Creating Accessible Science Labs: 3M Student Fellow Anna Lukeman

Anna Lukeman, a recent recipient of the 3M National Student Fellowship, is dedicated to making life in the lab accessible to all students. 

Anna just finished her third year at Acadia University, where she is completing a five-year dual degree in Math Education. “Acadia has been a big part of my life ever since I was little,” she says. “I live 5 minutes away and spent many of my summers in the Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens and around campus.” Anna received the Arthur L. Irving Family Foundation Scholarship to support her studies at Acadia, for which she is incredibly grateful to the Irving Family: “The scholarship has provided me with so many great opportunities and a family of scholars here at Acadia.” Anna began her degree in chemistry but made a switch in her second year: “After doing a teaching assistantship in my second year in the first year chemistry labs, I realized how much I love teaching.” Following her new passion for teaching, Anna switched to the integrated BSc/BEd program, retaining chemistry as her minor.

TAing in first-year chemistry didn’t just spark Anna’s passion for teaching, it also helped her get involved in a research project headed by Ms. Ashley Parsons, that examined the experiences of students registered with Accessible Learning Services who were in the first-year chemistry lab. From her own experiences in the lab, Anna recognized that there were opportunities to improve accessibility. When she became a teaching assistant and saw other students struggling with the lab environment, she decided Ms Parsons’ project was the perfect way to make concrete improvements in accessible education. “I helped create a set of interview questions and interviewed students registered with accessible learning in the introductory chemistry labs weekly throughout the fall semester,” says Anna. “I compiled all their interview responses and wrote a report that helped inform some changes made in the lab.” Anna presented her research, titled “Welcome to our Science Labs: Creating Spaces Where Everyone Thrives,” to Acadia’s Faculty of Pure and Applied Science, and will be helping to train new TAs in the coming year. “I’m really thankful to Ms. Parsons for the opportunity and the impact she’s making at Acadia.”

Outside of the classroom, Anna serves as the director of Dancepiration, a non-profit that offers free, inclusive, and creative movement dance classes to people of all ages and backgrounds in the Annapolis Valley. Started by Olivia Dobson in 2018, Dancepiration took a hit when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down their programming. “It was a small program when I started volunteering in my first year,” recalls Anna. “I fell in love with it. In my second year, I became the director and started teaching the adult class.” After taking on the role of director, Anna created fundraising initiatives and volunteer recruitment campaigns to help strengthen the organization and rebuild it to its pre-COVID success. She’s incredibly grateful to everyone who has helped make Dancepiration what it is: “I want to thank Olivia Dobson and all the other people who have helped and contributed to Dancepiration because it wouldn't exist without them.” 

Finding out she was a recipient of the 3M Student Fellowship was an “exciting and unexpected” experience for Anna, who received the happy news on her birthday this spring: “I was very much in shock, but in the best possible way.” She found the application process to be a really fun experience, one which gave her a chance to reflect on our university experience thus far. “It was a lot of work, but totally rewarding. I’d never taken the time to reflect on my experiences in that much depth ,” says Anna. “It was also amazing to get so much support from my peers and teachers and everyone who helped me through the process.”

Looking forward, Anna is excited to continue TAing in the first-year chemistry lab alongside starting her honors research thesis in math next year. Long term, she hopes to become a math and chemistry high school teacher. “You can put a lot of work into being a teacher and you can influence people's lives in a positive way, especially at the high school level,” says Anna. “It's that cool place where people are transitioning into their next phase of life and getting to help them navigate that journey is really special.”