Oregon State University (OSU) will facilitate a Polar STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) program that aims to increase the impact and visibility of polar science by integrating arts- and education-based elements into the polar science research setting.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Julie RisienKim BernardSusan Roberta RowePeter Betjemann
Milwaukee has established itself as a leader in water management and technology, hosting a widely recognized cluster of industrial, governmental, nonprofit, and academic activity focused on freshwater. At the same time, Milwaukee faces a wide range of challenges with freshwater, some unique to the region and others common to cities throughout the country. These challenges include vulnerability to flooding and combined sewer overflows after heavy rainfall, biological and pharmaceutical contamination in surface water, lead in drinking water infrastructure, and inequity in access to beaches and other recreational water amenities. Like other cities, Milwaukee grapples with the challenges global climate change imposes on urban water systems, including changing patterns of precipitation and drought.
These problems are further complicated by Milwaukee's acute racial and economic residential segregation. With a population of approximately 595,000, embedded within a metropolitan area of over 1.5 million, Milwaukee remains one of the country's most segregated cities. There is increasing urgency to engage the public--and especially those who are most vulnerable to environmental impacts--more deeply in the stewardship of urban water and in the task of creating sustainable urban futures. The primary goal of this four-year project is to foster community-engaged learning and environmental stewardship by developing a framework that integrates art with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) experiences along with geography, water management, and social science. Synergies between STEM learning and the arts suggest that collaborations among artists, scientists, and communities can open ways to bring informal learning about the science of sustainability to communities.
WaterMarks provides an artist generated conceptual framework developed by Mary Miss / City as Living Laboratory (CALL) to help people better understand their relationship to the water systems and infrastructure that support their lives. Project activities include artist/scientist/community member-led Walks, which are designed to engage intergenerational participants both from the neighborhoods and from across the city, in considering the conditions, characteristics, histories, and ecosystems of neighborhoods. Walks are expanded upon in Workshops with residents, local scientists/experts, and other stakeholders, and include exploring current water-related environmental challenges and proposing solutions. The Workshops draw on diverse perspectives, including lived experience, scientific knowledge, and policy expertise. Art projects created by local artists amplify community engagement with the topics, including programming for teens and young adults. Free Wi-Fi will be integrated into various Marker sites around the city providing access to online, self-guided learning opportunities exploring the water systems and issues facing surrounding neighborhoods. Current programming focuses primarily on Milwaukee's predominantly African American near North Side and the predominantly Latinx/Hispanic near South Side. Many neighborhoods in these sections are vulnerable to such problems as frequent flooding, lead contamination in drinking water, inequities in safety and maintenance of green space, and less access to Lake Michigan, the city's primary natural resource and recreational amenity.
The WaterMarks project advances informal STEM learning in at least two ways. First, while the WaterMarks project is designed to fit Milwaukee, the project includes the development of an Adaptable Model Guide. The Guide is designed so that other cities can modify and employ its inclusive structure, programming, and process of collaboration among artists, scientists, partner organizations, and residents to promote citywide civic engagement in urban sustainability through the combination of informal STEM learning and public art. The Guide will be developed by a Community-University Working Group (CULab) hosted by UW-Milwaukee's Center for Community-Based Learning, Leadership, and Research and made up of diverse community and campus-wide stakeholders. In addition to overseeing the Guide’s creation, CULab will conceptualize onboarding and mentorship strategies for new participants as well as a framework for the program’s expansion and sustainability.
Second, through evaluation and research, the project will build a theoretical model for the relationships among science learning, engagement with the arts, and the distinctive contexts of different neighborhoods within an urban social-ecological system. The evaluation team, COSI’s Center for Research and Evaluation, and led by Co-PI Donnelly Hayde, aims to conduct formative, summative, and process evaluation of the Watermarks project, with the additional goal of producing evaluative research findings that can contribute to the broader field of informal learning. Evaluation foci include: How does the implementation of WaterMarks support positive outcomes for the project’s communities and the development of an adaptable model for city-scale informal science learning about urban environments? 2. To what extent do the type and degree of outcome-related change experienced by participating community residents vary across and/or between project sites? What factors, if any, appear to be linked to these changes? 3. To what extent and in what ways do the activities of the WaterMarks projects appear to have in situ effects related to the experience of place at project sites?
