The Space and Earth Informal STEM Education (SEISE) project, led by the Arizona State University with partners Science Museum of Minnesota, Museum of Science, Boston, and the University of California Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science and Space Sciences Laboratory, is raising the capacity of museums and informal science educators to engage the public in Heliophysics, Earth Science, Planetary Science, and Astrophysics, and their social dimensions through the National Informal STEM Education Network (NISE Net). SEISE will also partner on a network-to-network basis with other existing coalitions and professional associations dedicated to informal and lifelong STEM learning, including the Afterschool Alliance, National Girls Collaborative Project, NASA Museum Alliance, STAR_Net, and members of the Association of Children’s Museums and Association of Science-Technology Centers. The goals for this project include engaging multiple and diverse public audiences in STEM, improving the knowledge and skills of informal educators, and encouraging local partnerships.
In collaboration with the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD), SEISE is leveraging NASA subject matter experts (SMEs), SMD assets and data, and existing educational products and online portals to create compelling learning experiences that will be widely use to share the story, science, and adventure of NASA’s scientific explorations of planet Earth, our solar system, and the universe beyond. Collaborative goals include enabling STEM education, improving U.S. scientific literacy, advancing national educational goals, and leveraging science activities through partnerships. Efforts will focus on providing opportunities for learners explore and build skills in the core science and engineering content, skills, and processes related to Earth and space sciences. SEISE is creating hands-on activity toolkits (250-350 toolkits per year over four years), small footprint exhibitions (50 identical copies), and professional development opportunities (including online workshops).
Evaluation for the project will include front-end and formative data to inform the development of products and help with project decision gates, as well as summative data that will allow stakeholders to understand the project’s reach and outcomes.
This is a graphic summary of the Support Systems for Scientists' Communication and Engagement Workshop I: Communication & Engagement Training Programs. This workshop was held on December 4 and 5, 2017 at the SUNY Global Center/Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.
This is a list of participants who attended the Support Systems for Scientists' Communication and Engagement Workshop I: Communication & Engagement Training Programs. This workshop was held on December 4 and 5, 2017 at the SUNY Global Center/Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.
This is a report from Workshop I: Communication & Engagement Training Programs, part of the Support Systems for Scientists' Communication and Engagement workshop series. This first workshop was held on December 4 and 5, 2017 at the SUNY Global Center/Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. The report provides an overview (i.e. landscape) of the current North American science communication training community. The research project project expands on the research teams' recent NSF-AISL funded work.
Many scientists want to connect with the public, but their efforts to do so are not always easy or effective. Visionary programs and institutions are leading the way identifying the support needed to enable scientists’ connections with the public. However, the current appetite by -- and demand for -- scientists to do this exceeds the capacity of those who facilitate quality communication and engagement efforts. More can be done to ensure that those who support scientists are networked, sharing best practices, and supported by a reliable infrastructure.
This workshop series, convened by the Kavli, Rita Allen, Packard and Moore Foundations, was intended to view the entire system of people who support scientists’ engagement and communication efforts in order to explore how this system can be most effective and sustainable. The discussions examined where this system is thriving, the limits people within the system face and what can be done to ensure their efforts are commensurate with the demand for quality communication and engagement support.
Conducted over four closely scheduled workshops in late 2017 and early 2018, the convenings brought together leaders in different parts of the field who bridge scientists and the public and led to the emergence of a number of key priority areas. While the initial intention was to also hold a plenary event to provide a more holistic view of scientists’ support system in order to collectively discern directions to advance the field, we feel a more efficient way forward right now is to focus our efforts and resources on building community and advancing these priority areas.
