In December of 2019, TERC and the University of Notre Dame convened 21 early childhood reading, family learning, and informal STEM education experts to explore the role of children’s fiction books as a tool for supporting STEM learning with young children and their families. Through the discussions, the group developed a series of recommendations for future research and practice, with a particular focus on integrating diversity and equity perspectives into the use of storybooks.
In December of 2019, TERC and the University of Notre Dame convened a group of 21 early childhood reading, family learning, and informal STEM education experts to explore the role of children’s fiction books as a tool for supporting STEM learning with young children and their families. Participants included educators and researchers from across the country representing a broad range of learning contexts, professional roles, audience focus areas, and STEM discipline expertise. Through the discussions, the group developed a series of recommendations for future work, with a particular focus on
A large body of research highlights the benefits of storybooks for children's learning. In the context of preschool classrooms, the use of storybooks to engage young children in STEM is a frequent topic of practitioner-oriented articles. There is also an increasing number of informal STEM education (ISE) projects exploring how to leverage storybooks to engage young children and their families in different STEM content domains. While there is universal excitement for the potential of storybooks in ISE, there is an acknowledgment of a critical need for more cross-project sharing, more research, and more efforts to synthesize and share findings. This award will catalyze new research studies and partnerships to advance efforts in ISE contexts, including the role of books in the overall learning experience or program, how books are selected or designed, and how the reading is facilitated by teachers and families. Participants will be educators and researchers working with or studying family learning for preschool-age children (three to five years) using early childhood fiction books as a tool for engaging families in STEM topics and skills.
Storybook STEM will be implemented in four phases: (1) pre-convening activities to plan, synthesize existing resources, engage a broader group of educators and researchers beyond convening attendees, and prepare convening participants to maximize the value of the in-person discussions; (2) in-person convening to catalyze cross-project discussions, outline promising practices, and identify questions and ideas for the future; (3) evaluation of the impact and value of the convening, from the perspective of participants and a project steering committee; and (4) dissemination of findings and recommendations to educators and researchers within and beyond the ISE field. Outcomes include: (1) documenting current and past work in ISE and other fields; (2) summarizing key recommendations and resources from the reading, literacy, and early childhood development fields; and (3) outlining promising directions for future work.
The findings from this project will provide a critical resource to help broadening participation efforts be more effective and inclusive for audiences across the country. Research studies motivated by the convening will address the lack of empirical work on storybooks as a tool for ISE programs and advance the ISE field's knowledge of how to integrate these books effectively. Because storybooks are a highly accessible and almost universally used family learning resource, the topic of the convening will be relevant to a wide range of audiences and will help educators broaden access to ISE for traditionally underserved and under-resourced communities.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
This is a conference review of the 2nd Commemoration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, which had the theme Gender, Science and Sustainable Development: The Impact of Media. It was held in United Nations Headquarters, New York City, U.S.A., and a parallel event was held simultaneously in Valetta, Malta. There were 45 listed speakers from 24 countries, with a gender ratio of 2:1 in favour of women. The contribution of the media to socio-cultural barriers facing girls and women in STEM was well-illustrated. However, few actionable solutions were proposed.
While the use of scientific visualisations (such as brain scans) in popular science communication has been extensively studied, we argue for the importance of popular images (as demonstrated in various talks at #POPSCI2015), including pictures of everyday scenes of social life or references to pictures widely circulating in popular cultural contexts. We suggest that these images can be characterised in terms of a rhetorical theory of argumentation as working towards the production of evidentiality on the one hand, and as aiming to link science to familiar visualities on the other; our example
The prevalent lack of research on the interrelations between science, research and popular culture led to the organization of the first International Conference on Science and Research in Popular Culture #POPSCI2015, which took place at Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt, Austria, from 17--18 September 2015. The aim of the conference was to bring together not only science communication researchers with an interest in popular culture, but also other scholars, scientists and researchers, artists, media professionals and members from the general public. In this issue of JCOM we present four
The largest meeting of science journalists took place this summer in Seoul, Korea. It bore the imprint of a few of the previous ones — as a gathering to build community and encourage beginners —, but also showed some marked changes from when it all started back in 1992, as told by some of the leading actors.
In this paper I use the concepts “understanding of science” and “appreciation of science” to analyze selected case studies of current science communication in Denmark. The Danish science communication system has many similarities with science communication in other countries: the increasing political and scientific interest in science communication, the co-existence of many different kinds of science communication, and the multiple uses of the concepts of understanding vs. appreciation of science. I stress the international aspects of science communication, the national politico-scientific
Science and technology: these are the mainstays China wants to concentrate on in order to stabilise its future as an emerging world power. Beijing plans to have the whole, enormous Chinese population literate in the scientific field within a few years. Scientific popularization is the key to what now, due to political influences and deep social disparities, seems remote.