JoinFeature
Trust the Process
Developing STEM Mindsets Through Family Storytelling
Connected Science Learning January–March 2020 (Volume 2, Issue 1)
By Carrie Tzou, Daniel Rother, Ashley Braun, Elizabeth Starks, Meixi Ng, Enrique Suárez, Amanda Rambayon, Philip Bell, Don LaBonte, Amy Twito, Shawn Peterson, Sara Marie Ortiz, and Megan Bang
Tell the story of an important event that happened in your family. Tell the story of a place that is important to your family. Tell the story of how your family or the world will change in 10 years.
With these prompts, TechTales invites families to tell and animate their stories using robotics components and everyday materials. Over the course of five weeks, families build a diorama that depicts a scene in their story. In the first two sessions, families brainstorm a story they would like to tell using one of the three prompts listed above. They choose a scene in the story they would like to build into a diorama using cardboard boxes, construction paper, and recycled plastic (see Figure 1). In the second and third sessions, they learn about how to program robotics components, such as making an LED light blink or controlling a servo motor. TechTales provides families with a Hummingbird robotics kit, which includes a circuit board, sensors, motors, and LED lights. Users can build projects with everyday materials and program them using Scratch and other programming languages. In our project, after families decide on their story and design their diorama boxes, they build and program those boxes during the third and fourth sessions. Finally, families present their dioramas in a community storytelling event during the fifth session of the workshop (see Table 1 for an overview of the program).
In this article, we share our design principles and process, findings from our research on TechTales, and the structure of our partnership—as well as how TechTales supports a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) mindset in families and project staff.
Figure 1
Diorama depicting a family’s traditions around Dia de los Muertos, created in TechTales.
Table 1
Overview of TechTales sessions
TechTales is part of a larger National Science Foundation–funded four-year partnership between the University of Washington, the Pacific Science Center, the Seattle Public Library, Red Eagle Soaring, and the Highline School District Native Education Program. We have created a series of family STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) workshops centered on family storytelling and redefining families’ relationships with technology. There are two programs within our project: TechTales and TechStyle Tales. While TechTales connects families’ stories to robotics, TechStyle Tales connects family stories to e-textiles. In TechStyle Tales, families use conductive thread to sew LED lights and sensors onto textile projects (aprons, blankets, tote bags) that tell a story. The LED lights are programmed so that the lights flash in patterns or in response to input from sensors on the board. TechStyle Tales follows a similar structure as TechTales, emphasizing family storytelling in the first two sessions, coding and project building in the second two sessions, and sharing in the fifth.
In both TechTales and TechStyle Tales, we start with one of the oldest human technologies, storytelling (Archibald 2008), and build connections between families’ lived experiences, engineering, robotics/e-textiles, and computer science. We have found that stories are the grounding for family members to work for hours to achieve a certain “twinkle” effect to mimic stars in the night sky, or to experiment with how to make an owl’s head turn. This perseverance, innovation with technology, and deep connection between engineering and families’ personal histories and stories are hallmarks of both programs and integral to program goals of building a STEM mindset.
All together, our programs have served over 65 families—almost 200 participants over the life of the projects. We conducted research on families’ interactions and learning during the workshops to understand the role that storytelling, cultural practices, and family knowledge played in family engineering practices. We collected data by recording video of families during each workshop session, documenting their projects and final storytelling to the community, and interviewing families. As a result, we have over 15 hours of video data from each family, along with pictures of each of their final projects. The vignettes that follow are from that video data corpus. In addition, our evaluator administered surveys to all workshop participants (adults and children) after each workshop session and interviewed all of our partners about the program. Qualitative evaluation findings are incorporated throughout the sections that follow. As we share our findings from our research and evaluation, all of the names of facilitators, families, and family members are pseudonyms that participants themselves chose.
We have used a participatory design research model (Bang and Voussoughi 2016) to codesign and cofacilitate our program (Tzou et al. 2019). This means that, rather than one partner—for example the university—designing the program for the library, community, or partner school, all of the institutions codesigned alongside each other. In this way, we designed a program that truly addresses each partner’s needs. A core design group made up of members from all partner organizations met regularly to brainstorm, prototype, and design the program. When one of our program sites involved a low-income housing organization, case workers who deeply knew the families were also part of the design team.
We recruited children’s librarians and other practitioners to facilitate the program and codesigned professional development to orient these new facilitators, who did not need any previous engineering, coding, or making background to run the workshops. Because children’s librarians and educators in the Native Education Program had close relationships with the communities in which they work, they recruited families into the workshops, which were capped at five families (or 20 people) per session. Although learners of all ages were welcome, we encouraged families with children ages five and older to attend. The programs were free for all participants, and childcare for younger siblings and dinner were provided. To support the whole program team’s learning during implementation, we designed a way to regularly check in after each workshop session (see the “Trust the Process” section below) to continually improve the design and pedagogy of the program and learn from each other and the participating families. We have codesigned a complete set of facilitator’s guides to capture the activities, pedagogical strategies, and structures of both TechTales and TechStyles Tales family workshops.
