Great question, Ellis.  Over the past three years, we've worked with our partnering scientists and engineers in different ways.  We started by selecting people who all had prior outreach experience, yet, we found that they needed additional supports to facilitate the programs in the libraries and museums. More specifically, the scientists and engineers weren't used to teach in a dialogical way where families talk to each other. The STEM professionals were often more comfortable using slides and lecture-based pedagogies. So, our strategy was to consult with scientists and engineers as we were designing the program, then again once the curricula were designed, and then again after they lead their first workshop. Meeting and working together was key to get to a common understanding. For instance, we found we were using many of the same words and concepts, but we had different meanings for these ideas. So in the end, we found multiple meetings before and after the workshops -- plus designing our later version of the curricula to have "facilitation tips" helped.  

Thanks, Elysa.  We did provide a take-home bookmark or information about other related activities. Plus, at some programs, the children's librarians and youth services staff put out books related to our topic.  While some families did say they were going to do these activities at home, we weren't able to track them at home with our research methodology. A follow-up survey or a way to get back in touch with them would be great in the future!

Hello, William, thanks for asking about our workshops. 

The science and engineering workshops are between 60-75 minutes.  We use a simplified driving question and adapted the project-based learning project due to the short time frame.  For instance, our STEM professionals engage families in questions such as "How do astronomer classify galaxies?" and "How do bumblebees work together in a colony?". 

The librarians helped us craft the program, pick the topics, and align with the interests of their communities.  This way the librarians provide help craft the programs to fit into their communities' learning ecosystem. Timewise, the involvement of librarians varies; in some partnering libraries, there is a full-time children's librarian, but in most libraries, the youth services staff members are part-time. So, we adapt our program based on the needs, time, and resources of each library in order to reflect final workshop products that are adaptable to many different library situations. 

To get at the impact of the program, we use a video-based research methodology to examine how families talk about science together.  We code learners' videos across all workshops as an overview of the program as well as go in-depth in case study analyses.  Finally, we also employ a short survey at the end of the program. 

Heather, thanks for providing all the additional details, this is really helpful in understanding your approach. As your evaluation results become available, I hope you will share them with the informal science field on www.informalscience.org!

Thanks, Margaret, for this question!  We are still analyzing these data (when possible, we conducted interviews with the STEM professionals after their workshops in addition to the videotaped workshops, and we are now swinging back to conduct end-of-project interviews with them too).  We have received feedback from some of our experts that they are both more willing to participate in the future, and in one case, that one partner wants to redo her team's outreach to more fully align to these learning sciences/informal learning theories.  We are going to do a more systemic look at our data and see how common these intentions for new kinds of future involvement are. 

 In the meantime, we do have one open-access article in the journal International Journal of Science Education: Family connections to local science issues: how scientists use questions to engage families in personally-relevant learning during science-themed workshops.  (Open-access means it is free to download, without a subscription to the journal.)  In this analysis, led by Lucy McClain, our team looked at how the question prompts (for the families) that we designed into the curricula were taken up by a subset of our STEM professionals.   This analysis allowed us to redesign some of our curricula and "training" meetings with scientists. 

Thanks for the response - and the extra resource. I look forward to following your project results.

Margaret

Hi Rebecca, thanks for this question about parent involvement.  All of the workshops required an adult and youth to work together, so rather than parent outreach, we designed for parent-child interaction from the start. This design intention was supported by our library and museum partners who see parents wanting to be active learning partners with their children. 

Hi Brooks, thank you for your question! The programs are designed to be facilitated by subject matter experts. Our library and museum partners have played an integral part behind the scene, helping us to design the programs to suit the needs of the rural communities we are working within. 

Hi Michelle, thank you for your question! We are in the final stages of collecting data on this research project and are working on finalizing the curricula for publication, so the programs are not available quite yet. We are planning on making these programs available for public use later this year, likely sometime in the fall, so please keep us in mind if these programs are of interest to you! 

Hi Jason, thank you for your question! Our library and museum partners have played an integral role in the development of these programs. We have repeatedly met with local rural librarians and museum directors in order to ensure that the curricula we developed met the needs of the communities we were going to work within. Their input has been invaluable in shaping the programming content. 

Once the programs are available to the public (sometime this fall), it is our intention for librarians to be able to use these programs as a resource, through which they can make connections with STEM professionals and provide STEM content to their community.

