Meet STEM Department Head William A. Sandoval: ‘I Feel Really Fortunate To Be Joining a Department That Is Full of Incredible Teachers and Researchers’

William A. Sandoval joined the NC State College of Education on Jan. 1, 2024, as the head of the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education. 

Sandoval studied computer science at the University of New Mexico and earned his Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences from Northwestern University. His research focuses on epistemic cognition, or how people think about what and how they know. He is especially interested in how science learning in school can promote a deep understanding of scientific argument that supports productive engagement with science in public life.

Learn more about Sandoval below: 

Why did you choose a career in education?

My dad was the classic American educational success story: grew up working class, was the first person in his family to ever go to college and raised his own family in middle-class comfort. I grew up with the idea that education was the key to social and economic mobility. As I began to move through the wider world, I saw this key was not distributed equally. After working for some time as a software developer, I decided that I wanted to try to address that, so I went to graduate school and have been working at it since.

What inspired you to pursue a doctoral degree?

My first job out of college was writing software to run interactive management training games. This was at the dawn of the personal computing age in the mid 1980s — a long time ago! I wondered why these sorts of games weren’t being made to help children learn, and my bosses literally laughed at the idea. After working other software jobs for a few years, a friend from that first company sent me a brochure from Northwestern University announcing a new doctoral program focused on educational computing, so I jumped at the chance to figure out how computers might be used to really change how kids learned in school.

What are your research interests?

I’m interested in helping young people understand science, what scientific knowledge really is and how it is developed, in ways that they can use in their own lives. My research includes studying how children think about science and developing approaches to science teaching that help youth learn science better. I am also interested in improving how we theorize people’s thinking about knowledge and knowing (their epistemic cognition), which has led me to a lot of interesting work in philosophy, history and sociology of science.

What sparked your interest in those topics?

I’ve always thought my own science education was pretty bad, and when I got into the field as a graduate student, I learned that most people do not seem to learn science deeply through high school and definitely not in ways that help them as adults. As I began to study the practice of professional science and compared it to how we teach science in school, I saw a lot of room for making school science more like professional science. I am not very interested in training children to be scientists, really, but I want them to understand enough about how the sciences develop knowledge that when they encounter science-related issues in their own lives, they have the tools to think through them productively.

What is one moment or project in your career that you are particularly proud of?

I am one of the first generation of scholars trained in the field of the learning sciences, which I like to describe as a field that draws from psychological theories and anthropological methods to study learning as it happens in real places, like schools, workplaces, museums and families. Studying learning in the world like this often involves designing some particular learning environment and then studying how people interact with that environment, both to understand learning processes and to improve them. This is known as educational design-based research. About a decade ago, I wrote what remains the most detailed process for how to describe any specific design research project. It is now, by far, the most widely used methodological tool in the field. It’s pretty gratifying to have put something out into the world that other people find so useful.

What are you most hoping to accomplish in your role as head of the Department of STEM Education?

I feel really fortunate to be joining a department that is full of incredible teachers and researchers that already functions really well. One of my aims is to make sure that our work is clearly oriented toward ensuring that students are learning STEM in ways that help them address the questions and concerns they encounter in the communities in which they live. My other primary aim is to make sure that the great work happening in STEM education here is known widely across the country, so that people look to us as a model for how to do exceptional, innovative and socially meaningful STEM education.

What do you believe makes someone an extraordinary educator?

One of the real joys of collaborating with many, many teachers over the last 25 years is that I’ve gotten to see a lot of extraordinary educators in action. The best teachers I’ve known see teaching as a job of structuring opportunities for people to learn for themselves. This is a lot harder than just telling people things or giving them a lab to do and checking off what they did right and wrong. You have to really know your subject, but you also have to understand why it’s worth learning. This means you have to understand learners’ goals and needs and connect those to the subject. You have to care about the people you’re trying to teach and understand your job as helping them accomplish their own goals. Not surprisingly, extraordinary teachers are usually very curious learners.