This study focused on girls’ engagement with science and how they negotiate identities with and in opposition to science in a three-year study of community-based afterschool initiatives. Rahm conducted a multi-sited ethnography, observing girls’ whose families had recently immigrated to Montreal, Canada and were participating in a community organization creating science newsletters and science fair projects.
Hamlin provides a how-to guide for leveraging traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) to teach science in indigenous contexts. Her process uses the Vitality Index of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with ethnography to identify TEK. She describes how a community-driven program used TEK to expand the learning opportunities of a historically oppressed group: Maya women in Guatemala.
Hobbyists are excellent learners. They are self-motivated; they seek out new information; they practice and refine their skills. As a result, some develop considerable expertise in their specialist areas. Studying the ways in which hobbyists engage with content may help both formal and informal educators to better understand and support learning.
Fields and Enyedy studied how two students who learned computer programming in an OST program leveraged their skills in the classroom to broker positions as experts in the classroom community. Expert identity is reinforced by the interactions among what students do, how they see themselves, and how others see them.
This article examines middle school girls’ participation in school-day science classes and out-of-school time science clubs to understand the girls’ identification with and relationship to science. Looking at the girls’ science experiences across settings, researchers compared how the identities developed from these experiences supported or worked against the girls’ future trajectories in STEM.
This article discusses the potential for learner engagement in the contexts of a basketball team and a mathematics classroom. The qualitative analysis centers on three aspects of each context: access to the domain, the integral roles available to learners, and opportunities for self-expression.
This paper explores how a school-day science and nutrition curriculum, Choice, Control and Change (C3), shaped student thinking, decision making, and actions outside the classroom. The curriculum taught health science content and engaged students in activities focused on analyzing and changing their personal health choices.
Participants in Kitchen Science Investigators, an afterschool program for middle school students, learn science through cooking, baking, and experimenting with recipes. In-depth case studies analyzed how and why girls begin to scientize, or see their worlds through a scientific lens, and how the program structure supported this shift.
Design-based research (DBR) is a method for testing educational theories while simultaneously studying the process of creating and refining educational interventions. In this article, Sandoval proposes “conjecture mapping” as a technique to guide DBR processes. Conjecture mapping responds to critiques that DBR lacks clear standards and methodological rigor.
In this study, researchers investigated levels of awareness of and responsibility for global climate change in two groups of children. The researchers argue that understanding the nature of beliefs, and how they may be modified by particular influences, is important if educators are to challenge the status quo, in which “the majority of individuals do not believe that they are responsible for or can engage in any actions which will be environmentally efficacious” (Uzzell, 2000, p. 314).
The Computer Clubhouse aims to help inner-city youth gain that type of technological fluency. The Computer Clubhouse is designed to provide inner-city youth with access to new technologies. But access alone is not enough. The Clubhouse is based not only on new technology, but on new ideas about learning and community. It represents a new type of learning community—where young people and adult mentors work together on projects, using new technologies to explore and experiment in new ways.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mitchel ResnickNatalie RuskStina Cooke
This fact sheet presents information on the benefits of out-of-school programs and some of the issues surrounding them, including the need for professional development for practitioners and the importance of 21st century skills.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
National Institute on Out-of-School Time