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.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Julie RisienKim BernardSusan Roberta RowePeter Betjemann
This project centers on an Indigenous Scholars program, immersing students in land-based learning to deepen a relationship with their homeland while understanding how legal and political conflicts impact environmental and community health. Students will explore ways of knowing in language, mathematics, science, arts, and society and culture, through sessions led by scholars versed in Indigenous methodologies.
Explora Science Center and Children's Museum of Albuquerque will conduct “Roots: supporting Black scholars in STEAM,” a project to increase Explora’s relationships with and relevance to Albuquerque’s Black communities and increase opportunities for Black students in Albuquerque to pursue STEAM. The project is designed to foster a holistic, place-based approach to K–16 STEAM learning that incorporates a growth mindset and highlights the contributions of community members, particularly Black STEAM professionals. The museum will collaborate on project activities with the Mexico Black Leadership Council, the Greater Albuquerque Housing Partnership/Casa Feliz, the Community School at Emerson Elementary, and Sandia National Laboratories’ Black Leadership Committee.
The Children’s Museum will collaborate with six Hartford Public Library branches, three Hartford Family Centers, and the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center to provide hands-on Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) - based programs to over 1,000 local 3 to 14-year old children and their care givers. Program design and development will include planning for field trips to the museum. All participants will be given age-specific, supplemental STEAM materials to continue their learning activities at home, and families can attend more than one week of library programs, or more than three Saturdays of family center programs. The goal will be to help urban Hartford youths find new pathways toward responsible citizenry and fiscal stability.
The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan's Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways will organize a four-day educational symposium to build a better understanding of Native American culture and history. The project will begin with a forum to foster dialogue on the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Saginaw. The forum will discuss the treaty's impact on sovereignty and relationships between natives and non-natives and the loss of continuity of language, culture, and the practice of traditional art forms. The forum will include representatives from the 25 tribes whose children attended the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. The representatives will share cultural stories and traditional methods through birch bark, black ash, elm and sweet grass basket making. The symposium will conclude on Michigan Indian Day with science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) activities for area students.
KID Museum will develop and test a framework for working with community organizations to design learning experiences and create a facilitation guide for integrating cultural appreciation with maker-based learning. Building on its established Cultural Days programming, the museum will partner with four organizations that represent the region's largest ethnic populations. Together, they will plan, design, prototype, and refine new programs and experiences for children ages 4 to 14 and their families. The project team will adapt an IMLS-funded STEM-expert co-development model to develop and present cultural programs both at the museum and in the community. The project team will evaluate and refine the programs through visitor surveys. The museum will share the resulting framework and facilitation guide with other informal learning spaces to support the implementation of similar programs.
Through the T523: Formative Evaluation for Educational Product Development course, our team conducted a semester-long formative evaluation for the Museum of Science, Boston (MoS) Gaia Exhibit. The Gaia Exhibit (Gaia) is a new, temporary art installation located in the MoS’s Blue Wing exhibition hall. Gaia that strives to inspire appreciation for the earth and climate change awareness. The exhibit displays imagery of the Earth’s surface on a twenty feet diameter, three-dimensional globe. Additional exhibit elements include projected questions on the floor to prompt reflection and exhibit-
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Programming includes
Neighborhood Walks led by teams of scientists/engineers and artists
Community Workshops, Local Artist Projects, and Youth Mentorship focused on neighborhood and citywide water issues
Intergenerational participation, from seniors and adult learners to young adults, teens, and middle schoolers
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Our overarching goal is to better understand the particulars of how and why youth co-make in life-based and STEM-rich ways with families and communities, such that we can better infrastructure community-based maker programs in support of youth learning and well-being.
The call for more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education taking place in informal settings has the potential to shape future generations, drive new innovations and expand opportunities. Yet, its power remains to be fully realized in many communities of color. However, research has shown that using creative embodied activities to explore science phenomena is a promising approach to supporting understanding and engagement, particularly for youth who have experienced marginalization. Prior pilot work by the principal investigator found that authentic inquiries into science through embodied learning approaches can provide rich opportunities for sense-making through kinesthetic experience, embodied imagining, and the representation of physics concepts for Black and Latinx teens when learning approaches focused on dance and dance-making. This Research in Service to Practice project builds on prior work to better understand the unique opportunities for learning, engagement, and identity development for these youth when physics is explored in the context of the Embodied Physics Learning Lab Model. The model is conceptualized as a set of components that (1) allow youth to experience and utilize their intersectional identities; (2) impact engagement with physics ideas, concepts and phenomena; and (3) lead to the development of physics knowledge and other skills. The project aims to contribute to more expansive definitions of physics and physics learning in informal spaces. While the study focuses primarily on Black and Latinx youth, the methods and discoveries have the potential to impact the teaching of physics for a much broader audience including middle- and high-school children, adults who may have been turned off to physics at an earlier age, and undergraduate physical science majors who are struggling with difficult concepts. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.