The project’s research team led by PI Ryan Holifield and Co-PI Woonsup Choi, will investigate how visual artistic activities introduced by the programming team as part of the Walks (and potentially other engagement activities) interact with personal, sociocultural, and physical contexts to produce distinctive experiences and outcomes of informal science learning about urban water systems. The aim of the research will be to synthesize the results from the different WaterMarks sites into an analysis generalizable beyond specific neighborhoods and applicable to other cities. The project's research questions include: 1. How does participation in Walks focused on visual artistic activities affect outcomes and experiences of informal STEM learning about urban water systems? 2. How do outcomes and experiences of informal STEM learning vary across different urban water topics, participants from different demographic groups, and contrasting sociocultural and biophysical contexts?
This Innovations in Development project is led by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), in collaboration with City as Living Laboratory (CALL) and the COSI Center for Research and Evaluation.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. This two-year Pilots and Feasibility project seeks to build knowledge and strategic impact in the informal STEM learning field by studying how and why science-education-art collaborations yield impactful informal STEM learning experiences. By design and implementing interactive and participatory experiences for adult audiences, this project will build knowledge about how to help communities learn about environmental science and apply scientific knowledge to environmental decision-making in their lives.
The project's two overarching research questions are: (1) What are the essential elements of collaboration among scientists, educators, and artists that support learning about adaptation in a changing environment? (2) In what ways do designed, participatory, informal science learning experiences support participant learning? This pilot project will: a) develop methods for facilitating and assessing collaboration among scientists, educators, and artists; b) pilot and refine approaches for engaging scientists, educators, and artists with community members for high quality participatory experiences focus on learning about adaptation to environmental change in informal learning settings; c) pilot and refine methods to measure the outcomes for community participants on knowledge about environmental change and its application to problems in their everyday lives. This project is innovative in bridging a diverse body of scholarship in order to study the process of collaboration and the specific ways interdisciplinary collaborations foster learning. Because informal STEM learning settings often combine the work of multiple disciplines, examining the process and outcomes of collaborative, participatory STEM learning has the potential to deliver widely applicable guidance for achieving more impactful educational outcomes.
The proposed project will broaden participation by engaging adult members of environmentally vulnerable communities in participatory STEM activities and will improving individual and community well-being by delivering tools for future decision-making. The collaborative project will build valuable partnerships and capacity between disparate sectors of society, allowing co-learning and co-production of knowledge. Results will be published in scholarly journals as well as shared with community participants.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Amy LesenSameer HonwadAma RoganCalvin Mackie
This program will derive knowledge on extreme weather and its concepts to be shared with youth in the Boston and Kansas City areas. Subsequently, the youth will share this knowledge by displaying it as art work on the rapid transit systems. The art projects will culminate in broad-based exhibition at the end of each group's sessions. The project will involve 200 youth per region resulting in an impact of 1000 youth per year, 80 adult mentors and 20,000 adult transportation riders in learning about extreme weather concepts. Participant organizations are the University of Mass-Boston, University of Mass-Lowell, The Massachusetts College of Art, the University of Kansas Center for Research Inc., and the Goodman Research Group Inc.
The goals of this project are to bring the topic of extreme weather to the foreground by educating youth and in turn having them educate a selected group of adults that use the rapid transit system. Groups of youths will learn about the topic through a series of meetings with mentors who are experts on the issues around extreme weather. The youth will derive their own art-works with their interpretation. These art-works will be displayed on the rapid transit systems in New England (Merrimack Valley and Worcester regions) and the Mid-West (Topeka and Kansas City areas). Using a quasi-experimental mixed methodology (demographics, bus ridership, initial level of science awareness, and interest) the goal is to understand science learning outcomes associated with the creation and public display of youth art. Research questions of importance in this regard are 1. In what ways does blending art with the science enhance youth learning about extreme weather concepts? 2. To what extent does youth art support adult learning of science? and 3. How does regional context affect learning about extreme weather?
Broader impacts will result from the youth diversity as well as the diversity of riders of the rapid transit systems where the art of extreme weather is displayed.
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert ChenLois HetlandJill LohmeierStephen MisholSteven SchrockClaudia Bode
‘6 Degrees of Connection’ is an informative and memorable program that combines a one-hour Science On a Sphere® interactive presentation with a follow-up creative art activity – each aspect of which encourages middle school students to think of interconnections among phenomena on the planet, including the natural world and human activity.
