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Chapter 9
Formal/Informal Science Learning through Civic Engagement: Both Sides of the Education Equation Alan J. Friedman1 and Ellen F. Mappen*,2 1Consultant
for Museum Development and Science Communication, New York, New York 2Senior Scholar, National Center for Science and Civic Engagement, Washington, DC *E-mail:
[email protected] The SENCER-ISE project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Noyce Foundation, sought to explore the potential for building long term collaborations between undergraduate science education institutions and informal science education organizations such as science centers, museums and the science media. The pilot project developed some promising approaches, while clarifying the barriers to be overcome in crossing the higher education/informal education divide.
Introduction Education in America has tended to be divided into distinct, largely independent systems, including K-12 and higher education (HE) and within higher education, 2- and 4-year colleges and undergraduate, graduate, post-doctoral programs. There is also the broad area of informal science education (ISE), which includes after school programs and the ideal of lifelong learning. The separation between these segments often leads to problems, with undergraduate colleges complaining that the K-12 system sends them underprepared students, the K-12 system complaining that teacher colleges send them new teachers unprepared for the realities of the system, and afterschool and ISE operating largely independently of everything else. There is an attractiveness to independence, but there are also penalties in lost opportunities for making use of each system’s © 2012 American Chemical Society Sheardy and Burns; Science Education and Civic Engagement: The Next Level ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2012.
particular strengths, in the duplication of effort, and in leaving some learners lost between the systems. The SENCER-ISE project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Noyce Foundation (1), sought to explore the potential for building long term collaborations between undergraduate science education institutions and informal science education organizations such as science centers, museums, and the science media. The focus was to explore, primarily at an invitational conference, whether working together we could develop initiatives (including curriculum and programs) to increase interest in science study and enhance public understanding of science so that those who did not become scientists could become life long self-directed learners in issues involving science. The pilot project developed some promising approaches, while clarifying the barriers to be overcome in crossing the higher-education/informal education divide. SENCER-ISE is an outgrowth of the signature program of the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement, SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities). The SENCER initiative’s primary focus is the improvement of undergraduate teaching and learning through the framework of civic engagement. Its goals are to get students interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, while helping these learners connect their learning to other disciplines and to “strengthen their understanding of science and their capacity for responsible work and citizenship.” Over 430 college and universities and other educational agencies and community-based organizations and more than 2,000 educators, administrators, and students have been involved with SENCER since its inception at the beginning of the 21st century. At least 600 courses have been designed or revised, with over 40 course models offered on line for the larger educational community (2). SENCER’s approach impacts K-12 education through the work of pre-service faculty. In recent years, another initiative of the National Center has undergraduate faculty and students connecting with community-based organizations and informal science education facilities in the Great Lakes region. While SENCER faculty have developed some partnerships with informal science educators and institutions, an attempt to bring together undergraduate science faculty and informal science educators across the interdisciplinary and institutional divides of these sectors has been limited, both within SENCER and beyond. Most interactions that we are familiar with occur at the K-12 level and not in higher education (3) In a summary of discussions organized by Public Agenda about collaborations between informal science education entities and higher education institutions, only enhancing connections with teacher education programs are noted (4). Among the potential complementary aspects of higher education and ISE are the attention of ISE to strands of learning in the affective domain, while HE tends to focus primarily on the cognitive domain. While the distinction is not at all new (5), the differences between the attention paid to affective domain outcomes in formal and informal learning were recently recalled when the National Research Council’s report on ISE in 2009 found it important to add two affective domain strands, one on motivation and interest, the other on identity as a science learner, to the four cognitive strands of the NRC’s 2007 report on formal education (6, 7). 134 Sheardy and Burns; Science Education and Civic Engagement: The Next Level ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2012.
In this respect, SENCER already had a sympathy with ISE because one major objective of SENCER is to increase undergraduate interest in taking science courses, by looking for instances in which civic engagement with local issues provides motivation for student learning. A recent analysis of student responses to the SENCER course evaluation instrument (SALG, or Student Assessment of Learning Goals) noted upward trends for faculty pedagogical goals, including student changes in attitudes towards science (8). The goal of this chapter is to provide, especially for undergraduate educators, a general perspective on the benefits of collaborations between the realms of higher education and informal science education by discussing results from a conference which brought together HE and ISE professionals to explore the potential of such partnerships. The chapter examines the premise that despite different organizational and reward structures and seemingly different audiences, collaborations between formal institutions of higher education and informal science initiatives can contribute to knowledge development for learners of all ages. The authors will examine the role that the framework of civic engagement plays in curriculum or program development, discuss briefly SENCER-ISE as a preliminary case study in the process of developing partnerships, provide examples of the types of potential collaborations that can be developed, and examine the mutual benefits of such collaborations for the entire educational community.
