Bio STEM career pathway courses come to Rutherford County Schools

Nine weeks into her senior year of high school, Kelsey Swor has a pretty good idea of what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

Inspired by her experiences in the new Bio STEM pathway being offered at Oakland High School and coupled with the impact her nine-year-old brother has had on her life, Swor is considering a career as a biomedical engineer.

Her brother has struggled with ADHD and has been through a lot.

Swor would like to help develop a treatment with less severe side effects than Adoral and the first quarter of the 2020–2021 school year helped her to realize she can, in fact, make an impact.

“He’s not himself when he’s on it … and the side effects of him coming off are even worse,” Swor said. “I want to do something for kids who are experiencing that — to help.”

Melissa Bunch is in her first year of teaching in Rutherford County and brought with her a Bio STEM pathway that offers four years of coursework — STEM Biotechnology 100, 200, 300 and 400 — at Oakland High School.

The latest career and technical education pathway is brand new for the 2020–2021 school year.

“The overall umbrella of the program is the central dogma of molecular biology,” Bunch said. “It is DNA creates DNA, and DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins; and the protein is responsible for some traits that you can see or maybe not see in an organism, so they learn how to genetically engineer bacteria.”

Bunch wrote the entire program — including statewide standards for all four courses — while at her previous school and it was approved by the Tennessee State Department of Education in 2015.

“I emailed those out to industry people and to university people for feedback before we submitted them to the state,” Bunch said. “I started teaching the first course in fall of 2016.”

That program was the first in the state.

“We’re in the lab most of the time,” Bunch explained, “and kids really like doing science. You can’t learn science without doing it — being in the lab — and being involved. I don’t use the textbook.”

The biotech program is rigorous, but, over the past nine weeks, Bunch’s hands-on approach has resonated with students.

“It’s definitely different than all my other science classes because with my other classes,” Hannah Hawthorn explained, “everything is already set up for you.”

Hawthorn, a junior at Oakland, and Swor both prefer Bunch’s hands-on method over lectures and PowerPoints.

In her other classes, Hawthorn said experiments were set up for students, whereas now they have to gather all the materials and mix their own solutions.

“This helps me learn,” Hawthorn said. “In order to help me in my science classes in college, I need to do this. This is how they do it in other professional labs.”

Both students are looking into attending Tennessee Tech University as undergraduates and then attending University of Tennessee – Knoxville for graduate school.

Hawthorn would like to become a veterinarian.

“We want to make sure that the skills [the students] have, that they learned from high school, can help them get a job in the career of their choice,” Tyra Pilgrim said. “We want our students to be able to find out what they like and what they’re good at.”

This past spring, Bunch met with Pilgrim and Brian Lewis. Pilgrim is the Career and Technical Education coordinator for Rutherford County Schools, while Lewis is the CTE specialist.

“That was on a Monday and that Friday, I decided to move to Rutherford County Schools to set up the program,” Bunch recalled.

“My teachers that I have in CTE have a passion to train the students in their field,” Pilgrim said. “It’s not just a teaching job to them, it’s training our students for their futures.”

Bunch has already seen the success of students from her previous school.

“I can say this with a hundred percent confidence, every single one of my students that have graduated after four courses, they are in a scientific major in college and they are killing it,” Bunch said. “They call me and text me all the time and say, ‘Oh my gosh, thank you so much. My biology course is so much easier. I know what I’m doing. Nobody else in the lab knows what the heck they’re doing.’

“My kids are in college functioning as basically lab assists and helping all of their other classmates get through labs.”

Closer look at the Bio STEM pathway:

STEM Biotechnology 100 covers the basics of chemistry and preparation of solutions, basics of microbiology I, special solutions and students will be able to demonstrate proper preparation of common reagents and growth media.

STEM Biotechnology 200 covers DNA basics, DNA basics II, molecular biology and are able to describe translation of proteins and explain classic paradigms of gene regulation.

STEM Biotechnology 300 prepares students to understand the central dogma of molecular biology; explain the process of replication, transcription and translation and how they result in the expression of genes; understand the mechanism for regulation of gene expressions in prokaryotes and eukaryotes; understand how bacteria and viruses transfer genetic material between cells; basic DNA technology used in DNA cloning; prepare agarose gels, use them to separate fragments of DNA and analyze the gel; understand and perform a restriction digest of DNA, protein basic I, statistics I and everything from DNA quantitation to bacterial transformation.

STEM Biotechnology 400 is the fourth and final course — this year’s freshmen class will be the first students able to work their way through the entire four-year program — and provides an opportunity for students to use skills and content learned during the first three courses in a real-world university or industry lab setting. Those students will be able to identify, explain and execute lab-based research utilizing the scientific inquiry process. They will also have an opportunity to conduct research to develop meaningful questions, define simple problem scenarios and scientific investigations, develop fundamental design solutions, conduct basic mathematical modeling and data analysis and effectively communicate solutions and scientific explanations to others.