We used a youth focused wild berry monitoring program that spanned urban and rural Alaska to test this method across diverse age levels and learning settings.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katie SpellmanDouglas CostChristine Villano
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Free-choice learning occurs when individuals make choices about what, where, how, and who they participate with in their self-motivated learning activities. This project explores how different people, living in the same geographic region, make plants and gardening a part of their lives. We explore how adult community members choose to participate in their plant and gardening interests, including: the topics and activities that interest them, with whom they participate, where, and which resources they access. This work will
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Elysa CorinJudy KokeDavid MeierAllison HuEric Jones
This brief focuses on a participatory study with the high school program of the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center (KAYSC) at the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM). Young people are organized into teams of up to 20 youth with an adult practitioner who delivers programming based on a STEM content area. Their activities and project-based learning are based in both STEM and social justice, coined in the KAYSC as “STEM Justice.”
As part of our study, we wanted to understand youth and adult needs that exist in an informal STEM education program that weaves equity into its core. This brief
This brief shares youth development insights from a museum-based, informal science learning program that uses STEM as a tool for social justice. Key to the success of this program were young people and adults feeling at home in a welcoming, diverse, and inclusive space; activities that focused on connecting and relationships; a holistically supportive space that attended to family and personal needs; shared norms for conversation and expectations; and science content grounded in young people’s lives, experiences, and communities as well as work with community members.
These needs were
Tinkering is an approach to learning increasingly adopted within informal learning settings to engage people with STEM learning (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). It builds on ideas in inquiry-based pedagogy and exploits some of the most engaging and motivational elements of learner-centered, immersive and hands-on learning approaches to develop 21st century skills such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, communication, responsibility, self-confidence, digital literacy and entrepreneurship. In a Tinkering activity, the learner is presented with
Background. STEM identity has emerged as an important research topic and a predictor of how youth engage with STEM inside and outside of school. Although there is a growing body of literature in this area, less work has been done specific to engineering, especially in out-of-school learning contexts.
Methods. To address this need, we conducted a qualitative investigation of five adolescent youth participating in a four-month afterschool engineering program. The study focused on how participants negotiated engineering-related identities through ongoing interactions with activities, peers
In The Nature of Community: SCIENCES, we share the lessons learned from an innovative partnership designed to leverage the strengths of two nonprofit organizations—a large cultural institution and a smaller, deeply-rooted community-based organization, both of which offer informal science education expertise.
You’ll read first-hand reflections of how staff members, community leaders and members, children, and adults experienced this partnership: the expectations, surprises, challenges, successes, and lessons learned. We hope the description of this partnership inspires other organizations to
Ideas from social justice can help us understand how equity issues are woven through out-of-school science learning practices. In this paper, I outline how social justice theories, in combination with the concepts of infrastructure access, literacies and community acceptance, can be used to think about equity in out-of-school science learning. I apply these ideas to out-of-school science learning via television, science clubs and maker spaces, looking at research as well as illustrative examples to see how equity challenges are being addressed in practice. I argue that out-of-school science
Learn how to create opportunities for young people from low-income, ethnically diverse communities to learn about growing food, doing science, and how science can help them contribute to their community in positive ways. The authors developed a program that integrates hydroponics (a method of growing plants indoors without soil) into both in-school and out-of-school educational settings.
Young adulthood, typically defined as between the ages of 18 and 25, is a critical period of growth during which young people acquire the education and training that serve as the basis for their later occupations and income (Arnett, 2000). The successful transition from adolescence to early adulthood requires youth to have the skills and resources to graduate high school and then go to college or enter the workforce (Fuligni & Hardway, 2004; Lippman, Atienza, Rivers, & Keith, 2008). To accomplish these tasks in advanced urban societies, young adults need a wide range of social, cognitive
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. The SCIENCES project aims to create a STEM ecosystem in Fuller Park, a chronically, severely under-resourced urban community in Chicago.