SENCER-ISE: Developing Partnerships between Informal and Formal Higher Educators and Institutions With the belief that a focus on civic issues and engagement could provide a bridge between these communities to develop strong educational partnerships, the National Center convened, with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Noyce Foundation, SENCER-ISE, an invitational conference in March of 2011 (9). Attendees included representatives from the SENCER higher education community and informal science educators from 19 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, Chile, and Israel. Conference participants “concluded that a shared focus on contemporary issues of civic consequence” would lead to “productive collaborations, achieve STEM learning goals and ... greater civic engagement,” along with creating a “science-enabled citizenry” (10). As an introductory exercise at the March 2011 conference, the participants started with the question “In the next 2-3 years, what are ways we could use civic engagement to achieve our educational goals?” (11). In the ensuing discussions, it became clear we were talking about a broad framework that could be applied in different ways, either as a means to the end of learning science through the study or examination of complex, unsolved civic issues (favored by the undergraduate faculty in attendance), or as an end in itself to bring about “positive change in the community,” through “science-based decision making” and participation (preferred by the informal science educators present). How science is delivered by the different communities then became a thread throughout the discussions, which included activities on envisioning steps to develop “science-enabled 135 Sheardy and Burns; Science Education and Civic Engagement: The Next Level ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2012.
citizens,” obstacles to collaborations, partnership opportunities, and emerging strategies (12). In the end, there was consensus that the March meeting was just the first step for the SENCER-ISE initiative (13). It should be noted that civic engagement means more than creating opportunities for service learning for undergraduates or citizen science activities (such as measuring levels of rain water or counting the bird population) for people of all ages, although those examples are ways to increase understanding of and participation in science. In general though, a broader definition of civic engagement in science encompasses an understanding of societal problems and how science can help citizens ask the necessary questions and find solutions to problems.
The Two Sectors In a previous article (14), the authors discussed the differences between the two communities in terms of structures, audiences served, relationships of these audiences to the professor/exhibit designer, and age group. For example, formal K12 education is normally compulsory, curriculum-based, teacher-directed, and age specific. This is similar for undergraduate education. Informal science education, on the other hand, is voluntary, based upon personal interest, self directed and life long. Assessment practices are different, as there are not tests or grades given when students/adults visit science museums or zoos, watch a science program on TV, or become engaged in citizen science programs. Neither sector is monolithic. Formal higher education includes two- and fouryear colleges/universities of varying sizes that offer a range of degrees ranging from associate to doctoral degrees, minors and certificate programs, and different degree options. The informal field covers a wide range of institutional types and approaches as well. A 2008 “landscape” study sampled 13 different communities that included educators from science centers and natural history museums, zoos and aquariums, media, parks and gardens, and after-school programs (15). Although there are differences between and within these two realms of education, there are also commonalities in focus and in theoretical underpinnings between informal science education and higher education as represented by the SENCER faculty. In the earlier paper, the authors postulated the idea that the strands of informal science learning for participants (developing interest in science, understanding science knowledge, engaging in scientific reasoning, reflecting on science, engaging in scientific practice, and identifying themselves as individuals who both learn and use science) are not dissimilar from the SENCER Ideals, concepts that provide the basis for SENCER practice (16). These ideals encourage faculty to start with matters of interest to students that allow the latter to put scientific knowledge and the scientific method to use, begin with an intellectual project that is practical and engaged, extract from immediate issues the larger lessons of the process of science, and locate the responsibility of discovery in the work of the students. (17, 18). While there are different models of possible partnerships between these sectors, two existing combinations are the Portal to the Public program at the 136 Sheardy and Burns; Science Education and Civic Engagement: The Next Level ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2012.
Pacific Science Center (19), which brings undergraduate faculty to the floor of a science center to develop and to practice public communication skills, and the Communicating Climate Change project from the Association of Science-Technology Centers (20), which brought together 12 research institutions with 12 science centers to create Citizen Science projects for public participation. At a follow up SENCER-ISE meeting in November of 2011, a number of potential and nascent partnerships were presented, including: Arkansas State University, Arkansas Fish and Game Commission, and the Trout Nature Center envision a project that aims to increase the interest and scientific knowledge of kids in the 10-15 year-old age range and their parents through their interest in fishing. They plan to hold a series of one-day workshops at their field stations (all have aquatic components) that will educate the kids and their parents about the ecosystem issues, ecological interactions between fish and other species, and how this affects their feeding patterns. There will be follow-up sessions online to see how any interest and knowledge gained changes over time. University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the National Geographic Society are exploring efforts to support citizens and K-12 students in studying and addressing local and regional environmental issues using an online digital mapping and analysis tool developed by National Geographic (FieldScope). They are interested in examining how this tool can be used to support and enhance different types of existing citizen science and related projects—especially those that link citizens and students to environmental science research and resource management. For example, this online visualization tool could be used for entering data, mapping and analyzing datasets, sharing conclusions, and exploring new questions and solutions. They would also like to explore how best to support leaders of these diverse efforts in integrating this tool into their existing education programs and are particularly interested in expansion of this Internet program to mobile devices to broaden its application and accessibility. Longwood University and Clean Virginia Waterways want to build a strategic partnership based on the development of a Center for Excellence in Environmental Education and have a leadership role in environmental education in Virginia. They would provide new opportunities for students to develop as citizen leaders, support educational efforts for K-12 students in selected regions of the state, and engage citizens in learning about the Chesapeake Bay watershed’s environmental issues.