The evaluation found that members of partner organizations said the following about our collaboration:
- “This is such an interesting and unique example of a partnership. The power sharing that’s going on; seeing how just in many different ways that we’ve been able to plug into each other and work for the project.”
- “I think it gets messy but a big takeaway is … it’s important to involve all of our partners equally with an equal footing [at] the table and having them have a voice about what is design.”
- “A commitment from all to see each other as partners—as experts and as collaborators—instead of competitors or as obstacles. I think that sometimes when we partner with others, we may see their interest or their missions or their goals as obstacles to our own. But I don’t get the sense of that happening here at all.”
- “This kind of real integrated deep partnership is just something that I really have not observed or been a part of.”
Design principles: Building STEM mindset through culturally based family STEM learning
Other hallmarks of our program are the foundational principles about learning and equity that drive our design (Tzou et al. 2017; see Figure 2). In this section, we describe four of these design principles and illustrate each in action with a vignette from a participating family. These principles are grounded in research in the learning sciences that shows the rich and varied ways that families learn outside of school (Banks et al. 2007), as well as the importance of understanding the role that culture and identity play in learning (Nasir et al. 2006).
Figure 2
Learning design principles from the TechTales project
We begin with the idea that all learning is cultural. A Framework for K–12 Science Education argues that, “All science learning can be understood as a cultural accomplishment … What counts as learning and what types of knowledge are seen as important are closely tied to a community’s values and what is useful in that community context” (NRC 2012, p. 284). Therefore, we understand that families bring their histories, languages, experiences, and values into learning settings—and we designed TechTales to make space for those ways of knowing.
1. Promote multiple ways of knowing and making
We designed our programs in a way that did not assign value to different ways of knowing and making. There was no one “right” way to make or learn—families engage in projects in many ways based on the knowledge and expertise they bring to the program. While the facilitators often supported families in building their stories, the intergenerational nature of the program also made space for parents to act as facilitators and center their own family and cultural knowledge in story-building and making. In this way, multiple areas of expertise and interest can intersect with STEM learning, even if the program facilitator is not necessarily familiar with each family’s cultural practices.
While brainstorming their story, the Pony family, a Native family from the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, had a conversation about their child’s first lightning storm. During the conversation, Corey (the father) and Tracy (the mother) ask Gwen (the child) some questions about the lightning storm:
Corey: What story would you tell your kids, Gwen?
Gwen: Lightning storm.
Tracy: Lightning storm? Okay.
Corey: That would be a good one because you could do like … with LEDs behind it. Gwen’s first big lightning storm. A real one.
Gwen: Scared lightning, it makes me scared.
Corey: So what do you remember of that storm? How did you feel about the storm?
Gwen: Scared.
Corey: You were scared? And? What—did you smell anything, hear anything? See anything? Did you see it?
Gwen: Boom.
Corey: You heard it? Was it so loud you could feel it?
Gwen: No. Scared.
In this example, Corey teaches Gwen about how to tell a story and how to observe the land. By asking the questions about what she smelled, heard, saw, and felt, he is embedding Indigenous ways of knowing through stories (Archibald 2008) and relating to the land through observation (Kawagley, Norris-Tull, and Norris-Tull 1998), all while he is thinking about how to use robotics components (e.g., LEDs) to depict the event (see Figure 3). This example shows how, when activities are designed to make space for families to connect to multiple ways of knowing rather than being prescriptive about what to build and how, families have opportunities to connect to their cultural practices in engineering learning environments.
Figure 3
The Pony family’s diorama of Gwen’s first lightning storm. LEDs in the cloud flickered to depict lightning, and a motor attached to Gwen’s hair on the top floor made her hair stand on end.
2. Scaffold playful thinking and teaching
Families learn through playful and collaborative exploration of concepts and materials. Learning is not about step-by-step sequencing, but rather about creating depth and space for play and creativity with materials. To that end, we wanted to design experiences to make learning new skills, such as wiring, programming, sewing, and robotics, fun and engaging.
During one workshop activity in which families learn about algorithms, kids “program” adults to do things: walk around the table, sit in a chair, or walk in a straight line while avoiding a tree. In this way, they learn how detailed and specific their “code” needs to be for the “robot” to perform a task. They also learn about how to “debug” their code and keep trying until their robot family member correctly performs the task . In the Lee family (one mom and two sons), the older son programmed his mom to “do the happy dance.” His mother jumped up and down and waved her arms, much to her son’s delight. When it was the younger son’s turn to program his older brother, he had a “happy dance” in his program, too!
