Several years ago, Kansas City leaders decided to boost future economic growth by developing science and engineering skills in the area’s work force. There was a problem though: Kansas City’s workers and students weren’t very interested in science and engineering. So, five organizations, including a library and museum, founded KC Science, INC to improve science literacy in the bi-state Kansas City metropolitan region. Partners included the Johnson County (KS) Library as the lead partner; Science City, the region’s premier science museum; KCPT, the local public television station; Science Pioneers, a group that produces educational materials and activities for teachers and students; and Pathfinder Science, an online collaborative community of teachers and students engaging in scientific research. The group received a 2006 Partnership for a Nation of Learners* grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) because the community partnership’s focus on science-related careers and lifelong learning helped build a foundation for an informed citizenry.
Children feed alphabet letters to a talking baby dragon, drive a New York City fire truck, paint on a six-foot art wall, and crawl through a challenge course in PlayWorks™ at the Children's Museum of Manhattan (CMOM) in New York. Manhattan’s largest public play and learning center for early childhood marries the skills that children need to succeed in kindergarten with fun stuff that kids love. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded the project through a 2006 Museums for America grant to support the museum as a center of community engagement and lifelong learning. “PlayWorks™ is a joyful place for learning science, math, reading and other things. We incorporate fun and learning into the whole design to create a scaffold of learning. Families come to the museum to supplement preschool experiences,” said Andy S. Ackerman, CMOM’s executive director. The museum also offers parents, sitters, and other care-providers guidance on engaging their children with the exhibit. Based on the concept that children’s learning and personal growth is rooted in play, the 4,000-square-foot space is divided into five learning areas: Language, Math and Physics, Arts and Science, Imagination and Dramatic Play, and Practice Play (for infants and crawlers).
SciGirls is a national dissemination project, which puts resources from the PBS science series DragonflyTV into the hands of outreach professionals at PBS stations and educators in after school programs for girls. The current project leverages PBS' nationwide network of member stations to connect the educational research community with practitioners in the field. Thus far SciGirls has trained over 100 educators and community leaders and reached 2,300 girls in grades 3 through 8. SCIGIRLS MUSEUM ADVENTURES has four objectives: 1) to provide museum educators with DragonflyTV videos that model authentic inquiry in museum settings; 2) to expand SciGirls activity guides with new museum-based activities and research-based strategies specifically for museum educators; 3) to create a set of online, streaming videos that demonstrate best practices in gender-inclusive teaching; and 4) to facilitate feedback between our participants and the research community and deepen our understanding of the most effective ways to engage girls in STEM activities. Intellectual Merit--The strength of SciGirls lies in its comprehensive multimedia approach and its foundation in the inquiry-based strategies defined in the National Science Education Standards. The videos provided in SciGirls emphasize the process of science, rather than a collection of science facts. They provide real-world models of inquiry that all girls can do. Taken together, the SciGirls resources stimulate discussion, build confidence and pave the way for girls to investigate science questions on their own. The educational strategies provided by SciGirls are based in research into gender- inclusive STEM teaching and learning, translated into strategies that can be easily used by after school educators to create successful STEM experiences for girls. Broader Impact--SCIGIRLS MUSEUM ADVENTURES will provide museum educators at ten sites with materials that can be used in their programs for years to come. The entire set of resources--streaming videos and Activity Guides--will be available on DragonflyTV's Web site at www.pbs.org. The outcomes of the project will be shared with the informal science education research community. Findings will be reported at the annual PBS National Center for Outreach Conference
