Janet Carlson

Janet Carlson is currently the faculty director of CSET where she has been working since 2013. She began her career in education as a life and earth science teacher in rural and small towns. As she moved from classroom teaching into developing curriculum, facilitating professional learning, and conducting research she kept a focus on equity in the science classroom. This focus began with looking at gender equity and trying to understand why so few female-identifying students pursued upper-level science courses and majors in college. She became particularly interested in teachers’ beliefs and actions in the classroom with regard to who teachers thought could learn science, what counted as learning science, and what it meant to be a “good” science teacher. Gradually this focus on gender equity broadened to look at all students who were being disserved in science education and more generally in the K-12 system. Today her work in CSET is centered on naming and disrupting entrenched systems of oppression in K-12 education especially as played out in classroom instruction. She is guided each day by the credo that “white silence is violence.”

Please note that I am no longer accepting graduate students.