When we designed TechTales, we wanted learners to playfully learn together within and across families. We found that playful learning allowed families with children from wide age ranges to participate in the activities. We also found, as in the example from the Lee family, that playfulness helped flip traditional roles. In this case, the playful programming of the parent allowed the sons to be “in charge” of their mom, and the younger son to give commands to his older brother.
3. Learning experiences should grow out of the lives of learners
Families can relate technology to their lives in meaningful ways rather than program facilitators letting technology define their experiences. The ways families design and create their projects can be deeply personal and filled with family history and community goals. In TechTales, we create space for families to bring their own learning pathways, experiences, and interests into STEM learning. The overarching goal is to overlap the STEM learning with the lives of families and their communities.
The Wanbli family, a Native family who is Lakota, Paiute, and Mayan, chose to tell a traditional story about how the inipi (sweat lodge) came to the Lakota people. As one of the sons, Yoshi, programmed an LED light, he worked with his father, Charles, to recreate the medicine wheel with accurate colors placed in the correct order. As they work together, their talk switches between English and Lakota languages:
Yoshi: Ooh, wait! The yellow looks way better in here. Oh that’s right, the white in here.
Charles: I think the blue—blue I think shows the most. Nah. I think the blue showed up, which is fine ’cause that’s actually the first direction.
Yoshi: Wait. What order does it go in?
Charles: Blue, red, yellow, white.
Yoshi: What’s after blue?
Charles: Huh?
Yoshi: What’s after blue?
Charles: Shah.
Yoshi: Red. What’s after red?
Charles: Zi.
Yoshi: Yellow. And after yellow is white?
Charles: Uh-huh.
This is an example of how, while working with the LED lights to tell a meaningful cultural story, the family uses Indigenous knowledge systems embedded in the Lakota story and language to create a specific effect with the lights. After this interaction, Yoshi iterated his programming of the lights to reflect his conversation with his father (see Figure 4). This shows the importance of designing activities that allow learners to draw on their own life experiences for learning and creative engineering.
Figure 4
The Wanbli family’s diorama that depicts the traditional Lakota story of how the Inipi came to the Lakota people.
4. Broaden what counts as STEM using everyday and professional forms
STEM learning environments often work within very narrow and overly uniform views of what counts as STEM (Warren et al. 2001; NRC 2012). When family stories are at the center, new forms of STEM learning emerge—sometimes in unexpected ways. In TechTales, we broaden definitions of STEM and create opportunities for new forms of participating in and learning STEM.
The Diamond family built their diorama around a trip that they took to “family camp,” depicting their cabin under a night sky filled with stars. One challenge they encountered was how to program the LED lights so that they would “twinkle” like stars. In one workshop session, Command Block, the older son of the family (age 9) spent two hours experimenting with how to program a multicolored LED light to be the desired color and twinkle in a way that would resemble a star (see Figure 5). He worked with a program that his dad started and tried to refine it. After a couple of hours, he asked his dad (John), “Dad, do you know how I can make this [the light] faster? Stars don’t really twinkle.” John looked outside the window at the night sky and replied, “Yeah, I mean like ever so faintly because of the air, the differences in temperature in the air. Yeah, they don’t really. But if they’re just static in the box, it won’t look quite as cool as if there’s something happening.”
As they tried to re-create a memory and program a certain effect into their project, the family started to explore the reason why stars twinkle. It is not hard to imagine this becoming the basis for a much longer or more in-depth conversation into space science—or Command Block recalling something about stars twinkling in his space science unit in school. This also helps us understand that everyday knowledge about ideas such as stars twinkling may be embedded for learners within these kinds of complex networks of everyday practices, stories, memories, and experiences. Providing opportunities in programs for learners to connect to these networks of knowledge is an important way for them to use their rich everyday knowledge in learning science.
Figure 5
Command Block programming an LED to twinkle.
Fostering a STEM mindset
Building community
A safe and supportive community was key for a STEM mindset to flourish. All of our workshop series started with dinner and “About Me, About Us” cards. This was a chance for families to share a meal and introduce themselves to the group. The cards asked each family member to write something they like about themselves and something they like to do. They switched cards with someone and then introduced this person’s card. We held workshops in school-affiliated programs for Native American families, in low-income housing centers, in neighborhood community centers, and at Seattle Public Library and Pacific Science Center locations. Across all of these settings, these introductory activities were important for getting people comfortable, growing community, and getting people ready to engage with our programming (see Figure 6).
Figure 6
A family participant reads the “About Me, About Us” cards from all of the participants in the workshop.
Grounding learning in storytelling
We recognized that stories and storytelling are a universal experience (Cajete 1994) around which the community could come together, talk about themes of the day such as perseverance or learning from mistakes, and refer back to as they did their work.