Benefits to Collaboration As envisioned by the National Center and the participants in the SENCER-ISE project, there are multiple benefits to developing partnerships like these between the HE and ISE sectors, including: •
Faculty at the higher education institutions will learn skills in communicating with the public (and even their own students) through their partnerships with ISEs, allowing the faculty to advance their own broader impacts. Understanding more about how informal science educators attract and retain their audiences, which can vote with their 137 Sheardy and Burns; Science Education and Civic Engagement: The Next Level ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2012.
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feet, will help faculty attract and retain non-science majors. Portal to the Public provides strong evidence for how much faculty can learn from an ISE, and how highly the faculty come to value their associations with ISEs (21). ISE staff will develop ongoing relationships with faculty at the higher education institutions. Instead of working with researchers on a more typical once-a-year advisory committee meeting, they will develop deeper trust and understanding, resulting (we hypothesize) in the ISE’s staff being more engaged with current research, engagement that they can use in their own organization’s work. New institutional partnerships beyond the individual students, the public, faculty, and ISE staff, will be built. These new institutional links possess high potential for generative collaborations strengthening a continuum to support lifelong learning. Individuals in both higher education institutions and ISEs are always in flux, but we hypothesize that institutional relationships between these education organizations can be sustained if the mutual benefits are demonstrated to be sufficiently valuable over a sufficiently long period of time. Undergraduate students will learn more STEM content and how to explain that content to others. SENCER has clearly demonstrated that using civic engagement with STEM-related issues brings more undergraduates into science courses and enthuses them about learning science. We have persuasive evidence that the SENCER approach helps college students achieve these intellectual and affective outcomes. A recent study based on SENCER faculty responses shows the type of “21st Century” skills that are learned in SENCER courses. These faculty believe their students can make connections between science and civic problems, make interdisciplinary connections, and identify scientific problems and questions (22). SENCER’s attractiveness for undergraduates will be further enhanced, we hypothesize, by having public involvement through the ISEs. It is great to learn for your college degree, to please your peers and parents; but how much more exciting to share what you are doing with the public through exhibits and presentations at science centers, where tens of thousands of people can see what you are doing on STEM-related issues that matter to the public. For undergraduates, learning how to explain their work to the public enhances the students’ own learning (you do not know what you know until you try to teach it). “Explainer” programs at hundreds of science centers around the world, and internships for college students at museums, media organizations, and community organizations such as after-school providers demonstrate the popularity and value of undergraduate involvement with the public. Civic engagement adds to these opportunities for involvement for large numbers of undergraduates, who, we believe, will retain longer-term involvement with public education, as demonstrated by longitudinal evaluations of programs like the Science Career Ladder at the New York Hall of Science (23). 138 Sheardy and Burns; Science Education and Civic Engagement: The Next Level ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2012.
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Graduates who do not major in science or another technological field will see also that they can turn to ISE when science questions arise after they complete their undergraduate studies. Publics served by ISE organizations will be attracted to learn STEM by the new civic engagement activities that the ISEs present and in which the ISEs offer participation opportunities to the public. We see strong evidence for this in the extraordinary growth of citizen science activities, which now involve millions of people a year. Citizen science is new for the ISE community however, with C3 being a pioneering effort to spur citizen science at twelve science centers. SENCER-ISE has learned deeply from C3’s successes and problems. SENCER-ISE, by building ongoing, more equal partnerships between higher education and ISEs, will result in the ISEs being able to attract more public participants for longer periods of time, and will allow even non-citizen-scientists to appreciate and to learn about STEM through the important civic engagement projects presented by the ISEs for their audiences.
