When neurologist Annick Desjardins first heard about an experimental therapy that uses the polio virus to attack cancer cells, she admittedly thought it was an off-the-wall idea. In the 12 years since then, however, Desjardins—now associate professor of neurology at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, which is hosting the study—has seen remarkable results. The CBS show 60 Minutes even described the treatment, a form of immunotherapy, as potentially a “big leap forward.” In advance of her keynote address at the 2015 ASTC Annual Conference in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
While science communication has become increasingly professionalised, philosophers have been far less active in, and reflective about, how we talk to the public. In thinking about the relationship between the ‘public intellectual’ and science communication, however, philosophy has some important contributions to make, despite the differences of content and disciplinary approach. What, then, can both these professions learn from each other about how to engage with the public - and the risks that this might involve?
This paper briefly describes a new academic discussion project first presented on November 29th, 2016, at the "Universum Sciences Museum" in Mexico City. Interdisciplinary professionals comprise the Museological Reflections Group (MRG), whose aim is to think and explore new possibilities for science museums. The group's first edition, offered the theme "The Sciences behind Showcases: Anthropological and Archaeological Processes".
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Blanca Cardenas
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This article provides a brief synopsis of the second Science of Science Communication Sackler Colloquim, held September 23-25, 2013 at the National Academy of Sciences. It presents summaries and links to relevant research that informed the meeting.
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.
This is a conference review on PCST 2016 Istanbul. PCST 2016 Conference, with the theme of "Science Communication in Digital Age", was held in Turkey Istanbul on April 26, attracting more than 400 science communication experts and scholars from 52 countries and regions. This conference featured vast topics and rich contents, covering 6 conference reports, 52 sub-forums, 133 oral reports and 52 poster papers focusing on science communication changes, scientists participation, public object, ethics and art, tendency and policy under the background of the digital age.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Wang KangyouLiu Xuan
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and workforce development in the US are critical for global competitiveness and national security. However, the U.S. is facing a decrease in entrants to the STEM workforce which is not shared evenly across demographics. Specifically, women, underrepresented minorities, and people with disabilities obtain STEM degrees and enter the STEM workforce at levels significantly below their demographic representation in the U.S. The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES) program supports models, networks, partnerships and research to ensure the broadening participation in STEM of women, members of racial and ethnic groups that have been historically underrepresented, persons of low socio-economic status, and people with disabilities. This conference focuses on collective impact as a strategy to address the broadening participation challenge. Collective impact is distinguished from collaboration in that the alliances require a backbone organization to succeed. The goal of this project is to organize a conference to inform backbone organizations toward broadening participation in STEM education and the workforce.
The conference takes place at the University of California, San Diego January 20-22, 2017 and brings together Project Investigators from the Design and Development pilots, along with stakeholders in broadening participation in STEM on a local, regional, and national scale. The overarching goal of the conference is to develop the knowledge base of participants in the application of the collective impact model, and the role of backbone organizations to address specific issues and transition points of the STEM pipeline. Conference participants include K-12, community college, and university representatives; leaders in graduate education, policy makers and private sector employers. The conference includes plenary sessions, flash presentations, and interactive workgroups engaged in the development of collective impact approaches to problems in Broadening Participation in STEM. Workgroups share their insights, and audience feedback is electronically curated via Twitter and Storify. To respond in real time to participant questions or insights this conference uses the innovative platform, IdeaWave, to solicit, sort and value ideas from the attendees before, during, and after the conference. Conference results are integrated into a final report to inform the NSF INCLUDES Alliances backbone organizations. The intellectual merit of the project is that it advances knowledge about the barriers to broadening participation in STEM education and the workforce, the collective impact model, and the role of the backbone organization to guide the vision and strategy, and support the activities, evaluation, and communication of the NSF INCLUDES Alliances. The broader impact of this project is that it benefits society by informing backbone organizations, which leads to broadening participation of the STEM workforce and ultimately increases U.S. global competitiveness and national security.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kim Barrett
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
As the NSF INCLUDES Program seeks to scale from the Launch Pilots to the full program, achieving its goals to promote the progress of science by broadening participation will rely on the ability to successfully scale the technical and human infrastructure for collaboration across the mini-backbones and the national backbone. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is seeking support for an NSF INCLUDES infrastructure conference that will provide a forum for discussion about current and long term technical and human infrastructure needs for scaling. Technical infrastructure might refer to the functions provided by any communication, community building and collaboration tool, such as document sharing or storage. Human infrastructure might refer to data analysts or community managers.
The conference would include discussion of the structures and processes for creating a shared, overarching vision of the changes at all levels and for all groups that would be needed to promote the talent development goals envisioned within INCLUDES, supporting the current design and development launch pilots, and supporting scaling and promoting conditions for sustainability. Based on research on collective impact and improvement science in education, we would offer presentations followed by structured conversations within the setting of working sessions. The goals of AAAS for diversity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are very much in keeping with the goals of INCLUDES; thus AAAS proposes to offer its existing online platform, Trellis, to support this comprehensive initiative to develop STEM talent from all sectors and groups in our society.
