena!

Terri Sowa-Imbo

Terri Sowa-Imbo, an Illinois educator in the Evanston Township High School District, specializes in teaching the physical sciences. As an educator, she is interested in exploring novel ways to utilize current and relevant content that requires thought, communication, and collaboration from her students. She became an Xplorlabs Educator Fellow after attending two Xplorlabs Workshops in her community, where she found herself immediately engaged in the provided materials and the modeled inquiry processes.

As a part of the Xplorlabs Educator Fellowship (2024-25), Sowa-Imbo’s goal for the school year was that her students would walk away with an understanding of how fire works, how it connects to their local community and the larger Chicagoland area, and how they can keep themselves safe from fire danger. She saw the path to achieving this goal as the intentional prioritization of student-driven exploration and sensemaking about their experiences. Using free hands-on investigations available at Xplorlabs.org, Sowa-Imbo provided safe ways for her students to explore and develop an understanding of fire. For instance, using the candle flame investigation, Sowa-Imbo had her students construct explanations and develop models that demonstrated core ideas pertaining to her chemistry course (e.g., matter, chemical reactions, and thermal energy transfer), but also promoted safety and awareness within their communities. Students engaged in learning using these resources throughout the school year, and were ultimately challenged to take what they learned and share it with others outside of the classroom. The foci of their knowledge sharing ranged from general fire prevention to topics as specific as holiday fire safety.

The Xplorlabs Educator Fellowship team was honored to have Terri Sowa-Imbo on board for the 2024-25 school year. Her commitment to making her course content exciting and accessible for her students is admirable, and we eagerly await the opportunity to showcase more of her work in the future as she lights even more fires – both literal and metaphorical – in her classroom.

Stay tuned this summer as we introduce our new group of Xplorlabs Educator Fellows who were recently onboarded for the 2025-26 school year!