The informal STEM education (ISE) field is a landscape that includes a variety of institutions beyond schools, including museums, science centers, zoos, youth and adult organizations, documentary film producers—and public libraries (J. H. Falk, Randol, and Dierking 2012). Libraries across the country have been reimagining their community role and leveraging their resources and public trust to strengthen communnity-based learning and foster critical thinking, problem solving, and engagement in STEM.
Understanding the Sun Through NASA Missions. The Maryland Science Center (MSC) initiative is targeted to rural educators and library patrons in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. The Maryland Science Center is lead partner collaborating with Prince George’s County, Maryland Public Schools and its Howard B. Owens Science Center, and with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to develop Educator Workshops and library exhibits for the Maryland counties of Cecil, Kent and Washington and NASA Wallops Visitor Center (Virginia) and NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Center (West Virginia). The project will make participants aware and better informed of NASA Heliophysics science and NASA missions studying the Sun. Participants in the programs will come to a better understanding of the Sun, space weather, and the Sun’s far-reaching influence on our planet and the rest of the Solar System. Educators will be better prepared to teach students using NASA-developed hands-on materials demonstrated and provided in the workshops, as well as Sun Spotters and Solar Scopes to examine solar surface features, helping to engage them and their students in better understanding our closest star. Rural libraries patrons will encounter NASA mission science, and MSC visitors will acquire better comprehension of the Sun. All participants will come away with a renewed appreciation of our Sun and how it works, its variability, its ongoing effects on our planet, the nature of the scientific study of the Sun, and how and why NASA is exploring the Sun with its current missions.
In collaboration with the libraries of Oklahoma State University (OSU) and Mount Holyoke College, the American Library Association proposes a traveling exhibit and public programs for 40 libraries examining the history and legacy of the Dust Bowl. The project spotlights Ken Burns' film "The Dust Bowl," and brings to public view two little known Dust Bowl archives: online oral history interviews of Dust Bowl survivors at OSU, and letters and essays of Caroline Henderson, a Mount Holyoke alumna who farmed in Oklahoma throughout the Dust Bowl. Libraries will display the exhibit for 6 weeks and present at least 3 public humanities programs from a list provided. The project humanities themes include the interaction between humans and nature; the different ways human beings respond to adversity; and how people living in the Dust Bowl tried to understand their social, economic, and ecological environment.
This project will bring STEM education to rural communities through local public libraries. Museum quality exhibits labelled as "Discover Earth", "Discover Technology", and "Discover Space" will spend 3 months at a series of locations around the Nation. Twenty four medium sized libraries will be chosen for the large exhibits and forty small libraries will be chosen for scaled down versions. The project's intent is to provide exhibits in every state and to reach as many under-represented individuals as possible. The significance of this project is that rural areas of this country are underserved regarding STEM education and since this segment of society is represented by 50-60 million residents, it is important to reach out to them. There is a significant segment of the Nation's population (50-60 million) that is underserved by out-of-school learning venues such as museums and science centers. An earlier phase 1 project demonstrated at 18 sites that rural libraries and librarians could provide STEM education to community members ranging in age from adults to children using these hands-on exhibits. Each exhibit (earth, space or technology) includes information about the topic and technologically enabled models to provide interesting and fun discovery mechanisms. They use common layman friendly language that highlights the most recent discoveries in each area. Each exhibit will be placed in the selected library for 3 months during which the library will organize events to feature and advertise the STEM learning opportunities. Another feature of this project will be to determine the models of learning in library settings and as a function of the demographics. The partners in this project that bring the necessary expertise are the American Library Association, the Afterschool Alliance, the Association of Rural and Small Libraries, the University of Colorado Museum, Datum Advisors, LLC, Evaluation and Research Associates, the Lunar and Planetary Institute, the American Geophysical Union, and the Space Science Institute.