Arny Leslie

Arny’s first seven years in the classroom were in Ganado, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation where he learned that unless you start with your students their abilities, interests, and culture nobody’s going to have any fun and very little learning will take place.

A highlight of his time on the Reservation was taking groups of students to Northern Arizona University each summer to participate in NSF Young Scholars programs, where students produced original environmental research. Many of his former Navajo students went on to become teachers and one is currently the director of the Native American Studies Program at Harvard.

He has been an active participant in a partnership with the University of Texas at Austin in the development and delivery of their innovative Engineer Your World curriculum since our inception and he now spends part of each summer training other teachers to teach the curriculum. Edina High School, Bowdoin College, Indiana University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Washington, and UT Austin are probably the institutions most responsible for what he knows about science and engineering, but the thousands of students he has taught over the years are completely responsible for what he knows about teaching!