We started off every workshop session with a story and used stories in different ways depending on the workshop settings. In some settings, librarians selected books that highlighted relevant concepts such as perseverance, curiosity, innovation, and learning from failure, which we could refer to later by saying, for example, “Remember how in The Most Magnificent Thing,[1] the main character keeps needing to redesign her project, too?” We also built on the Pacific Science Center’s strengths by bringing in STEM professionals from the Portal to the Public program to tell stories of “science failures,” including a family favorite in which a marine biologist’s data made no sense until eventually she realized that a snake from a nearby area was climbing out at night and eating the fish in her experiment! In our partnership with Native education programs, traditional storytellers were invited to share community stories that contained lessons about the importance of family, self-confidence, science practices, and learning from mistakes and through teaching others (Archibald 2008; see Figure 7)).
[1] This refers to Ashley Spires’s 2014 book, The Most Magnificent Thing (New York: Kids Can Press).
Figure 7
Traditional storytellers at the beginning of TechTales sessions.
Try something new
Once we built community through storytelling, we introduced new concepts and got families out of their comfort zones to try something new. In TechStyle Tales, families learned and practiced sewing because they would ultimately connect conductive thread to lights to tell a story. Sewing and e-textiles were ways to connect to deep expertise of families, once resulting in a mother-daughter pair teaching and reteaching each other. The daughter knew a lot about patterns and design and the mother knew about the fundamentals and technique. It became a moment to learn from each other before they also helped members from other families. Participants from multiple families would often gather around one person who had expertise in sewing to learn from them. In partnership with the Native Education Program, we also facilitated during in-school sessions the practice of integrating circuitry with beadwork from multiple Native nations’ traditions. By introducing STEM practices into beadwork, we were able to broaden what “counts” as STEM in school. In the evaluation data, when asked if the sessions helped them better understand electrical circuits, programming in Scratch, using motors and LEDs, creating loops in programming, and creating “if/else” statements in their code, the average rating for postworkshop survey statements was 4.5 out of 5, with 1 being “not at all” and 5 being “a lot.”
Define STEAM roles and identities
A key component of the workshop series was explicitly identifying STEAM roles and identities, such as computer scientist, researcher, electrical engineer, or storyteller. As facilitators, having an awareness of the roles and identities that are possible in our program helped us name them in action as we saw learners engaged in them. For example, when a child created a program that caused an LED flicker to create a campfire, the facilitator could say that they were thinking like a computer scientist. This was a powerful way for facilitators and families to make connections between their activities in our program, the professional practices associated with different roles/identities, and their everyday lives. It also makes clear that there is substantial overlap between the different roles, and made it possible to highlight practices found in multiple roles, which enabled learners to identify with roles that had previously been unfamiliar.
We used STEAM identities as a tool for in-the-moment facilitation and reflection. We closed each workshop session by asking family members what practices they used and which STEAM role(s) they identified with. We then awarded them badges as buttons or stickers (see Figure 8), representing the roles they took on that day. Ultimately, this was a powerful tool for fostering a STEM mindset. As many aspects of designing and building projects involved opportunities for families to practice 21st-century skills, learning from failure, and other elements of a STEM mindset, discussions of roles provided explicit opportunities to make aspects of STEM mindset visible for family members. We gave families a handout (Figure 9) as a tool for reflecting on how they might be thinking like artists, researchers, or electrical engineers, and to highlight overlap between roles. For example, “creative” is a characteristic in all of these roles. Through actively reflecting with facilitators and each other using these lists, participants identified new skills in themselves while directly making connections to how those skills could be applicable in the future. From the evaluation data, we could see that participants were identifying with these roles. Results indicate that when asked to rate on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 being “not at all” and 5 being “a lot”), family members said the workshops helped them feel like an engineer (4.61), computer scientist (4.59), and artist (4.59).
Figure 8
Badges that depict roles that family members take on during the workshop
Figure 9
Workshop roles and descriptions of skills for each role. Note that there is no intentional ordering of the characteristics of each role.
Trust the process: Building a STEM mindset between the partners
Finally, we realized that it was important to continually iterate the program to ensure that it fit community needs. This required that we develop a STEM mindset about our own work. Over time, we developed formal and informal tools to learn from failures in the workshop as an opportunity for growth.
We ended every session with a debrief including all facilitators, educators, support staff, and researchers. We always asked the same four questions (see Figure 10):
- Describe a high point for you today.
- Describe a low point for you today.
- Describe a snapshot of learning, including multiple ways that you saw people learning.
- What would you change for next time?
By deliberately looking at moments in which we saw learning, we all got better at recognizing learning as it happened. By looking at what did not go well, we created a safe space to collectively identify failure and what we could learn from it. In this way, we were able to course-correct with the same families the following week or with new families the next time. Through this group reflection, we made changes to everything from the way we presented information to the layout of the room, the tools we chose to have out, the way we offered support to participants, and the overall structure of the program—all from data we collected through our observations. By the end, we ran the program 19 times with over 65 families, and each time we were able to iterate and improve through this reflection process.