The Challenges to Collaboration Across the HE-ISE Divide There is a substantial literature of survey findings, case studies, and advice on the formation for successful non-profit partnerships (24–31). Much of this literature discusses non-profits broadly, but many analyses and case studies focus specifically on ISE organizations partnering with higher education and research institutions. Essentially all of the literature and case studies we reviewed described a similar list of the specific challenges to forming and sustaining non-profit partnerships. Five of these challenges are directly relevant to SENCER-ISE: •
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Non-profit partnerships are almost always more difficult to establish and sustain than the partners imagine they will be at the time a proposal is written. There is rarely enough thought and time given to forming partnerships before the proposals are written or before work begins. Initial responsibilities, decision-making prerogatives, and commitments from both sides need to be clearly defined well before the work plan is underway. Some flexibility must be expected and negotiated as conditions change. The differences in cultures between ISE organizations and research or higher education institutions are significant but rarely accounted for initially in forming partnerships. These differences can lead to misunderstandings and disappointments throughout the run of a partnership. For example, participants from higher education institutions are subject to very different constraints than those of the smaller, more nimble, but less well endowed ISEs. Both sides need to appreciate the positive and negative consequences of these differences. This takes time visiting each other’s operations and understanding their values and limitations. 139 Sheardy and Burns; Science Education and Civic Engagement: The Next Level ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2012.
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Time and other resource commitments must be defined and agreed to in writing at the beginning. The absence of these written commitments is a common cause of friction. Institutional vs. individual commitments to a partnership produce very different outcomes that are often not appreciated at the beginning of a relationship. Organic relationships can lead to sustainable partnerships, while ad hoc partnerships rarely do. Organic relationships are distinguished by goals that meet key institutional mission needs of both partners, each partner having mutually-appreciated strengths the other does not, and a consistent process of communication and decision making.
What We Learned from SENCER-ISE The project evaluation by Randi Korn & Associates (32) found: …new learning and perspectives resulted from conference participation; about three-quarters of interviewees said the conference had created an awareness of the value of the other sector, empathy for the challenges the other sector encounters, and/or concretized potential opportunities for collaboration between the two sectors. And, the remaining one-quarter of interviewees said the conference had confirmed and reinvigorated an existing belief that collaboration among the two sectors is a valuable endeavor. Encouragingly, findings show that there is much consensus between the two sectors when considering how best to collaborate around civic engagement in science, as most responses to interview questions represented equal numbers of those from ISE and SENCER; and initial collaborative steps have been taken by some interviewees. As such, findings demonstrate that the SENCER-ISE conference successfully achieved its two main goals of bringing ISE and SENCER professionals together to discuss civic engagement in science and inspiring ideas for collaboration between them. The challenge now is to help participants continue and build on the relationships and momentum that were started at the conference. Continued discussions by SENCER-ISE staff, and the follow up meeting held in November 2011 with five newly-formed teams of HE and ISE professionals, all inspired by the earlier conference and including new potential partners who had not attended the earlier conference, confirmed that barriers to getting these partnerships underway and sustaining them were essentially those raised at the conference and identified by the Korn & Associates evaluation: First, findings suggest a continued need to build awareness of the value of using civic engagement as a platform to advance science understanding, 140 Sheardy and Burns; Science Education and Civic Engagement: The Next Level ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2012.
including what each sector brings to a potential collaboration that would help achieve this end. Second, because findings suggest that maintaining the momentum of the conference may pose a challenge to participants, other platforms for collaboration might need to be considered. Interviewees suggested maintaining communication online and hosting regional conferences to address the barrier of geographic distance.
Plans To Extend the SENCER-ISE Initiative With continued support from the National Science Foundation (33), the National Center is currently planning to continue the experiment on formulating HE and ISE partnerships by seeding several individual partnerships and creating an infrastructure to address the challenges identified by the evaluations of SENCER-ISE and from the literature on nonprofit partnerships. The current plans include: •
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creating a joint organizing “secretariat,” to provide communications and support through low-cost shared services for initially six civic engagement partnerships; providing modest “partnership support awards” and technical assistance to seed initially six HE-ISE civic engagement partnerships, and sharing evaluation and analysis services across all the partnerships.
The goal will be to enable movement beyond one-time, asymmetric partnerships bridging science education silos, to the creation of self-sustainable, balanced, and mutually beneficial relationships among HE and ISE institutions. The project will evaluate and report to the field the relative costs and benefits of each of the proposed mechanisms to nurture and maintain these partnerships. The project will provide faculty members in HE with tools from the ISE world to help improve undergraduate education. It will provide ISE institutions with ongoing refreshment and contact with scientists, teaching faculty, and students in the HE community, including their extensive civic engagement course experiences, many of which involve issues of sustainable practices and policies like studying energy usage and investigating effects of climate change. This will in turn assist ISE institutions in sharing current research by providing civic engagement opportunities for their diverse public audiences. Beginning with the conversations at the March 2011 SENCER-ISE conference, it has been the hope of the investigators that we can develop a series of roadmaps to provide guidance for future collaborations between the higher education and informal science education communities. We hope to define the common essential goals and needs of successful partnerships and also highlight the individual efforts that speak to the needs of the specific locality or audience for which the partnership was developed. 141 Sheardy and Burns; Science Education and Civic Engagement: The Next Level ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2012.
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