Our invitation-only workshops brought together scientists, academic leaders, engagement professionals, researchers, communication trainers, and foundation leaders. For each workshop, we also commissioned a “landscape overview”, to better understand the high-level state of each community. Workshops included:
Workshop I: Communication and engagement training programs - Dec. 4-5, 2017 at SUNY Global Center/Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science in New York
Workshop II: Associations, societies and other professional organizations - Feb. 28 - March 1, 2018 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, MD
Workshop III: Academic institutions - March 27-28, 2018 at UC San Diego
Workshop IV: Science engagement facilitators (museums, science festivals, connectors) - May 2-3, 2018 at Monterey Bay Aquarium
TBD - Workshop V: Plenary event
The goal of the workshops was to explore how to ensure scientists’ communication and engagement support is effective and sustained. In doing so, we hoped to 1) deepen our understanding of how scientists are currently supported in these areas, 2) map the broader support system to expose the opportunities and obstacles that play a role in achieving this goal, and 3) identify strategic and practical next steps that move us closer to this goal. This initiative also aimed to forge and strengthen networks across communities and institutions – and in so doing, take a view of the entire system to explore how everyone can better ensure their efforts are impactful, mutually supportive, and connected to a greater whole.
Included in the links below are summaries from each workshop.
Hubbard Brook Roundtables are a method of face-to-face PES developed by science communication practitioners at a long-term ecological research site in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Hubbard Brook Roundtables use facilitated dialogue with stakeholders and ecologists to harness the power of “ecosystem thinking” to address complex socioscientific questions. Here we present key lessons from more than ten years of convening roundtables in the Northern Forest region of the northeastern US.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is creating, implementing and evaluating a forum for the NSF INCLUDES broadening participation community of practice and for engaging the NSF INCLUDES awardees and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) researchers across the nation to expand the NSF INCLUDES broadening participation network. The NSF INCLUDES program is a comprehensive national initiative designed to enhance U.S. leadership in STEM discoveries and innovations focused on NSF's commitment to diversity, inclusion, and broadening participation in these fields.
The NSF INCLUDES Open Forum will use the AAAS Trellis networking platform and the organization's experience engaging communities of practice focused on broadening participation, STEM education and STEM research. The project builds on the success of a prior NSF INCLUDES Conference award (HRD-1650509) that was addressing goals to define networking needs of the first round of NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots (DDLP); to develop design specifications for NSF INCLUDES networking, curating of resources, and supporting communities of practice; and to propose tools, techniques, capacities and functionalities for an NSF INCLUDES national network.
The NSF INCLUDES Open Forum project includes advisory board members with expertise in networking platforms and others with broadening participation knowledge and experience. A yearly conference for NSF INCLUDES awardees will offer participants an opportunity to learn about how Trellis platform upgrades, functionality and technology options (e.g., a smartphone application) can be used in new ways to engage a broader community of partners interested in broadening participation in STEM research and education contexts. An external evaluator will assess the activities and outcomes of the NSF INCLUDES Open Forum both during implementation and at project end. The PIs will also communicate the outcomes of the project to broader audiences, both academic and non-academic, and encourage a dialogue within the NSF INCLUDES community about the use of technology for organization and communication within a network.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Shirley MalcomJosh Freeman
resourceprojectProfessional Development and Workshops
For the United States to maintain its leading role on the world economic stage, it is essential to strengthen the American workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Our current prosperity and our future success hinge on recruiting, training, and employing the creative and industrious STEM professionals who drive the innovation economy. Strengthening the American STEM workforce depends, in part, on broadening participation to students from demographics that have traditionally been underrepresented in STEM. This NSF INCLUDES Launch Pilot project will foster recruitment, training, and employment for indigenous STEM students, where the term "indigenous" comprises the terms Native American, American Indian, Alaskan Native, and Hawaiian Native. Specifically, this project will support the design and development of a first-of-its-kind network focused on environmental stewardship of indigenous lands. The network will comprise both tribal and government partners and will be organized by three faculty at the University of Colorado-Denver. Student recruitment, training, and employment will be organized around the unifying principle of land stewardship. The focus on land stewardship has been selected not only because it demands the expertise of STEM professionals, but also because land stewardship is among the top motivations for indigenous students considering STEM careers. Accordingly, this work is important on several fronts: It addresses the recognized need for STEM professionals; it broadens participation to students from underrepresented groups; and it provides a test bed for collective action by a first-of-its-kind network of tribal, government, and university partners.