Figure 10
A completed debrief form
We also realized that we had taken on a STEM mindset in a more subtle way. Most of our workshop series were five sessions long. Inevitably by session four, the facilitators would slightly panic because it felt like families were so far from being finished that it seemed unfathomable that we would be ending just one session later. Over time we developed a saying: “Trust the process.” This took on two meanings. First, it was a reminder that we had done this before and we knew that families had made amazing projects in the past, so we could be confident it would happen again. The other meaning of “Trust the process” was to remind us to think about process over product. Without fail, every family told impactful stories through complex dioramas and e-textile projects. All of the facilitators were also blown away by the thought, learning, creativity, and personal and community connections that went into every project. If at the end of a series, everything in a family’s creation didn’t work perfectly, this would not be an issue as they still would have learned a lot, developed new skills, grown their STEM mindsets, and made connections to STEM careers, all while they strengthened family memories and relationships to their stories—which was more important than the end product, as intended.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the participating families in TechTales who shared their stories with us. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number DRL 1516562. Any findings or opinions expressed in this material are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Carrie Tzou (tzouct@uw.edu) is an associate professor of science education and director of the Goodlad Institute for Educational Renewal in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell in Bothell, Washington. Daniel Rother (rother.daniel@gmail.com) was the Tinker Tank manager at Pacific Science Center during this project and now is the Understory program manager at the Seattle Spheres in Seattle, Washington. Ashley Braun (Ashley.braun@spl.org) is a children’s services librarian at the Seattle Public Library in Seattle, Washington. Elizabeth Starks (eestarks@uw.edu) is a research scientist with OpenSTEM Research at the University of Washington Bothell. Meixi Ng (meixi@umn.edu) is a presidential postdoctoral fellow in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Mní Sota Makoce. Enrique Suárez (easuarez@umass.edu) is an assistant professor of science education in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts. Amanda Rambayon (arambayo@fwps.org) (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is the Native education coordinator for Federal Way Public Schools in Federal Way, Washington. Philip Bell (pbell@uw.edu) is professor of education at the University of Washington Seattle. He holds the Shauna C. Larson chair in learning sciences. Don LaBonte (don.labonte@gmail.com) is a graduate student in the Learning Sciences and Human Development department at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Amy Twito (amy.twito@spl.org) is the informal learning program manager at the Seattle Public Library, in Seattle, Washington. Shawn Peterson (shawn@naahillahee.org) (Nuu-cha-nuulth) is youth program manager at the Na’ah Illahee Fund in Seattle, Washington. Sara Marie Ortiz (Sara.Ortiz@highlineschools.org) (Pueblo of Acoma) is a writer; Native arts, culture, and education advocate; and the program manager of the Highline Public Schools Native Education Program in Burien, Washington. Megan Bang (megan.bang@northwestern.edu) is professor of learning sciences and psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Tell the story of an important event that happened in your family. Tell the story of a place that is important to your family. Tell the story of how your family or the world will change in 10 years.
Tell the story of an important event that happened in your family. Tell the story of a place that is important to your family. Tell the story of how your family or the world will change in 10 years.
Feature
Wings Over Water
Museums, Scientists, and Teachers Collaborate to Spark Student Interest in Science Through the Study of Ospreys
Connected Science Learning January–March 2020 (Volume 2, Issue 1)
By Allison De Jong, Jenélle Dowling, Erick Greene, and Sharon Leigh Miles
The Wings Over Water (WOW) collaboration began with ospreys.
Anyone who’s seen one of these highly specialized fishing raptors plummeting from high above the water to catch a fish knows how captivating this species is. The birds’ M-shaped silhouettes can be seen winging above waterways on every continent except Antarctica, and they migrate thousands of miles to return to the same nest for years, sometimes even decades. As the top predator in many aquatic ecosystems, they are important indicators of the health of our streams, lakes, and rivers. Perhaps for these reasons, or perhaps because they are simply beautiful and familiar birds, people love ospreys.
Ospreys tolerate human activity and thus are easy to observe: Erect a nest pole and students and teachers are likely to have a breeding pair to study. Ospreys are well suited to excite and motivate students and provide unique learning experiences in E-STEM (environment, science, technology, engineering, and math).
Inspired by ospreys
The Montana Osprey Project started over a decade ago as a collaboration between Rob Domenech (director of Raptor View Research Institute), Dave Taylor (of Dave Taylor Roofing—he provided the bucket trucks needed to get up to osprey nests), Dr. Heiko Langner (an environmental chemist, now the director of the Analytical Chemistry Core Lab at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology), and Dr. Erick Greene (an ecologist and behavioral biologist at the University of Montana [UM]). At the time, the Clark Fork River in western Montana was part of the largest Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) superfund site: Because of a long history of copper mining, the river had extremely high levels of certain heavy metals. The project’s original purpose was to analyze the blood and feathers of osprey chicks to measure their levels of these heavy metals, which was a way for researchers to monitor the effectiveness of the massive cleanup efforts of the Clark Fork River.
