Danielle Taylor

Danielle Taylor

Fellowship Placement: National Science Foundation
Hometown: New York, NY

Danielle Taylor was most recently employed at Pharos Academy Charter School, in the South Bronx, where she taught 10th grade Chemistry and Physical Science. During the course of her 8 year teaching career, Danielle has instructed a variety of middle and high school science subjects, including Earth science, Biology [As Living Environment], 8th grade intermediate science, Physics and AP Biology. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Stony Brook University and her Master’s degree in Teaching from Queens College of the City University of New York. During her time as a mentor teacher, Danielle has trained and guided upcoming science teachers, who have continued on in their independent careers to teach Project Lead the Way courses, Public Health and Gardening initiatives as well as core science classes like Biology and Chemistry. Additionally, during her best academic year, Danielle assisted an 8th grade class to achieve 100% pass rate on the New York state test, allowing for that cohort of students to enter high school with a graduation requirement already fulfilled and to skip freshman science. Danielle’s teaching philosophy is driven by the idea that science should be accessible to all people. Science, in her personal life, allowed her to gain an understanding of the world around her that has informed who she thinks should be allowed to participate in science. Science has been relentlessly gate kept as this arcane study for select special minds; minds that are usually white and male. This tendency has allowed for urban science education to be taught as a narrow set of skills and ideas that live in a classroom, only necessary for the ‘smartest’ students to understand. For large segments of urban schools, science is a classroom course made up of a set of unrelated facts, not as a way of thinking and understanding the world. This has led to a huge absence of certain segments of the population post-secondary STEM education and the STEM workforce. Diverse points of view are needed in STEM to move STEM forward in this country, and these ideas are trapped in minds that have traditionally kept out of scientific understanding over the years. Danielle was highly motivated that all students that passed through her classroom had an aptitude for science learning and she worked to hold that expectation every day.