by Marya Barlow
Each morning Dulce Lopez greets her eighth-grade students at the classroom door with a friendly handshake. The gesture clearly conveys Lopez’s enthusiasm for teaching science and serving as a role model for future generations.
In Anacapa Middle School’s dual-language science program, Lopez teaches three classes a day in Spanish and three in English. In her first year of teaching, she’s also helping develop and pilot the school’s Spanish-language science curriculum.
“That’s what really drew me to my position—to be able to teach science in my native language,” she said. “I want to be the science teacher I didn’t have. Going through my education, I never saw many people like myself represented in science. I want students in my classroom to know they can grow up to be anything.”
A first-generation college student from Oxnard, Lopez enrolled at ±¬ÁĎłÔąĎ in 2013 as an Environmental Science & Resource Management (ESRM) major and quickly “fell in love” with environmental science education.
“What I loved about ESRM is how hands-on it was,” she said. “I had opportunities to do undergraduate research and service-learning projects on the Channel Islands, in New Orleans, and in Costa Rica. Those experiences really helped me set myself apart from others and stand out when interviewing.”
While attending ±¬ÁĎłÔąĎ full-time, Lopez seized opportunities to work, teach, and conduct research. Among them, she held jobs as a park ranger in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area and was a student assistant and STEM educator in the “Crossing the Channel” program, a federal grant-funded initiative providing classroom education, mentoring, and outdoor experiences on the Channel Islands for Oxnard middle and high school students.
“My students inspire me each day to be a better teacher,” she said. “I want to provide a lot of hands-on opportunities for them to learn science by experiencing it.”
Lopez recently completed a summer research fellowship with the STEM Teacher and Researcher (STAR)
Program, where she worked on a large-scale ecological restoration project on the Channel Islands with scientists from the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey.
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© Fall 2019 / Volume 24 / Number 2 / Biannual