Community Ambassadors in Science Exploration (CASE) is a new model for encouraging the appreciation and understanding of science among underserved families through: a corps of teen and adult peer presenters; a curriculum of hands-on learning experiences for families of diverse ages and backgrounds; a regional network of museum-community collaboration; integration of community and museum resources through joint programming; and a longitudinal research study of program impacts. CASE will serve over 20,000 people over three years with peer-presented family learning opportunities and museum experiences. In addition, CASE will train a total of 108 science ambassadors who will offer science workshops at community-based organizations in the languages spoken by their constituencies. Through CASE, the ambassadors will gain training and experience in informal science education that can open the door to possible future career opportunities in community and museum settings. Building on a ten-year history of museum-community collaboration, CASE will be conducted by PISEC, the Philadelphia/Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative. PISEC includes four major Philadelphia informal science institutions: The Franklin Institute, the Philadelphia Zoo, The Academy of Natural Sciences and The New Jersey State Aquarium. This organization conducts research and outreach projects in support of family science learning.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Minda BorunKathleen WagnerAngela WengnerNaomi Echental
The Science Museum of Minnesota would like to create a network of partnerships between the museum and small community-based science organizations (CBSOs). CBSOs will receive professional development workshops to increase their capacity to produce high quality exhibits and publications and offer effective science programming. A team from each science organization will participate in a 12-hour skills development workshop to cover such topics as exhibit development, audience research, science communication and program development. A workshop "tool kit" will capture the essence of the training workshops and be made available to other museums. Each team will develop a small traveling exhibit and supporting materials. Annual Science Summit programs will showcase the CBSOs to the general public, museum visitors and students, while a CBSO Roundtable will invite the participants to explore collaborations and programming strategies. An online database will be created and a complimentary printed resource guide of all local CBSOs will be available to the public. The model will be tested at two small science centers, the Kirby Science Discovery Center in Sioux Falls, SD, and at the Headwaters Science Center in Bemidji, MN. It is anticipated that 72 organizations and 450 CBSO staff members will be served by this project, in addition to over 5,000 members of the general public.
Temple University's "Sisters in Science in the Community (SISCOM)" is a constructivist-based, inclusive youth/community project targeting underrepresented urban middle and high school girls in grades 6-10 and their families; it supports inclusion of girls with disabilities. It engages girls and their parents in hands-on, inquiry-based sports science in after-school, Saturday, and summer programs co-hosted by community-based organizations and Temple University. Girls will also be engaged in student-centered research projects guided by female scientists. With regard to intellectual merit, SISCOM is based on previous research done by Temple on methods for engaging girls and their parents in STEM activities. The infrastructure of research and practices in education will be facilitated through the sharing of information between the network of partners and the national community of formal and informal educators
This project will develop a Digital Technology Institute and Youth Radio Science Desk as new components of the existing Youth Radio organization. The project's Digital Technology Institute and Science Desk will train and engage 450 low-income and underrepresented youth ages 14-24 in Los Angeles, California; Atlanta, Georgia and Washington, DC. An additional 300 youth will be engaged through quarterly community outreach programs. Youth Radio currently reaches wide audiences through traditional media such as NPR and emrging media such as podcasting and vodcasting. This project will produce 60 short-format radio programs for distribution on NPR, iTunes and MTV Interactive, as well as other distribution outlets. Organizational partners include media organizations, scientists and youth organizations around the country, universities and technical partners such as sound and animation studios.
