Svea Anderson

Svea Anderson is a public school educator with over twenty years of experience in all elementary and some junior high-grade levels. When not working her day job, Svea works with the Arizona Science Teachers Association and the ADE designing and facilitating Science workshops for colleagues across the state. Svea’s mission is to make science equitable for all students.

After finishing college in Northern California, Svea attended Antioch University New England in Keene, New Hampshire. As part of her Masters’s program, Svea lived and taught in Auroville, Tamil Nadu, South India. One evening, while out walking at sunset, enjoying the flying foxes taking flight, Svea saw her students huddled under the one street light in the rural village, doing their homework. This experience shaped her educational pedagogy and how she would teach for her entire career.

Svea is a lifelong learner and always looking for experiences to bring back to the classroom. In 2018 she was selected as a PolarTREC educator and spent a month helping a researcher conduct ecological research at a field site in the high Arctic. In 2019, as a Grosvenor Teacher Fellow, Svea circumnavigated Newfoundland, conducting plastic drags and learning about the collapse of the cod industry. Also in 2019, Svea was awarded the prestigious Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematical and Science Teaching for elementary school teachers. Most recently, Svea was selected as an Albert Einstein Fellow and will spend the 2021-22 year in Washington, DC, working with a government agency on STEM policies and procedures.

Svea has always had a love of the outdoors and the environment. Svea enjoys disc golf, hiking, fly fishing and kayaking, and currently lives in the wrong part of the country (the Sonoran desert) to do any of these activities. Her best story of 2019 is how she met and chased off an adult male grizzly bear, by herself, while conducting research in the Arctic.