Learning to Design with Biotechnology: Innovations, Challenges, and Opportunities for Principled Youth Engagement
When: March 9th 2026 6:00-7:00 PM EST
Where: School of Creative Arts – Armouries Building, Amphitheatre, RM AM 132
37 University Avenue East, Windsor, ON
Join the School of Creative Arts and INCUBATOR Art Lab for a visiting speaker talk by Dr. Justice Walker
About the Talk
Innovations in biotechnology have expanded access to formal and informal learning environments. For K-12, this means youth can now learn about and engage with biology ideas, tools, and practice communities through designing and making. Because biotechnology expands inquiry-driven activities to include more design-oriented epistemic practices, these developments mark a conceptual and applied shift in how life science learning is understood and conducted. This has led to myriad conceptual framings—from BioMaking and BioDesign to DIYBio, Biohacking, and CommunityBio. While these efforts represent an important step toward modernizing life science education for pre-college audiences, we need to examine how we do so productively and responsibly. This talk addresses these innovations in the context of my recent research, which will include discussions of my efforts in burgeoning areas of computing with parallel field trajectories. I will present a set of conceptual and pragmatic approaches to enacting learning designs that serve societal values, priorities, and needs.
About Justice Walker
Justice T. Walker, Ph.D. (justicetwalker@gmail.com) is a Learning Scientist who studies what middle and high school students and teachers know, think, and do when learning with biotechnologies and computer science-enabled data science tools. His work draws on active learning perspectives in constructionism, design, and literacy to examine how teachers and students respond to contemporary STEM learning experiences in formal and informal environments. His work is informed by more than a decade of experience teaching in K-12 classrooms. Walker has earned more than $4.2M in extramural funding from the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Education (more than $2M of which he managed as Principal Investigator) and has secured supplemental funding to support key initiatives such as “Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) and “Research Experiences for Undergraduates” (REU) funding supplements. His work has been featured in Computer Science Education, Phi Delta Kappan, the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET), Public Understanding of Science, and the Journal of Science Education and Technology. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST) and the Journal of Science Teacher Education (JSTE). Walker earned a B.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Miami (FL) and an M.S. in Engineering Biotechnologies and a Ph.D. in Teaching and Learning, both from the University of Pennsylvania.
To learn more about Dr. Justice Walker link below:
University Profile
LinkedIn
Website