The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center will implement a three-year, research-based community program entitled "Archeology Pathways for Native Learners." This comprehensive program consists of four components or pathways that are designed to increase participation of Native Americans in science. Pathway #1 invites students and teachers from New Haven Public Schools to participate in archaeology field research, which expands to include youth throughout the northeastern US. Students will be involved with site excavation, documentation and analysis of findings in an archaeology laboratory, working with scientists to interpret findings, and communicating the results of research to their peers and through the project Web site. Concurrently, in the first year of the project, Pathway #2 will focus on the expansion of museum programs for youth and community members in addition to the creation of related professional development programs for educators. Pathway #3 calls for replication of the research model at Navajo sites in New Mexico and Arizona during year three, while Pathway #4 emphasizes leadership training workshops for Native Americans from over 50 tribal communities. Workshops will focus on the creation of research-based youth programs in native communities across the country, using a train-the-trainer model to disseminate the model. It is anticipated that this project will reach more than 60,000 youth and community members, in addition to over 450,000 individuals via the Archeology Pathways website.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kevin McBrideMarc BlosverenElizabeth TheobaldGeoffrey BrownTrudie Lamb-Richmond
IDSolutions, in partnership with the National Association of Health Education Centers (NAHEC) and eight NAHEC member organizations will develop an original project to provide informal science education experiences to children, families and the local community via visual communications' technology. This initiative includes building a technical infrastructure that will connect participating Health Education Centers. It will expand beyond the installation of a network and will focus the bulk of its energy on the technology's application -- generating inquiry-based science experiences through active engagement with content that originates from remote locations. Through the creation of an Interactive Videoconferencing Programming Collaborative (IVPC), IDSolutions, NAHEC, and NAHEC Members will produce and disseminate to our target audience of school-age children, families, community groups and teachers, a high volume of science-related programming. The core content of the initial set of programs will be extracted from one of the nation's most popular life science traveling exhibits called "Grossology." These distance-learning programs will originate from a central "studio" location and will be available during the day, after school, on weekends, during summer breaks and holidays. Supporting this effort will be Advanced Animations (designers of "Grossology" and "Experience Science!"), a science education consulting company.
Community Science Workshops: Beginning a National Movement is an extension of a successful, NSF-funded project that created a network of community science centers in California. The San Francisco State University will now take this successful venture to a national level by working with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) to establish a new Community Science Workshop (CSW) 8-10 in underserved communities over the next four years. Once sites are selected, CSW directors participate in an intensive two-week training program. This is followed by visits by site mentors, and ongoing support through the WWW and other media, which contributes to the establishment and eventual sustainability of the centers. Each site partners with larger, established museums and science centers locally to gain much needed assistance with exhibits and education programs. Community Science Workshops contain permanent exhibit space, a workshop area for student projects and classroom/storage space. They serve a variety of audiences through after school, family, school and summer science programs. Potential locations include Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and the District of Columbia.
Colorado State University proposes to identify the framework and infrastructure needed for the university's main campus and pueblo campus to deliver informal science education to school aged youth and their families with a particular focus on Hispanic families. The two-year planning process will include workshops, surveys, focus groups and interviews with key partners in the community that provide programming and advocacy for the targeted audience of school age children and Hispanic families in particular. An advisory board and core team of planners will use data gathered from this process to inform the development of the infrastructure model and to identify STEM concepts and formats, compelling University resources and faculty Professional Development needs in this University/Community partnership. The results of this planning initiative will provide tools, infrastructural plans and community awareness that will support future opportunities for delivering programs to specific school age audiences and developing the capacity of the faculty/staff to work with new audiences. These future efforts will support the ultimate goal of increasing school age children's participation in ISE and ultimately the numbers of Hispanic youth who go on to participate in STEM careers.
Family Science: Expanding Community Support for Inquiry-based Science is the University of Washington's innovative five-year plan for reaching youth and families in the Seattle school district. This program represents an enhancement of the NSF-funded Family Science program targeting grades K-5 and expansion of this successful program to include middle and high school students. The proposed activities, Science Explorations, Inquiry Science Conferences and Community Celebrations, are designed to help parents understand inquiry-based science instruction while heightening students' confidence in their ability to understand science processes. The hands-on activities also support and complement Seattle's Local Systemic Change project by enlisting teachers, parents and community members to champion science education outside of the formal school setting. The implementation strategy includes workshops to train Family Science Lead Teachers and Parent/Community Leaders to coordinate Family Science programs. Subsequent partnerships between teachers and community organizations are designed to establish regional clusters of community networks to support programmatic activities during and beyond the funding period. It is estimated that Family Science will result in the presentation of nearly 300 school and community-based events impacting 10,000 individuals.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Leroy HoodEthan AllenDana RileyPatrick Ehrman