Established in partnership between Bartram’s Garden and Mural Arts Philadelphia, FloatLab, a new public space and floating art object designed by artist J. Meejin Yoon, will allow visitors to engage directly with the Schuylkill River. It will offer an eye-level perspective to explore the intersections of science, nature, and art. Community planning meetings held this year at Bartram’s Garden identified safe riverfront access and youth-enrichment opportunities—especially in STEAM and related fields—as overwhelming neighborhood priorities. Program development and implementation will coincide with major capital investment along the riverfront, aligning new facilities with this new curriculum for greater exploration, access, and understanding.
Creative Discovery Museum (CDM) will fabricate the Little Farm House Exhibit (LFHE) for children ages 0–5 in order to offer their youngest visitors age-appropriate, hands-on, STEM-focused learning opportunities. Since access to high-quality early learning activities is important for brain development and long-term academic success, Chattanooga 2.0—the community’s initiative to transform public education—places a high priority on improving both access to and the quality of early learning environments. The museum will use various methodologies for evaluation, including time and tracking, behavior mapping, observations using an outcomes checklist, and interviews. To gain continuous feedback and input on the LFHE project, CDM leverages partnerships with multiple local organizations and an LFHE Advisory group.
The New England Aquarium will create Conservation STEM — an online curriculum that features engaging videos and hands-on activities aligned with state and national standards that are easily accessible for teachers to use in the classroom. The project responds to a need that the aquarium’s Teacher Advisory Council — composed of Pre-K through 12 teachers from the greater Boston area — identified, which was to help students develop critical and systems thinking skills. It also will provide a means for teachers to engage students with authentic experiences to address real-world problems and build an understanding of the need for a balanced use of the ocean.
The Explora Science Center and Children’s Museum will carry out the “Planting Seeds of STEM” project to address the under-representation of people of color in STEM courses and careers. Through informal science education programming that focuses on the STEM concepts inherent in the agricultural traditions of New Mexico, the project will engage students from communities of color in STEM. The project also aims to increase exposure to STEM role models, especially farmers from communities of color, and spark interest in STEM content and careers. The museum will partner with multiple local organizations and the New Mexico State University Master Gardener Program to implement the project activities.
The Hollister Herbarium at Tennessee Tech University will implement “Rooting Students in their Botanical History” — an educational module targeted for 11th and 12th grade biology students. The module will address “plant blindness,” a phenomenon defined as the failure to notice or appreciate plants. The herbarium will collaborate with three Tennessee high school biology teachers, a videographer, and a graduate research assistant to increase knowledge, awareness, and appreciation of plants over the three-year project. Students also will get to know herbarium specimens as an essential resource for information about the natural world.
The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden will conduct the Million Orchid Project Authentic STEM Initiative to provide inclusive and accessible STEM learning opportunities for approximately 1,800 students annually from the most diverse and under-resourced middle and K-8 schools in Miami–Dade County. The initiative will use the Fairchild's STEMLab — a mobile plant propagation lab designed especially for schoolchildren — to bring the museum’s specialized scientific research to young learners in South Florida neighborhoods. Students and teachers will collect and analyze scientific data, devise research questions, and test hypotheses that will advance local conservation and contribute to the propagation of endangered orchids. Students will have the opportunity to explore STEM careers through interactions with Fairchild botanists.
This summary brief captures highlights from the evaluation report for the first year of the NSF-funded WaterMarks project (also available on this page). The purpose of this document is to communicate key updates from evaluation in a less technical way with the many different audiences who have an interest in keeping up with WaterMarks.
This is the evaluation report for the first year of the NSF-funded WaterMarks project. It reflects an initial summary of available evidence about the intended outcomes of program activities to date, as well as commentary on how the project is using (or could use) this information moving forward. This report contains descriptions of embedded measures (i.e. anonymized drawings and reflections captured on a thematic postcard) included in community walks and analyses of secondary data (i.e., interviews conducted by other members of hte project team), as well as reflections emerging from the
The Key West Tropical Forest and Botanical Garden will strengthen and expand its “Living Laboratory,” a hands-on outdoor youth environmental education program. New curricula will target students in preschool through 6th grade to expand the reach of the program. Additional programming will serve students in middle school and high school, including facilitating guided research projects for students in the district STEM Fair. Partnerships with local organizations will help to expand inclusive programming for at-risk and economically disadvantaged students and make the program free. They will use student-created videos of their experiments and activities to create multimedia online tutorial resources for educators.
