Jeff Toney would like you to think differently about who’s doing the teaching at MIT. The visiting professor in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy piloted an ambitious Independent Activities Period (IAP) project, bringing together students from MIT and Wellesley College to explore the rich trove of knowledge each student already possesses as a cultural inheritance.

“STEM education is rooted in a tradition of students mentored by masters and icons of their field,” says Toney, who is also the provost and vice president of research and faculty at Kean University. “Student success is often determined by learning how to think like a scientist or engineer, and by a student’s ability to adapt to and model the behavior and culture of their mentor and the campus environment.”

This top-down model of education may help create excellent engineers, but it creates a somewhat hierarchical learning dynamic. Toney’s IAP aimed to overturn that dynamic. “I challenged four culturally and linguistically diverse undergraduate students to complete a remote research project on a topic well outside of their comfort zone: to examine how their culture, gender identity, or language could enrich the Institute.”