The goals of the conference activity are to: (1) define short term and long term communications and networking needs that can support the pilots; (2) outline the technical specifications and human resources needed to support the pilots; (3) envision the technical, resource and human needs required to support Alliances; (4) develop design specifications for intra- and cross Alliance networking to support technical assistance, identification and curation of resources, support for communities of practice and capture of lessons learned and (5) propose tools, techniques, capacities and functionalities for an NSF INCLUDES National Network Backbone.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Shirley MalcomJosh Freeman
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This award supports a conference and related activities which will bring together researchers, higher education administrators, industry representatives, members of professional societies, and other community members to design collective impact initiatives to improve the retention and continuation of Hispanics, women, and other underrepresented groups in STEM fields. Retention and continuation to the next step in their educational careers is a particular challenge for underrepresented minorities and first-generation students, whether in community college, four-year institutions, or graduate programs (Ishitani 2006, Sowell et al. 2015). The conference focuses explicitly on this critical issue, and will identify potential remedies that can scale across different types of institutions, communities, and underrepresented groups.
This conference will employ a collective impact, networked improvement approach to help fill this gap and engage the broader community. This approach offers a means of identifying and agreeing upon shared, measurable objectives, mechanisms for coordination across individuals and organizations, a commitment to contrast and comparison, and an ethic of continuous improvement. Drawing from the extant literature and recommendations from a wide array of stakeholders, the team will propose measurable strategies for Alliances and the National INCLUDES (Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners that have been Underrepresented for Diversity in Engineering and Science) Network that can be implemented, tested, enhanced, and expanded. The workshop team will draw on evidence-based knowledge, leveraging findings from disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields and from differing types of institutions and educational levels to determine whether strategies identified can yield large-scale progress towards INCLUDES goals. Results will inform the INCLUDES Alliances and the backbone organization supporting the Alliances.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marjorie ZatzAnn GatesDeborah Santiago
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The National Science Foundation's (NSF)Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES) program supports models, networks, partnerships and research to ensure the broadening participation in STEM of women, members of racial and ethnic groups that have been historically underrepresented, persons of low socio-economic status, and people with disabilities.
The University of Akron will convene a two-day conference to develop a backbone organization to support the preparation and advancement of underrepresented minorities K-12 through careers in the biosciences, a high growth area for engineering (biomechanics, biometrics and biomaterials). This conference draws on the expertise of a wide range of organizations, professional associations, K-20+, community based organizations, industry and museums. The intent is to strengthen the network among participants and leverage learning on how to engage youth in the biosciences.
The results of this first conference will be a white paper that will be disseminated to several professional societies that outlines a backbone infrastructure for addressing both short-term and longer-term aspects of an NSF INCLUDES alliance centered on bioengineering, biomechanics, biomedical engineering and biomaterials.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Brian DavisCarin HelferRouzbeh Amini
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This project will develop, organize and host a Conference to assist in the planning of the NSF INCLUDES (Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science) Alliances and National Network. The focus of this project is the design and implementation of program evaluations necessary for the INCLUDES Alliances and National Network. The conference will be the first to emphasize the multiple scales at which evaluations occur for programs that include components based at single institutions, at interdisciplinary centers/institutes within larger institutions, at alliances/partnerships between several institutions and at entities with a national scope. As the INCLUDES Alliances and National Network will operate across multiple scales, the proposed Conference will provide guidance on the technical aspects of designing and planning multi-scale evaluations.
The target audience for the activities are those individuals involved in current INCLUDES projects, those considering collaborating in such projects and STEM educators considering inclusion of formal evaluation in their projects. The overall goals are to (i) enhance the knowledge of the participants about evaluation methods; (ii) present the experiences of individuals who have successfully developed alliances and carried out evaluation efforts for these; and (iii) provide advice regarding evaluation methods for those planning to participate in future requests for INCLUDES Alliances and/or the National Network. The methods proposed include three components: (a) an initial webinar open to the broad community of STEM educators to introduce key concepts and vocabulary concerning evaluation methods; (b) a pre-Conference Tutorial with 30 participants to provide a one-day overview of modern methods in evaluation and connect these to projects suggested by the participants; and (c) a two-day Conference with 80 participants including as speakers leading experts on program evaluation as well as leaders of programs in STEM education that have operated at multiple scales. Virtual participation will be integrated throughout the three components of the project and a formal evaluation of the project will be carried out using the Systems Evaluation Methodology that has been in use at the host NSF-sponsored Center (NIMBioS) for many years.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Louis GrossSuzanne LenhartErnest BrothersPamela Bishop
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This award supports a conference entitled "Accelerating Data-Driven Collaboration for Large-Scale Progress" which will support the progress of INCLUDES (Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners that have been Underrepresented for Diversity in Engineering and Science) Launch Pilots toward their broadening participation goals. The issues and challenges affecting the persistence of students of color, students from low-income households, females, and students with disabilities in STEM learning surpass the scope of programs designed to promote awareness of STEM career options. The Launch Pilots will need technical assistance to leverage their strategic plans, become poised for the next level of becoming an Alliance, and ultimately show impact that results in large-scale progress.
The conference will support the Launch Pilots in their broadening participation goals by providing opportunities to (1) develop innovative new ways to gather data and make evidence-based decisions, (2) connect with best practices on the frontiers of data-driven collaboration, and (3) apply new knowledge and innovations to their projects that address societal needs. The overarching design of Data-Driven Collaboration is to facilitate the sharing of ideas, struggles, and promising practices in a collaborative and participatory manner. This will occur by fostering a network improvement community (within and across Launch Pilots), engaging participants in systems thinking and problem-solving through collaborative modeling, and a 2.5-day Public Support and Engagement Lab conference. Launch Pilots who engage support from Data-Driven Collaboration will have a variety of technical assistance services available between November 2016 and April 2017.