SUNY Erie biology students make board games and spoken-word poetry in Raven Baxter's classes

Raven Baxter taught human biology and microbiology as an adjunct professor at SUNY Erie Community College in Buffalo, New York, starting in September 2016. While earning her master's degree, she also worked as a substitute teacher in Buffalo Public Schools.

In her courses, every exam came with a creative assignment. "I linked every exam with a creative assignment," Baxter said in July 2021 at Climate Generation's Summer Institute for Climate Change Education. For the final, students could present any topic from the course in any creative form, alongside the written exam.

Students made songs, skits and 3D animations of viruses infecting bacterial cells. One built a digestive system board game called "Poops and Shoots," and the class played it together. Another wrote a spoken-word love poem about circulatory systems, read by candlelight.

Community colleges taught a large share of the country's undergraduates at the time. In fall 2015, 38 percent of undergraduates attended two-year colleges, according to the Community College Research Center. Of students who first enrolled in fall 2010, 48.5 percent of Black students started at a two-year public college, compared with 35.6 percent of white students. In January 2018, Pew Research Center reported that Black workers held 9 percent of STEM jobs and made up 11 percent of the workforce.

Baxter came to the classroom from corporate drug discovery. "That experience as a community college professor really solidified my interest in continuing to teach at that level," she said on a Rosalind Franklin Society panel in December 2020. She described "a calling and a mission to fill in a space in higher education teaching biology."

Students noticed the change in format. "I've never really had the opportunity to represent my voice in class, or I've never had this opportunity before," Baxter recalled students telling her, in an April 2021 talk for Penn State Hazleton. At the Summer Institute, she said some students wrote in their teaching evaluations that they wanted to add a science minor or switch their major to biology. The paired project "also helped a lot with some students' test anxiety," she said there, especially among non-majors.

Her years in Buffalo Public Schools also showed her the level she wanted to teach. The district, founded in 1838, runs schools from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, plus adult education. "I had the experience of working in kindergarten through 12th grade," Baxter said in a 2024 McMaster University alumni conversation. "I really thrive when I'm able to explain higher level complex scientific concepts." Recalling her lab years, she told SUNY Buffalo State, "I remember thinking to myself, There are kids literally down the street from me who are failing, and I'm in a lab all day."

SUNY Erie has served students since 1946. It has campuses in Buffalo, Williamsville and Orchard Park, and enrolled 7,618 students in 2023-24.

A molecular biologist, Baxter went on to a Ph.D. in curriculum, instruction and the science of learning at the University at Buffalo, conferred in 2022.

Baxter describes her community college classroom in her Penn State Hazleton talk.