Whenever members of the Montana Osprey Project visited an osprey nest, they invited kids and members of the community to learn more about ospreys, aquatic ecology, and the importance of clean water. Then they installed an osprey nest camera in Missoula, Montana, and Iris—the female osprey nesting here—and her mates became international superstars, with thousands of people from all over the world tuning in during each breeding season.
The Montana Osprey Project team realized there was a huge potential for much deeper and richer educational programs. Dr. Greene had already been inspired by the Green Eggs and Sand program in Maryland, which uses horseshoe crabs to bring E-STEM education to schoolchildren along the East Coast of the United States. Dr. Greene realized that the osprey is another ideal species around which to build a rich, integrative E-STEM curriculum. And so the Wings Over Water program was born.
WOW connects middle and high school learners to environmental issues, nature, and their place, all while engaging them in E-STEM learning. WOW reaches these students through their teachers, building classroom educators’ E-STEM capacities through a weeklong, interactive, field-based professional development workshop in Missoula, Montana. During this summer institute, teachers become E-STEM teacher-scholars, learning from experts in the field about avian biology and aquatic ecology, as well as math, the physics of flight, and satellite technology. These teachers in turn take their new knowledge and enthusiasm—and their connections to science experts—back to their classrooms to spark their students’ interest in E-STEM topics.
The WOW collaboration
Since its inception, the WOW program has been a fruitful symbiosis among many groups. WOW is embedded within the Montana Natural History Center (MNHC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is connecting people to nature through education. When Dr. Greene went looking for partners for his project, MNHC was a natural fit; the organization already provided science and natural history education to thousands of elementary school students and hundreds of adults, and had experience running in-depth professional development workshops to train K–12 formal and informal educators in E-STEM subjects. The one gap that remained in MNHC’s offerings was a dedicated program to reach middle and high school students.
Once MNHC was on board and had hired avian researcher and educator Dr. Jenélle Dowling as the staff scientist to help develop and coordinate WOW, the next step was to collect a diverse group of experts. The Montana Osprey Project team (including Domenech and his biologists from Raptor View Research Institute, Greene, and Dalit Guscio, the restoration education program manager from the Clark Fork Watershed Education Program/UM) could offer groundbreaking ecology research on heavy metal contaminants in the Upper Clark Fork River, osprey migration, and the local aquatic ecosystem. With support from these researchers, several local middle and high school teachers, and expert educators at MNHC, Dr. Dowling crafted a dynamic curriculum including everything from ecology to aeronautics and satellite tracking, aerodynamics and flight, math, physics, engineering, and more. And, to make the curriculum as relevant as possible for educators, not only did several middle and high school teachers assist with the curriculum development, but the WOW team also created each module and lesson with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in mind, focusing all of the content through the lens of the standards. We also reached out to experts from the Montana Space Grant Consortium, Lockheed Martin aerospace company, the UM Flight Laboratory, the UM Environmental Biogeochemistry Laboratory, the Clark Fork Watershed Education Program, the National Wildlife Federation, and spectrUM Discovery Center to lead hands-on demonstrations and provide teachers firsthand experience with active research during the WOW summer institute.
All of these partners are essential members of the WOW experience. One of the most exciting aspects of WOW is that the program invites teachers and students into the heart of the research process. Instead of learning about physics, math, or ecology from a textbook, WOW teachers and their students engage directly with biology, chemistry, math, physics, engineering, and technology while participating in scientific research.
During the weeklong professional development institute, teachers are immersed in the four broad modules of the WOW curriculum—the same modules that they’ll work through with their students in the fall (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
WOW modules
- Osprey biology: What is an osprey and where do they live? Teachers are introduced to basic biology of ospreys, and these general concepts are springboards to additional themes of adaptation, anatomy, life cycles, behavior, ecology, and population biology.
- Aerodynamics: How do ospreys fly? Teachers learn about the basic aerodynamics of flight. They study the physics of flight and the design of aircraft from pilots at Neptune Aviation/Northstar Jet; visit UM’s world-class Flight Lab to learn about aerodynamics, wind tunnels, bird flight, and research methods; build their own wind tunnels out of cardboard boxes and a fan; and are able to design and test their own paper airfoils.
