Déana Scipio

Dr. Scipio has focused much of her career on broadening participation for learners from non-dominant communities in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). She has designed and studied learning environments within formal and informal contexts and focuses on equitable design, creating spaces for learners from non-dominant groups to demonstrate and create disciplinary expertise, architecting community-university partnerships to facilitate multidirectional learning, and helping experts and mentors build pedagogical capacity. She brings this focus to her work as Director of the Graduate Program in Education for Environment and Community, School Overnight, and Community Education programs at IslandWood as she works to further integrate justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. This work entails building partnerships, conducting research, designing, and implementing a rich learning environment for graduate students who come to IslandWood.

Dr. Scipio is the current chair for the American Educational Research Association special interest group for Informal Learning Environments Research and is an advisory board member for numerous projects, including FieldScope. She has served as a reviewer for the American Educational Research Association, the International Society of Learning Science, the National Science Foundation, and the Journal of Science Education.

Dr. Scipio was a graduate researcher at the Institute for Science and Math Education and the LIFE Center; an ERC Postdoctoral fellow at the ChècheKonnen Center at TERC in Cambridge Massachusetts; and most recently, a postdoctoral scholar and researcher in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis where she conducted research to understand how youth develop environmental science agency through their participation in citizen science projects.

She is a graduate of Doctor of Philosophy in Learning Sciences and Human Development from the University of Washington, Seattle.