The proposed network will work together to design, deploy, and debug a unique educational program giving students an opportunity to train for employment as tribal liaisons in the environmental field. In particular, this program will address the need for culturally-sensitive, scientifically-trained individuals who can serve as tribal liaisons between tribal and non-tribal organizations, which will allow them to prevent, minimize, or manage environmental incidents through their understanding of STEM principles and organizational dynamics. All students in this educational program will earn a regular four-year STEM degree, but a key feature of the program is that they will also participate in training and internships designed to provide background with nontechnical matters such as cultural awareness, environmental regulations, and organizational dynamics. Additionally, this educational program is designed to support recruitment of indigenous students by (1) providing a clear vision of a high-impact, culturally-relevant professional career and by (2) providing a cultural connection with obtaining a college degree. Taken together, the network aims to increase enrollment, retention, graduation, and alumni activity by indigenous students. Best practices and strategies for collective impact will be used to document achievement of the network in increasing the enrollment, retention, graduation, and alumni activity of indigenous students in higher education and in STEM careers. Continuous feedback will be collected to assess partner engagement and durability, and student satisfaction, performance, and progress. The network is expected to be sustainable because it addresses a demonstrated need; it is expected to be scalable because scientifically aware, culturally-sensitive individuals who can serve as tribal liaisons are needed not only regionally, but nationally.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Timberley RoaneDavid MaysRafael Moreno-SanchezBrenda AllenGrace RedShirt Tyon
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Ecology Plus (Ecology+) is an NSF INCLUDES Launch Pilot project with a goal of increasing the participation of underrepresented minorities in a broad range of career pathways where ecology plays a role. This project recognizes that both innovative scientific research and wider societal participation are needed for effective and equitable solutions to environmental issues that directly impact societal well-being and national security. Both research and policy are enhanced by full participation of all sectors of society. Despite the existence of multiple programs over many years, barriers to the participation of underrepresented minorities in ecology persist. One overarching systemic issue remains critical: that insufficient connections among programs result in breaks along critical transition points in career pathways. Project activities will lay the groundwork by developing a regional approach to alliance-building that can be extended across the nation.
Ecology+ will use a collective impact framework -- characterized by a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support -- to optimize career guidance and support for undergraduate students, graduate students and early career technical and professional scientists. Starting in the Washington-Baltimore region, key objectives of the project are to develop infrastructure for effective communications among partners with the capacity to expand nationally; map potential career pathways with associated sets of necessary competencies, opportunities and mentors, and; empower alliance participants to overcome institutional barriers and patterns of unconscious bias. Ecology+ will: a) establish an online mentoring platform; b) offer a career fair with motivational talks and guidance on individual career development plans; c) offer a series of relevant skills workshops; d) arrange research or internship experiences, and; e) facilitate awareness and networking opportunities with employers from agencies, business and nonprofit sectors. The value of Ecology+ lies in its comprehensive, integrated approach that will bring new partners and their resources into a transformative and systemic response to the key barriers affecting underrepresented minorities in science.
Underrepresented minorities (URMs) are less than 10% of engineering faculty, despite comprising nearly a third of the nation's population. A common explanation for their disproportionate representation, at the engineering faculty level, is related to a lack of access to effective mentorship from other faculty. This NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project will expand a new mentoring and advocacy-networking paradigm to bring together two stakeholder groups: (1) underrepresented minorities (URMs) who are engineering faculty and (2) well-regarded (primarily non-URM) emeriti/retired engineering faculty. A previously-funded NSF project found that this mentor-mentee pairing was viewed favorable by both parties and beneficial, particularly by the URM engineering faculty. Because of these results, the investigators proposed to scale, test, and evaluate the approach on a broader scale by creating national infrastructural network partners to help increase capacity to serve a greater number of URM engineering faculty and to introduce tele-mentoring and training models to serve URM faculty who work in remote geographical locations with very little access to mentors.
