This conference project will bring together Black children's media creators with climate scientists and developmental psychologists to promote climate science story making that speak to the concerns, circumstances, and experiences of Black audiences.
The conference will convene library leaders, climate researchers and educators, public health experts, and informal educators to examine the current prevalence of climate related programming in libraries, and how the concept of environmental health can be used by libraries to create locally and culturally relevant, change oriented, and equitable STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) learning experiences.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Anne HollandNoah LenstraSteph HarmonPaul Dusenbery
Texas Southern University, in partnership with the Innovation Collaborative, will convene a two-year five-phase working conference project to address these issues. This conference project is housed on an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) campus that has a museum studies program and a university museum.
The conference will provide a critical opportunity for enhancing knowledge around innovation in these areas and sharing lessons learned with and advancing collaboration. The focus will be on collective impact, rural empowerment, and successful rural STEM programs.
The National Academy of Sciences, in partnership with the Nobel Foundation will host the second Nobel Prize Summit: Truth, Trust and Hope on May 24-26, 2023.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Franklin Carrero-Martinez Emi Kameyama
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) will convene a two-day participatory design conference of to identify research and education opportunities in informal settings for supporting literacy concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially for diverse and underserved youth whose communities are impacted by the bias in some AI processes. AI uses computer systems that simulate human intelligence. AI systems impact nearly every aspect of daily living, performing tasks underlying navigation apps, facial recognition, e-payments, and social media. AI can perpetuate inequities and biased outcomes in the culture at large. The conference will explore how to promote engagement and conceptual learning among youth about how AI works and what skills are needed to critically use and apply AI. The conference will also explore ways to support the interests of diverse and underserved children and youth in shaping AI and joining the growing STEM workforce that will use AI in their professions.
The conference will identify key features and needs with respect to AI literacy and explore the specific roles that informal learning can play in advancing AI literacy for youth in diverse and underserved communities. Participants in the conference will include designers, learning scientists, researchers, informal and formal educators, and science center professionals. Attendees will work in separate teams and as a group to explore and critique existing AI tools and learning frameworks, discuss lessons learned from promising AI literacy programs, and identify design principles and future directions for research. Specific attention will be paid to informal mechanisms of engagement, promising networks, and research-practice partnerships that take advantage of the unique affordances of informal learning and community services to accelerate AI literacy for historically excluded youth. The insights gained from this work will result in a set of research and programmatic priorities for informal institutions to promote AI literacy in culturally responsive ways. The resulting published guide and community events will broadly disseminate priorities and design principles generated by this convening to help informal learning institutions and community learning organizations identify both assets and priorities for addressing diversity, equity, access, and inclusion issues related to AI literacy.
The National Girls Collaborative Project and Education Development Center are convening “Advancing the Conversation on Scaling National Informal STEM Programs,” a two-and-a-half day knowledge-building conference that brings together key stakeholders in informal STEM education (ISE) to examine what scale looks like across informal learning settings. Currently, there is not a common definition or set of dimensions related to what it means to scale programs in informal learning settings. Approaches to scale in ISE too often center on the perspectives and needs of people who are developing and spreading programs while less consideration is given to the realities of those responsible for operationalizing programs in hyper-local contexts. This conference approaches the question of scale from the perspective of the program implementers, who are the beneficiaries of capacity building and serve as facilitators of these scaled programs. The conference also gives voice to program developers, researchers, evaluators, and funders of national informal STEM programs who study and support scale in education. The aim of the conference is to develop a new framework for scale in ISE that centers partnership and capacity building of informal educators. Such an approach to scale addresses issues of local access and diversity, equity, and inclusion, and promotes sustainability of ISE in high-need communities.
Conference discussions challenge three common misperceptions of scale across ISE: (1) simple spread and replication of turnkey programs lead to effective scale in ISE; (2) definitions of scale derived from formal learning settings should be used to scale across ISE; and (3) scale across ISE should be defined by program developers and those that seek to study it. Participants with a wide range of perspectives and who represent a diversity of organizational types will attend the conference and work together to articulate scaling success factors, barriers, diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies, and intended outcomes, distilling themes, questions, and concerns about current approaches to evaluating and researching scale in ISE. Together, conference participants will co-create a framework for scale in ISE which will define new and expanded dimensions of scale that center on capacity building and diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as a Program Developer’s Guide for scaling ISE programs through the lens of the framework. These products will increase the knowledge and capacity of informal learning organizations involved in nationally scaled initiatives, STEM-rich institutions wanting to scale their own locally developed programs, informal STEM researchers and evaluators, and the broader field of ISE including program funders. Conference findings will be broadly disseminated through publications, conferences, and a national webinar co-hosted by the National Girls Collaborative Project and Education Development Center.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tara CoxErin Stafford
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Informal learning institutions--museums, libraries, news organizations, and others--work to inform their audiences about the rapidly emerging scientific consensus on various topics. Often this information invites action such as social distancing during a pandemic. What motivates people to act upon that information (or not)? When recommended actions can yield good or bad outcomes for oneself, the information needs to fit with motivational tendencies towards preventing bad outcomes and/or promoting good outcomes. Recent theories indicate similar motives for recommended actions that affect others: family, friends, neighbors, and up the scale to the societal and the biological world. This small virtual conference will bring together STEM researchers and practitioners to offer a transdisciplinary and practically minded critique of the model of moral motives and discuss its implications for actions related to STEM topics. Specifically, the conference will use data collected by NSF RAPID grant (#2027939) that connects people’s news consumption, their compliance with COVID-19 prevention recommendations, and their judgments of whose wellbeing (from self to society) recommended behaviors protect or promote.