Hi Kelli, thank you for your question about the role of the STEM professionals. That is a very important component of the project that is not quite as highlighted in this video, as you noted. The STEM professionals introduce the topic and the content, but they also share their personal origin story of how they became interested in their STEM area of expertise. Most of the time, it is a story from their childhood. For example, one meteorologist involved in the project would share how an early experience with tornados in his hometown shaped his interest in meteorology as a potential career.

In addition, the STEM professionals are encouraged to walk around and engage the families as they complete activities, and to engage the workshop participants as a group during sharing periods. The design of the programs does encourage a higher level of interaction within families, but the STEM professionals do interact throughout the workshop with families.

One of our overall intentions with the STEM professional as facilitator was to illustrate to children and their families that scientists are everyday people in the community just like they are, so they act as a role model while also delivering content.

Are STEM professionals given that format to follow then (e.g., introduce topic/content, share their story, etc), or is this something that they have done spontaneously? Also, have you found that children and families remember or relate to these personal stories?

I ask because the project I am working on is trying to disentangle what it is about interactions with a role model that is most influential to students. So I was interested in whether this is something you have explored in your project as well.  

Thanks for the question, Kelli!  We invite the stem professionals to develop their own story from their perspective (without following a format); however, then we have the workshops designed as "educative curricula." (See https://www.collaborativeclassroom.org/blog/what-is-an-educative-curriculum/ for more details on this approach.)  The original educative curriculum idea was to support teachers to learn more about instructional strategies and we are adapting this idea that be an educative curriculum that includes the kinds of facilitation techniques that engineers and scientists need to know to better teach families.

Great question, Amy! One of the reasons that we designed the program the way we did was to build capacity in rural communities for these types of family workshops. In many rural communities, some people are heavily trained in science or engineering working from a distance for tech firms; working for farms, ranches, or agribusinesses; working for land-grant universities; working on experimental field plots; and who have started or work for in small businesses.  So, while it does take time to build partnerships and capacity of the scientists, engineers, and other professionals to facilitate programs with an interactive, conversational teaching style, the curricula that we developed, in partnership with the libraries and STEM professionals, can support rural engineers and scientists to connect families to their STEM disciplines and explain their careers. There are other models to do this work of connecting families and STEM, and in that spirit, we hope that the research from our project will provide principles on how to enrich STEM learning experiences in communities. 

Thanks, Deanna!  We are currently analyzing the families' talk and we'll be able to say more soon about this.  We'll be presenting two analyses (one on the engineering workshop, one on the astronomy workshop) at the upcoming Interaction Design and Children conference in June . . . if you are interested in the research findings on the family talk, let us know.  We can email you the papers in mid-June.

Hi Martha, thanks for asking this question -- it is important to think about how these workshops fit into people's experiences.  The STEM Pillars workshops were not only designed to be taught by scientists and engineers in rural/ small libraries and museums, but they were also designed in conversation with them.  The water workshops were taught primarily by conservation district staff members who engage the general public in these topics regularly and the same with the pollinator scientists who work with farmers, growers, beekeepers, hobbyists, gardeners, and the general public at large outreach events. That said, fracking hasn't come up in our water workshop  -- it focuses on green building and landscaping --  but, the pollinator decline has come up, primarily when parents ask questions.  The STEM professionals, in this case, focus on what science knows and doesn't know -- and how they are addressing figuring out what we don't know.  We do have information available on changes individual families can make in regard to pollinators (native plants, avoiding certain lawn chemicals, creating habitat for bees).  The librarians, in many libraries, also put out books for the youths and adults on related topics.  So, in sum, our focus has been on providing a hands-on experience with a STEM professional that provides a connection to the topic, some information about the topic, and some next steps for individual families to take.  We haven't gotten into civic engagement or collective actions that can be implemented by larger community groups -- but that seems like a good next step for the field.  How have you engaged these ideas in your own work?

Thanks, for the question, Jessica. The librarians and museum educators set up the programs to fit into their normal family offerings,  and then the STEM professionals lead the actual workshops.  Our team has been working with the STEM professions to prepare as well as wrote the curricula for them (i.e., it has less content presented since this is based on their workshop and more facilitation tips since many have not offered project-based, question-driven workshops before.