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Walter P. Kistler Science Teacher
of the Year Award
HOME | NOMINATION PROCESS | 2007
Paula Fraser Receives Foundation's First
Science
Teacher Award
 Paula Fraser
Paula Fraser is the first recipient of the Walter P. Kistler Science Teacher Award. She is a 24-year veteran of teaching “highly capable” fifth-graders in the PRISM Program at Stevenson Elementary School, Bellevue, WA. The ceremony honoring Fraser was held November 2, 2007.
Fraser, whose training is in both biology and philosophy, emphasizes critical reasoning and an interdisciplinary approach in creating a “community of inquiry” with her students: “I teach pure science and science as a human endeavor, bringing in the ethical, legal, and social implications for the world we live in,” she said. “I think my kids leave my classroom with an appreciation for the beauty and wonder of science as well as for the rigor and discipline of scientific inquiry.”
She is also a co-creator of the Foundation’s seminar for students, “The Future: Young Scholars’ Inquiry,” which was inaugurated with a pilot seminar in 2005 and has continued annually since.
In previous recognition, Fraser won the 1999 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, which included a $7,500 National Science Foundation grant to her school, to be used under her direction. She also has won the Christa McAuliffe Award for Excellence in Education. In 1997, she participated, in partnership with a developmental biologist, in the Science Education Partnership program at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle. Among other projects, Fraser has also presented workshops related to science for teachers at various local, state, and national conferences, and she was the lead teacher in partnership with science educators at Bellevue Community College on a year-long “Young Scientists” project, which culminated in a highly regarded Young Scientists Fair. In 2000 she won the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Award on genetics, genomics, and genethics for Washington State when she took part in a month-long seminar at Princeton University on mitochondrial DNA. There she assisted in teaching how to incorporate ethics in secondary biology courses; since 2001 she has worked with the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research in conducting workshops on the same issue.
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