Presenting the Capacity Building for Youth Civic Leadership for Issues in Science and Society (CYCLIST) toolkit! Here on the CYCLIST leadership team, it is our hope that this toolkit will help educators incorporate civic engagement into their programming.
CYCLIST’S leadership organizations include the New England Aquarium, The Wild Center, and Action for the Climate Emergency (ACE). Partner organizations include the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, the Audubon Nature Institute, the Saint Louis Zoo, and the Woodland Park Zoo. This diverse group of organizations collaborated to provide
This project engages families in engineering design challenges through a sustainability and biomimicry lens. Families advance their engineering proficiencies while learning from nature to create a livable future.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Project Harvest is a co-created citizen science project that investigates the quality of household environments in Arizona communities neighboring active or legacy mining and/or toxic release. Project Harvest is a response to the community-driven questions, “Are there pollutants in harvested rainwater? Can I use the harvested rainwater for my garden?"
Informal learning institutions (ILIs) create opportunities to increase public understanding of science and promote increased inclusion of groups underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers but are not equally distributed across the United States. We explore geographic gaps in the ILI landscape and identify three groups of underserved counties based on the interaction between population density and poverty percentage. Among ILIs, National Park Service lands, biological field stations, and marine laboratories occur in areas with the fewest sites for informal
The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community developed an informal environmental health and sustainability (EHS) curriculum based on Swinomish beliefs and practices. EHS programs developed and implemented by Indigenous communities are extremely scarce. The mainstream view of EHS does not do justice to how many Indigenous peoples define EHS as reciprocal relationships between people, nonhuman beings, homelands, air, and waters. The curriculum provides an alternative informal educational platform for teaching science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) using identification, harvest
This front-end evaluation study is part of Designing Our Tomorrow: Mobilizing the Next Generation of Engineers, a five-year project (2018–2023) led by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF, DRL-1811617) and project partners: Adelante Mujeres, the Biomimicry Institute, and the Fleet Science Center. The Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) project seeks to promote and strengthen family engagement and engineering learning via compelling exhibit-based design challenges, presented through the lens of sustainable design exemplified by
Antarctic Dinosaurs: A Giant Screen Film and Outreach Project aims to leverage the popularity and charisma of dinosaurs to draw museum audiences into a captivating educational journey, revealing the history and transformation of Antarctica and the planet’s polar ecosystems, and exploring the forces that continue to shape the continent. In addition to bringing to life a wealth of unfamiliar dinosaurs, amphibians and proto-mammals, this project will journey beyond the bones to reveal a more nuanced, multi-disciplinary interpretation of paleontology and Antarctica’s profound changes.
Centered
While there is extensive evidence that STEM careers can be important pathways for augmenting social mobility and for increasing individual prestige, many youth perceive a STEM trajectory as an unattractive option. In the US, women and members of historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups, continue to be underrepresented across STEM disciplines. One vehicle for generating and sustaining interest in STEM is providing youth long-term access to informal science education (ISE) institutions. Here, we incorporate triangulation methods, collecting and synthesizing both qualitative and
Increased emphasis on K-12 engineering education, including the advent and incorporation of NGSS in many curricula, has spurred the need for increased engineering learning opportunities for younger students. This is particularly true for students from underrepresented minority populations or economically disadvantaged schools, who traditionally lag their peers in the pursuit of STEM majors or careers. To address this deficit, we have created the Hk Maker Lab, a summer program for New York City high school students that introduces them to biomedical engineering design. The students learn the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Aaron Matthew KyleMichael CarapezzaChristine Kovich
Supported by the National Science Foundation, the Global Soundscapes! Big Data, Big Screens, Open Ears project employs a variety of informal learning experiences to present the physics of sound and the new science of soundscape ecology. The interdisciplinary science analyzes sounds over time in different ecosystems around the world. The major components of the Global Soundscapes project are an educator-led interactive giant-screen theater program and hands-on group activities. Multimedia Research, an independent evaluation firm, implemented a summative evaluation with low income, inner-city
The lack of equitable access to science learning for marginalized groups is now a significant concern in the science education community (Bell et al. 2009). In our commitment to addressing these concerns, we (the HERP Project staff) have spent four years exploring different ways to increase diverse student participation in our informal science programs called herpetology research experiences (HREs). We wanted the demographics of participants to mirror the racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic demographics of the areas where our HREs are held. To achieve this, project staff