The research is grounded in sociocultural perspectives on learning and identity, embodied interaction and enactive cognition, and responsive design. The design is also informed by the notion of “ArtScience” which highlights commonalities between the thinking and making practices used by artists and by scientists and builds on the theoretical philosophy that all things can be understood through art or through science but integrating the two lenses allows for more complete understandings. Research will investigate the relationship between embodied learning approaches, design principles, and structures of the Embodied Physics Learning Lab model using the lenses of physics, dance, and integrated ArtScience to better understand the model. The project employs design-based research to address two overarching research questions: (1) What unique opportunities for learning, engagement, and identity development for Black and Latinx youth occur when physics is explored in the context of the Embodied Physics Learning Lab Model? and (2) How do variations in site demographics and site implementation influence the impact and scalability of the Learning Lab model? Further, the inquiry will consider (a) how youth experience and utilize their intersectional various identities in the context of the activities, structures, and essential elements of the embodied physics learning lab; (b) how youth's level of physics engagement changes depending on which embodied learning approaches and essential element structures are used; (c) the physics knowledge and other skills youth attain through the set of activities; and (d) how, if at all, the embodied learning approaches engage youth in thinking about their own agency as STEM doers. An interdisciplinary team of researchers, choreographers, and youth along with community organizations will co-design and implement project activities across four sites. Approximately 200 high school youth will be engaged; 24 will have the role of Teen Thought Partner. Through three iterative design cycles of implementation, the project will refine the model to investigate which elements most affect successful implementation and to identify the conditions necessary for scale-up. Data will be collected in the form of video, field notes, pre- and post- interviews, pre- and post- surveys, and artifacts created by the youth. Analyses will include a combination of interaction analysis, descriptive data analysis, and movement analysis. In addition to the research findings and explication of the affordances and constraints of the model, the project will also create a curricular resource, including narrative text and video demonstrations of physics concepts led by the teen thought partners, video case training modules, and assessment tools.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Folashade Cromwell SolomonDionne Champion
For many youth, gaining access to quality STEM (science, technology, engineering mathematics) experiences is a challenge. Inequity and underrepresentation of youth of color in STEM persist. The makerspace movement holds great promise in broadening participation in STEM among youth from underrepresented communities. Makerspaces are defined as collaborative workspaces inside a library, school, or other community location designed for creating, learning, exploring, and sharing with high- to low-tech tools. Despite the availability of making programs focused on STEM activities targeted towards youth of color, the field has few models for designing these programs in ways that build upon youths’ cultural assets and desires for making. Working collaboratively with youth, families, and maker educators in Lansing, Michigan, and Greensboro, North Carolina, this project aims to deepen the field’s understanding about the rich and deep ingenuity in STEM-based making that youth from underrepresented communities can engage. These insights will be leveraged towards advancing community-based maker programming across four community-based makerspaces. The project will also build capacity among STEM-oriented maker educators, researchers, and youth. This model is important because the voices and perspectives of families and communities have been largely absent from the formative knowledge and theory-building processes of the field of makerspace education.
This project will build new knowledge about how and why youth and families make at home, in communities, and in STEM-based maker programs. Collaborators for the project include the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and four STEM- and youth-oriented making spaces in Lansing, Michigan, and Greensboro, North Carolina. This project will take place in two phases, exploring two main research questions: 1) What are the learning results of making at home and in the community? And 2) How do youth organize community resources for sustained STEM making, and what facilitates or hinders such organization? Phase one investigates the community resources (people, tools, materials, knowledge, data, and spaces) youth leverage towards making and how they do so across time. The project will study how youth connect these resources to STEM-rich making and what youth and families learn in the process. In phase two, design-based research will be used to apply phase one insights to the design of community-based STEM-rich maker programs in four maker clubs in Michigan and North Carolina. This work will develop an understanding of youths’ family and community-based STEM-based making practices, including the community resources (people, tools, materials, knowledge, data, and spaces) that youth leverage.
This Research in Service to Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.