- All about GPS: How do scientists use satellites to study ospreys? Just about every student has a smartphone. How does the phone know where the student is? This is a fun module that introduces the satellites circling overhead, rockets and trajectories, Newton’s laws, how GPS works, and how researchers can use small GPS backpacks on ospreys to study migration patterns. WOW teachers get first-hand information on these topics from Rodrigo Zeledon, a lead satellite scientist with Lockheed Martin aerospace company. This module allows teachers and students to explore a wide variety of topics in math, physics, and aerospace engineering.
- Ospreys and the environment: How do ospreys interact with the environment? Because they are at the top of aquatic food chains, ospreys have been considered environmental sentinels for a long time. WOW teachers learn how ospreys are used to study the environment, chemistry, the birds’ physiology, the creatures’ place in food webs, and conservation biology. Teachers participate as biologists from Raptor View Research Institute collect blood samples from osprey chicks. Teachers also connect with chemical ecologists in UM’s state-of-the-art environmental biogeochemistry lab as the scientists analyze the blood samples.
The WOW program makes science come alive. It helps turn teachers and their students into inquisitive researchers.
Living science
“Students perceive science in silos: This is life science. This is physical science. This is Earth science,” says 2018 WOW teacher Cliff Marr. “What WOW brings to the table is that students are able to see how different areas of science interact with each other. Students are able to take a technology that they take for granted, such as GPS, and see that physics, math, material[s] science, chemistry, and biology all play roles in a working GPS system. The WOW program presents science, technology, art, and engineering as a whole connected web, not as units or chunks of knowledge.”
Although every teacher implements the program a little differently—from picking just a few lessons to incorporating most of the curriculum depending on grade level, time constraints, and classroom needs—they all have the opportunity to work with a collaborative team of expert researchers. When the teachers return to their classrooms in the fall, WOW staff at MNHC and UM support teachers in their curriculum delivery throughout the school year—and throughout subsequent school years—through regular meetings, in-person and virtual E-STEM expert visits to classrooms, field trips, and demonstrations. WOW staff also connect teachers to local leaders in the fields of biology, physics, and aerospace technology. “The entire workshop was based on active and ongoing STEM research,” says a 2019 WOW teacher. “Now we have an opportunity to take part in this research by extending it to areas where we teach.”
Working with such a diverse, collaborative group provides students with endless opportunities to develop interest in a variety of E-STEM topics, and to develop relationships with enthusiastic role models who work in those fields. This innovative approach allows students to engage with science in a personally meaningful way—designing, planning, and carrying out their own investigations—which has been proven to foster lifelong interest in E-STEM, especially for groups under-represented in science, such as women, and ethnic and cultural minority groups (PBS 2014; Kelley and Knowles 2016).
“The integration of engineering and technology within the WOW curriculum has helped me transform my science and math classes into true STEM classes,” says 2018 WOW teacher Betsy Craske. “The lessons are relevant, innovative, and hands-on, which means that my students are getting a one-of-a-kind learning experience that will help them in STEM fields in their future studies and careers. This program has facilitated opportunities for me to expand student learning outside of the classroom walls in an exceptional, hands-on way.”
Program reach
Now in its third year, WOW has fledged beyond its initial Montana beginnings and is attracting teachers from all across the United States. WOW is currently implemented in 26 middle and high schools in Montana, Washington, Idaho, New Jersey, Minnesota, and California, reaching nearly 2,000 students in 14 rural schools, seven small-town schools, and five city or suburban schools. Although WOW staff cannot provide in-person support for teachers in other states, they do check in with these educators regularly throughout the year, offering advice and feedback as teachers work through the curriculum modules, helping them connect to local nest cameras, and even sending specimens and other resources by mail.
Several of the counties in Montana and other western states currently participating in WOW have populations greater than 65% American Indian, with four schools on tribal lands, and the majority of counties in the program have a population of between 2% and 25% American Indian. Montana’s Indian Education for All standards were explicitly incorporated into the WOW program.
Many students in the communities that WOW reaches have lacked engagement and foundational skills and knowledge in E-STEM, are unlikely to pursue E-STEM careers, and are at risk for delinquent behavior. Programs such as WOW—place-based, local, integrated—significantly improve E-STEM indicators for rural, low-income communities (PBS 2014; Kelley and Knowles 2016). WOW addresses critical needs for students and communities by specifically serving economically disadvantaged students in rural and tribal regions. Twenty-three of the 26 schools WOW currently reaches are eligible for Title I funding. WOW provides many rural students with their first exposure to environmental research and puts an E-STEM mentor—their teacher—in the classroom.