This small virtual conference will recruit approximately 16 attendees including transdisciplinary scholars whose work addresses social responsibility in the context of STEM informal learning and practitioners from a broad range of sectors including science centers, libraries, zoos, and the media. Individual disciplines will include anthropology, psychology, the interdisciplinary fields of the learning sciences and judgement and decision-making. The conference strategy will include synchronous, asynchronous, and small group collaborations in addition to full-group discussion. Conference activities will spread over 8 weeks. The structure of the conference is loosely based on the Open Space Technology approach (i.e.: General & Lantelme, 2014, Owen 1997). To build capacity in these various informal learning sectors participants will distill implications about moral motives into practical advice to publish in the conference proceedings that will include a report on the initial and collaboratively revised models. An editable version of the proceedings will allow registered practitioners to further critique and develop that advice. The conference proceedings will be distributed as a short Creative Commons e-book with copies and links distributed on the website of the Center for Advancing Informal STEM Education , and through all the participant’s professional research and practitioner societies.
Many scientists want to connect with the public, but their efforts to do so are not always easy or effective. Visionary programs and institutions are leading the way identifying the support needed to enable scientists’ connections with the public. However, the current appetite by -- and demand for -- scientists to do this exceeds the capacity of those who facilitate quality communication and engagement efforts. More can be done to ensure that those who support scientists are networked, sharing best practices, and supported by a reliable infrastructure.
This workshop series, convened by the Kavli, Rita Allen, Packard and Moore Foundations, was intended to view the entire system of people who support scientists’ engagement and communication efforts in order to explore how this system can be most effective and sustainable. The discussions examined where this system is thriving, the limits people within the system face and what can be done to ensure their efforts are commensurate with the demand for quality communication and engagement support.
Conducted over four closely scheduled workshops in late 2017 and early 2018, the convenings brought together leaders in different parts of the field who bridge scientists and the public and led to the emergence of a number of key priority areas. While the initial intention was to also hold a plenary event to provide a more holistic view of scientists’ support system in order to collectively discern directions to advance the field, we feel a more efficient way forward right now is to focus our efforts and resources on building community and advancing these priority areas.
Our invitation-only workshops brought together scientists, academic leaders, engagement professionals, researchers, communication trainers, and foundation leaders. For each workshop, we also commissioned a “landscape overview”, to better understand the high-level state of each community. Workshops included:
Workshop I: Communication and engagement training programs - Dec. 4-5, 2017 at SUNY Global Center/Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science in New York
Workshop II: Associations, societies and other professional organizations - Feb. 28 - March 1, 2018 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, MD
Workshop III: Academic institutions - March 27-28, 2018 at UC San Diego
Workshop IV: Science engagement facilitators (museums, science festivals, connectors) - May 2-3, 2018 at Monterey Bay Aquarium
TBD - Workshop V: Plenary event
The goal of the workshops was to explore how to ensure scientists’ communication and engagement support is effective and sustained. In doing so, we hoped to 1) deepen our understanding of how scientists are currently supported in these areas, 2) map the broader support system to expose the opportunities and obstacles that play a role in achieving this goal, and 3) identify strategic and practical next steps that move us closer to this goal. This initiative also aimed to forge and strengthen networks across communities and institutions – and in so doing, take a view of the entire system to explore how everyone can better ensure their efforts are impactful, mutually supportive, and connected to a greater whole.
Included in the links below are summaries from each workshop.
The Department of Education of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, with broad participatory support from free-standing, university-based and regional natural history museums across the nation will conduct a 3-day national conference on informal science learning in natural history settings. The goal of this conference will be to develop and disseminate a sustained, collaborative learning research agenda that begins to address the role of natural history museums in natural history learning and establish an infrastructure for communication and collaboration to pursue the research agenda. The conference builds on recent meetings among museums and informal learning professionals to this topic. Executive and Leadership Committees will implement a scaffolded project design involving a sweep of evaluation reports and audience research from the field, a foundational literature review, Committee workshops to review the field, conference planning and call for participation, and pre-conference dialogue through professional organizations and activities. The conference, to be held in Washington, DC in Spring-Summer 2012, will be followed by broad post-conference dissemination of findings and a call to action around the conference-generated research agenda. The conference will be evaluated by Oberg Research, an external audience research and evaluation firm. Oberg will develop an evaluation process that measures the quality, relevance, and impact of pre-conference, conference, and post-conference activities using an ethnographic fieldwork methodology involving in-depth interviews and participant observation of conference activities. The intended outcomes and impacts of this national conference are to develop, initiate, and disseminate a collaborative and sustained learning research agenda about how the 800 natural history museums in the United States can best use their resources for STEM learning. Among the topics to be considered by the Conference are new models for interaction among educators, curators, collection managers, exhibit professionals and museum leadership; audience research to more fully understand audiences and their needs; new technologies for discovery and learning regarding rapid response and current science; public participation in scientific research (citizen science); and collaboration in learning research across the Natural History field.