The project will use a multi-phased phenomenological, mixed method research design to gain greater understanding of the ways in which the URM faculty and emeriti faculty experience the opportunities afforded by the project. Further, the investigators plan to collect data to examine how project participants perceive and experience conventional, direct communications (e.g., telephone calls, e-mail, and in-person meetings)through the mentoring process versus the use of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), anthropomorphic interface agents that engage a user in real-time dialogue by using verbal-nonverbal channels to emulate the in-person experience. This project has the potential to broaden participation in the engineering professoriate and opens up new possibilities for supporting URM engineering faculty.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Comas HaynesValerie ConleySylvia MendezKinnis GoshaRosario Gerhardt
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This NSF INCUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot will increase the recruitment, retention, and matriculation of racial and ethnic minorities in STEM Ph.D. programs contributing to hazards and disaster research. Increasing STEM focused minorities on hazards mitigation, and disaster research areas will benefit society and contribute to the achievements of specific, desired societal outcomes following disasters. The Minority SURGE Capacity in Disasters (SURGE) launch pilot will provide the empirical research to identify substantial ways to increase the underrepresentation of minorities in STEM disciplines interested in hazards mitigation and disaster research. Increasing the involvement of qualified minorities will help solve the broader vulnerability concerns in these communities and help advance the body of knowledge through the diversity of thought and creative problem solving in scholarship and practice. Utilizing workshops and a multifaceted mentorship program SURGE creates a new model that addresses the diversity concerns in both STEM and disaster fields, and make American communities more resilient following natural disasters. This project will be of interest to policymakers, educators and the general public.
The Minority SURGE Capacity in Disasters (SURGE) NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot will enhance the social capital of racial and ethnic minority communities by increasing their networks, connections, and access to disaster management decision-making among members of their community from STEM fields. The four-fold goals of SURGE are to: (1) increase the number of minority graduate researchers in STEM fields with a disaster focus; (2) develop and guide well-trained, qualified disaster scholars from STEM fields; (3) provide academic and professional mentorship for next generation minority STEM scholars in hazards mitigation and disaster research; and (4) develop professional and research opportunities that involve outreach and problem solving for vulnerable communities in the U.S. The SURGE project is organized as a lead-organization network through the University of Nebraska at Omaha and includes community partners. As a pilot project, SURGE participation is limited to graduate students from research-intensive universities across the country. Each student will attend workshops and training programs developed by the project leads. SURGE investigators will conduct project evaluation and assessment of their workshops, training, and mentorship projects. Results from evaluations and assessments will be presented at STEM and disaster-related conferences and published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
DeeDee BennettLori PeekTerri NortonHans Louis-Charles
This NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot is to expand the Navajo Nation Math Circle model to other sites, and to develop and launch a network of math circles based on the NNMC model. The Navajo Nation Math Circle model is a novel approach to broadening the participation of indigenous peoples in mathematics that, ultimately, seeks to improve American Indian students' attitudes towards mathematics, persistence with challenging problems, and grades in math courses. Navajo Nation Math Circles bring teachers, students, and mathematicians together to work collaboratively on challenging, but meaningful and fun, math problems. Through this NSF INCLUDES project, additional math circles across the Navajo Nation will be launched and a mirror site in Washington State serving additional tribes (such as Puyallup, Muckleshoot, Tulalip, and Stillaguamish) will be established.
Originating approximately a century ago in Eastern Europe as a means to engage students in mathematical thinking, math circles bring teachers, students, and math professionals together to work collaboratively on challenging, but relevant and interesting, math problems. Navajo Nation Math Circles, established math circles in various Navajo Nation communities, are the foundation of this INCLUDES project. One goal of this effort is to launch a network with the capacity to support the replication and adaption of math circles in multiple sites as an innovative strategy for encouraging indigenous math engagement through culturally enriched open-ended group math explorations. In addition, the Navajo Nation Math Circle model will be expanded to new math circles in the Navajo Nation, as well as in Washington State to serve additional tribes. Cells in the network will implement key elements of the Navajo Nation Math Circle model, adapting them to their particular contexts. Such elements include facilitation of open-ended group math explorations, incorporating indigenous knowledge systems; a Mathematical Visitor Program sending mathematicians to schools to work with students and their teachers; inclusion of mathematics in public festivals to increase community mathematical awareness; a two-week summer math camp for students; and teacher development opportunities ranging from workshops to immersion experiences to a mentoring program pairing teachers with mathematicians.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
David AucklyHenry FowlerJayadev Athreya