A Chat with Marge Bardeen
QuarkNet is a unique and transformative long-term professional development program for high school physics teachers. We invite them into the particle physics research community where they have an opportunity to experience how scientists make discoveries and translate that to their students. We're in the business of developing relationships between physicists, teachers, and their students. It's all about people.
The above is what Marge Bardeen, the QuarkNet spokesperson who has just retired from her post at Fermilab, said when we asked what her "elevator speech" about QuarkNet might be. She really captured what we in QuarkNet do. Marge should know; she was there at and a key part of the inception of QuarkNet. Before that, Marge built Fermilab education and outreach from the ground up. She had great help and support—for example, Leon Lederman in his days as Fermilab director was an important backer of her work—but it was Marge that applied her insights and leadership to invent something great and enduring.
Marge went to two schools that influenced her greatly: the Rufus Putnam Teacher Training School at Ohio University and University High School at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she learned about student engagement, hands-on learning, and the new math not as education buzzwords, but as things she really experienced as a child and a teenager studying science and mathematics. Marge's was the first class at her school to do PSSC Physics and she said, "We loved it. They were still developing the program. We played with slinkies on the floor, fans with vision-blocking cards to do stop-motion, and all sorts of things with ramps, blocks, wheels and no wheels that we were able to adjust." Her chemistry teacher was also "doing innvoative stuff." They had projects to find chemical unknowns that got quite involved and complicated. Marge said, "It was really fun to do that. And 'new math' began at UIUC. We learned from the developers. They were great teachers."
After attending Cornell University and marrying her University High and Cornell schoolmate Bill Bardeen, Marge carried that sense of engagement and curiosity to the education of their own children at the various places they lived as Bill moved forward in his career as a theoretical particle physicist. (Bill retired from Fermilab a few years ago but, like many physicists, still comes back to the lab most days keeping his hand in particle physics.) "When my kids went to grade school, I volunteered. I could help the teachers teach the math. I brought in games, puzzles, making learning math fun."
Marge later became a mathematics teacher in her own right, teaching gifted middle school students. She pointed out that she used Bloom's Taxonomy to make projects her students could do wherever they were on that scale and making learning relevant. For example, her students learned about statistics and survey data by doing an exit polling project during a presidential election, where they learned that "people don't like to tell how they voted, but the town was majority GOP." They learned mathematics as a real part of their community.
Marge's work in building up the Fermilab Education Office and the Lederman Science Center was groundbreaking and influential. When asked about the biggest "wow moment" in her career, Marge went back to the Summer Institute for Science Teachers at the lab that got the ball rolling in 1983. "The first year we had the summer institute, there were 15 biology, 15 chemistry, and 15 physics teachers working in their fields and across disciplines. We wondered if this was going to work at a DOE lab." Later, when the teachers really got going and were learning and excited, she realized that their new, innovative approach caught on beautifully with the teachers. It was a eureka moment. And the best part was that the institute leadership team was master high school teachers. They knew what would work. Marge never forgot that lesson!
In 1998, Marge was recruited by Michael Barnett of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to propose a new program to bring particle physics to high school teachers and students. They teamed up with Randy Ruchti of Notre Dame and Keith Baker of Hampton University to propose QuarkNet. Principal investigators have come and gone, and staff have changed. There have been moments of great excitement, for example, when many of us gathered at the Fermilab pajama party to see the LHC get first beam. QuarkNet has collegial friendship, mentors and teachers at centers doing amazing things, dinners and cookouts at the Bardeen home, and a time of stinging tragedy with the untimely passing of QuarkNet Coordinator Tom Jordan. Through it all, Marge has been the spokesperson and a co-PI. More than that, she has been a guiding light, the person who could always remind us exactly what QuarkNet was about and where our vision was. That guidance has served QuarkNet very well.
Thank you, Marge, from all of us.