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.
Museum educators rarely experience ongoing training. They tend to rely on their past experiences of teaching and learning to guide their interactions with learners. Allen and Crowley describe the implementation of a new school trip program that challenged museum educators’ beliefs. The program involved a five-month process of reflective practice and the iterative testing of student-centered, inquiry-based facilitation approaches.
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.
This study examined the ways in which teachers’ beliefs influence their practice when taking students to visit a science and technology museum. The researchers interviewed 14 primary and secondary school teachers before and after their museum visit, which was also observed. They found a clear relationship between teachers’ beliefs about the value of informal, museum-based learning and their goals and actions before, during, and after the visit.
This poster describes the work accomplished by August 2014 for the NSF-funded project "Science of Sharing: Investigating Cooperation, Competition, and Social Interdependence." It was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC.
The mission of the New Mexico Informal Science Education Network (NM ISE Net) is to provide opportunities and resources for informal educators to work together to impact science teaching, science learning, and science awareness throughout the state of New Mexico. The NM Museum of Natural History and Science leads NM ISE Net with support from NM EPSCoR.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
New Mexico Museum of Natural HistorySelena ConnealyCharlie Walter
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. Using STEM America (USA) is a two-year Pathways project designed to examine the feasibility of using informal STEM learning opportunities to improve science literacy among English Language Learner (ELL) students in Imperial County, California.
This review paper summarises the current state of research on professional development in science education. It offers a number of insights and recommendations for the many informal science institutions that offer teacher professional development courses.
In this paper, Paris urges educators to actively value and preserve our multicultural and multilingual society while creating space for growth within and across cultures. This recommended change from culturally responsive pedagogy to culturally sustaining pedagogy entails a shift in both terminology and stance.
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.
This article describes how two inquiry games promoted student science skills in a museum setting while minimizing demands on teachers, fostering collaboration, and incorporating chaperones. Students who played these games engaged in more scientific inquiry behaviors than did students in control groups.
This paper describes a model developed by education researchers seeking to bridge the gap between formal and informal learning contexts. The model matches organisational, cognitive, affective, and social-environmental aspects of learning with four key design principles to create 16 practical steps to help formal and informal educators communicate and cooperate more effectively.