The ‘6 Degrees of Connection’ program was developed by the Nurture Nature Center (Easton PA) in collaboration with the Maryland Science Center (Baltimore MD) through an extensive process of developing the concept, prototypes, and final program. Lehigh
Human-induced global change has triggered the sixth major extinction event on earth with profound consequences for humans and other species. A scientifically literate public is necessary to find and implement approaches to prevent or slow species loss. Creating science-inspired art can increase public understanding of the current anthropogenic biodiversity crisis and help people connect emotionally to difficult concepts. In spite of the pressure to avoid advocacy and emotion, there is a rich history of scientists who make art, as well as art–science collaborations resulting in provocative work
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jennifer HarrowerJennifer ParkerMartha Merson
As part of its overall effort to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. In alignment with these aims, the STEM + Digital Literacies (STEM+L) project will investigate science fiction as an effective mechanism to attract and immerse adolescents (ages 10-13) from diverse cultural backgrounds in environmental and human health content and socio-scientific issues. This work is particularly novel, as the current knowledge base is limited, and largely addresses the high school level. Therefore, the results of the proposed effort could yield important findings regarding the feasibility of this activity as an effective platform for science learning and engagement for younger students. As such, STEM+L would not only advance knowledge in the field but would also contribute to a growing AISL portfolio on digital literacy and learning.
STEM+L is an early stage Innovations in Development project that will engage thirty middle school students in out of school time experiences. Over a twenty-four-week period, students will work collaboratively in groups in-person and online with their peers and field experts to design, develop, and produce STEM content rich, multimedia science fictions. The in-person learning experiences will take place on the University of Miami campus during the summer and academic year. Culminating activities include student presentations online and at a local Science Fiction Festival. The research component will employ an iterative, design-based approach. Four research questions will be explored: (a) How do students learn science concepts and multimodal digital literacies through participating in the STEM+L Academy? (b) How do students change their views in STEM related subject matter and in pursuing STEM related careers? (c) How do students participate in the STEM+L Academy? (d) How do we best support students' participation and learning of STEM+L in face-to-face and online environments? Data collection methods include video records, student-generated artifacts, online surveys, embedded assessments, interviews, and multimodal reflections. Comparative case analysis and a mixed methods approach will be employed. A rigorous evaluation will be conducted by a critical external review board. Inclusive and innovative dissemination strategies will ensure that the results of the research and program reach a broad range of audiences including both informal and formal STEM and literacy educators and researchers, learning scientists, local communities, and policy makers through national and international conference presentations, journal publications, Web2.0 resources, and community outreach activities.
Taking a wider view, departing from the specific case of the Hamburg exchange between artists and climate scientists, this comment envisages some radical potential for the collaboration of artists and climate scientists: moving beyond the traditional boundaries of social systems, artistic research and climate science may engage in a shared transdisciplinary learning process. They may communicate with the rest of society by engaging with others to develop ‘spaces of possibilities’, thus nurturing the creative resilience of communities.
The notion of ‘artistic research’ is a buzzword in contemporary cultural policy, scientific and artistic discourses. This text is not trying to add another note to the polyphony of attempts to define the concept. Rather, it aims to trace and analyse some possible backgrounds of emergence, suggesting that the myriad of definitions and descriptions of artistic research is rooted in the most varying and to a point contradictory motivations.
Many climate scientists find themselves confronted with the challenge of purportedly “knowing better” — while this is a valid claim with respect to a small segment of reality, namely their narrow field of expertise, the public expectation often is that they know better about the “world’s problems”, and what to do about it, sometimes even with the rhetoric of “saving” the world. Artists may help in this situation by bringing forth different viewpoints, challenging hidden assumptions and suggesting surprising links; however, more often, the arts seem to be considered as a useful supporter in
To observe art and science in interaction offered a great opportunity for me as cultural anthropologist to learn about the production of climate knowledge. Like ethnographers, artists entered the world of science, observed climate scientists and participated in their daily routines. They dissected elements of the scientific process and focused on science as a social practice. For scientists and artists, a process of “self-identification via the other” [Kramer, 1993] was set into motion. The artwork reflects this process by “mimicking” scientific procedures and by linking human sentiment and