Washington Business Winter 2018 | Washington Business | Page 46
business backgrounder | education & workforce
“It is rewarding, as a scientist, to have testimony
from the teachers that I have helped them ignite
their passion for science. This is the piece the
teachers carry forward to their own students
and that is important to me and important
to enabling our society’s scientific literacy.”
— Janelle Downs, Plant ecologist,
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
“The real basis is to take teachers into something that is
so cognitively dissonant, so challenging, that they’re hanging
by their fingernails on the edge of cliff, thinking, ‘This is so
hard,’ then you support them by lifting them up over the edge.
The celebration at the end is so grand because it’s been so
challenging,” said Meredith “Peggy” Willcuts, senior STEM
education consultant in PNNL’s Office of STEM Educ