Developing solutions to large-scale collective problems -- such as resilience to environmental challenges -- requires scientifically literate communities. However, the predominant conception of scientific literacy has focused on individuals, and there is not consensus as to what community level scientific literacy is or how to measure it. Thus, a 2016 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, “Science Literacy: Concepts, Contexts, and Consequences,” stated that community level scientific literacy is undertheorized and understudied. More specifically, the committee recommended that research is needed to understand both the i) contexts (e.g., a community’s physical and social setting) and ii) features of community organization (e.g., relationships within the community) that support community level science literacy and influence successful group action. This CAREER award responds to this nationally identified need by iteratively refining a model to conceptualize and measure community level scientific literacy. The model and metrics developed in this project may be applied to a wide range of topics (e.g., vaccination, pandemic response, genetically-modified foods, pollution control, and land-use decisions) to improve a community’s capacity to make scientifically-sound collective decisions. This CAREER award is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) and the EHR CORE Research (ECR) programs. It supports the AISL program goals to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. It supports the ECR program goal to advance relevant research knowledge pertaining to STEM learning and learning environments.
The proposed research will conceptualize, operationalize, and measure community level scientific literacy. This project will use a comparative multiple case study research design. Three coastal communities, faced with the need to make scientifically-informed land-use decisions, will be studied sequentially. A convergent mixed methods design will be employed, in which qualitative and quantitative data collection and analyses are performed concurrently. To describe the i) context of each community case, this project will use qualitative research methods, including document analysis, observation, focus groups, and interviews. To measure the ii) features of community organization for each community case, social network analysis will be used. The results from this research will be disseminated throughout and at the culmination of the project through professional publications and conference presentations as well as with community stakeholders and the general public. The integrated education activities include a professional learning certificate for informal science education professionals and STEM graduate students. This certificate emphasizes high-quality community-engaged scholarship, placing students with partners such as museums, farmer’s markets, and libraries, to offer informal learning programs in their communities. This professional learning program will be tested as a model to provide training for STEM graduate students who would like to communicate their research to the public through outreach and extension activities.
Creating science education that can contribute to cultivating just, culturally thriving, and sustainable worlds is an important issue of our time. Indigenous peoples have persistently been under-represented in science reproducing inequalities in a myriad of ways from educational attainment, participation in and contributing to innovations in foundational knowledge, to effective policy making that upholds and respects Indigenous sovereignty. The development of models of science education that attend to intersections of knowledge and development, socio-scientific decision-making and civic leadership, and the complexities and contradictions of these realities, is imperative. This five-year Innovations in Development project broadens participation and strengthens infrastructure and capacity for Indigenous learners to meet, adapt to, and lead change in relation to the socio-ecological challenges of the 21st century. The project engages multi-sited community-based design studies to develop and research the impacts of Indigenous informal field-based science education with three Indigenous leadership communities from the Pacific Northwest and the Great Lakes. This project will have broader impacts through model development, building infrastructure to transform the capacity of informal field-based science education, and will produce cutting edge foundational knowledge about pressing 21st century issues with a particular focus on Indigenous communities. The project increases Indigenous participation in research through 1) engagement of Indigenous community members as research assistants, 2) training of Indigenous graduate fellows, and post-doctoral fellows, and 3) supporting the careers of more junior Indigenous scholars.
This research seeks to identify key design features of an Indigenous field (land/water) based model of science education and to understand how learners’ and educators’ reasoning, deliberation, decision-making, and leadership about complex socio-ecological systems and community change evolve in such learning environments. The project also examines key aspects of co-design and partnership with Tribal communities and how these methods of co-production of new science enable new capacities for systems transformation. This multi-layered project is organized through 3 panels of studies including: Panel 1) community-based design experiments to develop and refine a model of Indigenous informal science education; Panel 2) co-design and implementation of professional learning programs for Indigenous informal science education; and Panel 3) foundational studies in cognition and learning with respect to socio-ecological systems thinking and the impact on learning and instructional practices. Of particular importance in this research is the rigorous development and articulation of effective pedagogical practices and orientations. More broadly, findings will have clear implications for theories of cognitive development, deliberation and environmental decision making and especially those pertaining to how knowledge is shaped by culture and experience.
This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Filiberto Barajas-LopezAnna LeesMegan BangAnna LeesFiliberto Barajas-Lopez
The RASOR project is designed to increase engagement of students from rural Alaska communities in biomedical/STEM careers. Rural Alaskan communities are home to students of intersecting identities underrepresented in biomedical science, including Alaska Native, low-income, first generation college, and rural. Geographic isolation defines these communities and can limit the exposure of students to scientifically-minded peers, professional role models, and science career pathways. However these students also have a particularly strong environmental connection through subsistence and recreational activities, which makes the one-health approach to bio-medicine an intuitive and effective route for introducing scientific research and STEM content. In RASOR, we will implement place-based mentored research projects with students in rural Alaskan communities at the high school level, when most students are beginning to seriously consider career paths. The biomedical one-health approach will build connections between student experiences of village life in rural Alaska and biomedical research. Engaging undergraduate students in research has proved one of the most successful means of increasing the persistence of minority students in science (Kuh 2008). Furthermore, RASOR will integrate high school students into community-based participatory research (Israel et al. 2005). This approach is designed to demonstrate the practicality of scientific research, that science has the ability to support community and cultural priorities and to provide career pathways for individual community members. The one-health approach will provide continuity with BLaST, an NIH-funded BUILD program that provides undergraduate biomedical students with guidance and support. RASOR will work closely with BLaST, implementing among younger (pre-BLaST) students approaches that have been successful for retaining rural Alaska students along STEM pathways and tracking of post-RASOR students. Alaska Native and rural Alaska students are a unique and diverse population underrepresented in biomedical science and STEM fields.