Michael Giamellaro
Dr. Giamellaro began his career as a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service where he found a passion for outreach, education, and engaging students in science. This led to a new career in science teaching that took him to Colorado and New York City where he began working with integrated and experiential curriculum approaches. In his current position Giamellaro is happy to be combining his passions for teaching and research as a professor in the Master’s of Arts in Teaching program at Oregon State University-Cascades.
Dr. Giamellaro’s research investigates the role of contextualization in science learning, or how learners make associations between targeted science content knowledge and the social, cultural, and physical aspects of their learning environment. His work stems from the theoretical assumptions that learning is situated within and inseparable from the learning environment. He is particularly interested in understanding science learning in environments where the learning context is authentically linked to the content to be learned, such as field experiences or cases where students conduct inquiry in conjunction with practicing scientists. The goal of this work is to help science teachers to improve these experiential pedagogies by more effectively leveraging the experiences to enhance learning and contextualization of science content.
In his current NSF-funded project, Dr. Giamellaro’s team is developing a new mixed-methods approach to conducting systematic reviews. They use bibliometric network analysis, AI, and qualitative analysis to map the intellectual foundations and the research front of an academic field.