The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum will partner with the Flowing Wells Unified School District on “We Bee Scientists,” a program to engage students in grades K–6 in real-world science by learning about bees—the most important group of pollinators. They plan to create a curriculum and related activities aligned with the Arizona science standards. The program is an expansion of the Tucson Bee Collaborative, which empowers community scientists from “K to grey” to contribute to ecosystem health and understanding through the study of native bees. The museum also will partner with Pima Community College and the University of Arizona on the program, which will involve volunteers and high school, college, and university students in documenting the abundance and diversity of native bees.
Many urgent environmental challenges, from soil degradation and water pollution to global climate change, have deep roots in how complex systems impact human well-being, and how humans relate to nature and to each other. Learning In and From the Environment through Multiple Ways of Knowing (LIFEways) is based on the premise that Indigenous stewardship has sustained communities on these lands since time immemorial. This project is collaboratively led by the Indigenous Education Institute and Oregon State University’s STEM Research Center, in partnership with Native Pathways and the Reimagine Research Group, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, World Forestry Center, and a national park network in the Pacific Northwest. The aim of this partnership is to deepen the informal learning field’s understanding of how Indigenous ways of knowing are currently or can be included in outdoor learning environments such as parks, nature preserves, and tribal lands. The project will share practices that center Indigenous worldviews to build awareness of their value and enhance STEM learning in outdoor settings. These approaches engage Native community members in continuing their traditional knowledge and practices, and help non-Native audiences learn from the dynamic interrelationships of the environment in authentic, respectful ways.
Conventional outdoor education is mostly grounded in Western concepts of “conservation” and “preservation” that position humans as acting separately from nature. This Research in Service to Practice project will identify “wise practices” that honor Indigenous ways of knowing, and investigate current capacities, barriers and opportunities for amplifying Indigenous voices in outdoor education. A team of Native and non-Native researchers and practitioners will draw upon Indigenous and Western research paradigms. Methods include Talk Story dialogues, a landscape study using national surveys, case studies, and a Circle of Relations to interpret and disseminate research findings. LIFEways will also document partnership processes to continue to build on the Collaboration with Integrity framework between tribal and non-tribal organizations (Maryboy and Begay, 2012). Findings from the LIFEways project will be shared broadly through a series of webinars, local and national meetings, conferences, and publications.
The goal of this project is to understand and support the development of evidence-based public engagement with science (PES) strategies within STEM research organizations. It specifically seeks to understand how scientists, institutional leaders, and staff within the NSF’s Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network make decisions about the design and implementation of PES activities. The LTER Network includes 28 varied sites across North America and provides a unique opportunity to study PES decision-making within scientific organizations. The project is especially interested in the degree to which these types of organizations consider the interests and assets of local communities, including underrepresented communities. This project will lead to increased capacity for effective, evidence-based PES in an essential sector of the nation’s STEM research infrastructure. The project is a collaboration between PES practitioners within the LTER Network and PES researchers at Michigan State University and Oregon State University.
The project will address three primary research questions: (1) How do scientists, institutional leaders, and staff view and make decisions about the design and implementation of PES? (2) To what degree do PES activities and PES strategies consider the interests and assets of local communities, including those underrepresented in STEM? (3) How, and to what degree, can scientists, institutional leaders, and staff develop shared PES strategies aimed at enhancing reciprocal exchanges and ongoing relationships with communities? The project design includes: (a) surveys and interviews with LTER scientists, institutional leaders, and staff; (b) case studies coupled with strategic engagement planning to investigate the community contexts of PES; (c) a PES working group with LTER scientists and PES-related staff to integrate research and practice; (d) a PES monitoring system for tracking PES activities at LTER sites; and (e) an external advisory board of PES experts and representatives of other STEM research organizations to promote accountability of the work and broaden its impact beyond the LTER Network. The overall hypothesis is that it is possible to improve the effectiveness of PES through a focus on helping scientific organizations develop PES strategies in collaboration with relevant communities.