Empowering educators
WOW gives both teachers and students confidence in E-STEM subjects; several WOW teachers and students have been recognized at state and national levels for their involvement in E-STEM. Patti Bartlett-Gladstone from Seeley-Swan Elementary and Junior High School received the 2018 Montana Environmental Education Association Educator’s Award for being a “fearless science teacher and scholar, who combines timely and impactful science topics; culturally relevant learning; indigenous knowledge; and real, muddy field biology into her classes.” And 2017 WOW teacher Caitlin Webb, who taught fifth through eighth grade at Dixon School in Dixon, Montana, won an honorable mention for the EPA Presidential Innovation Award for Environmental Educators for her creative implementation of the WOW curriculum in her physics, math, and science classes. In addition, two seventh-grade WOW students from Colville Junior High School in Colville, Washington, presented their osprey research at the 2018 North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) conference, where they won the STEM Award for their leadership and outstanding work in science education.
WOW focuses on helping teachers become E-STEM teacher-scholars with the confidence, resources, and professional support to engage their students in research. These teachers are supported by the guidance of the program curriculum and each lesson’s foundation in the NGSS. After participating in the WOW workshop, all educators indicated via the pre- and postworkshop evaluations that they
- see themselves as an E-STEM scholar more than they did before the workshop;
- feel more confident about their knowledge in E-STEM fields;
- have more access to professional researchers doing work in E-STEM fields;
- had exposure to active and ongoing E-STEM research;
- feel more confident that they can find and bring E-STEM experts into their classrooms;
- became part of a community that works together to exchange knowledge, ideas, and expertise;
- have a stronger ability to teach E-STEM topics in an integrated manner;
- have the opportunity to present E-STEM topics in a way that is personally meaningful and relevant to their students; and
- are able to provide students better access to engaging E-STEM materials and resources.
One 2019 WOW teacher wrote, “I feel much better about my ability to [teach E-STEM subjects] now. I still feel like I need to learn more myself, but I’m not as afraid now to learn as I go rather than waiting to be an expert in the topic before trying to teach it.”
Just a few days after she attended the 2019 WOW workshop, teacher Christine Karlberg wrote: “Yesterday I want paddleboarding in Newport Back Bay [in Newport Beach, California] to look for our local osprey nest. As I continued to paddle on, I noticed the vortices my friend’s paddle made in the bay. I noted the shape of the plane wings as they flew overhead. I wondered at the musculature that kept the legs of the egrets tucked up so aerodynamically (to reduce drag) for such a long time. Looking down in the water, I saw tons of stingrays ‘flying’ through their own medium! I learned SO MUCH in a week. I can’t wait to try the WOW curriculum with my students. I’d love to return to Montana next year to share lesson ideas with other teachers!”
Since WOW’s inception, our teachers have helped us build and expand the curriculum. The WOW team relies heavily on teacher feedback both during the professional development institute and throughout the school year to adjust the curriculum. We are constantly tweaking the program according to teachers’ experiences. Thanks to their expertise and insight, our curriculum now includes lessons on the significance of ospreys in American Indian history and culture, in-depth lessons that analyze Montana land-use impacts on ospreys and other birds, hands-on collaborative lessons exploring every aspect of flight physics, and lessons that use satellites to monitor effects of climate change from outer space.
Students take action: Classroom–community collaboration
Once teachers return to the classroom, they continue to work with the WOW team of experts, as well as forge new connections in their communities. With their fresh access to research, tools, and teaching methods commonly used at the college level, WOW teachers connect their lessons to local environmental challenges related to E-STEM, choosing the lessons and modules that work best for their individual classrooms and grade levels. They work with their students toward a capstone service-learning project that is informed by the research students have been conducting throughout the year as they work through the WOW curriculum modules. Students use their newly gained E-STEM knowledge to generate their own research questions, collaborating with professionals in their community to identify and help solve a local environmental problem.
2017 WOW educator Rich Montoya teaches at Hardin High School in the heart of Montana’s Crow Reservation. “I integrated the WOW curriculum with specific questions about our local land by connecting lessons to ‘Crow-centric’ concepts,” he says. “I had students read the Crow Treaty and understand it. Then we focused on the land—how mining, money, fish, and game fit in with Crow Nation. Water in Crow Nation/Hardin is so contaminated that ospreys fish in some areas, but not others: a real-life example. My students took water samples from locations near their homes, tested them for microorganisms, and plotted [data] in a Google database used by actual researchers. After locating osprey nests below, but not above a dam, students conducted field studies to answer [the question]: ‘Why is the water clean above the dam, but polluted downstream, on land leased from the tribe?’ In this lesson, we focused on ‘heritage’ as it’s associated with water quality and osprey health.” The class is now sharing results with the public and following up to find solutions with local tribal and governmental agencies.
Another WOW class, in Seeley Lake, Montana, noticed that their local osprey pair had built a nest on a dangerous high-voltage transmission pole, right on the main street in their town. The class worked together with the local electric co-op, several landowners, and WOW program biologists to relocate the nest. Students used the engineering design process to create plans for a platform and supports, and made scale model mock-ups to test different designs. They secured a donated platform and pole, had them installed, and moved the nest to the new, safe location, as the local community looked on.
“It was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” says 2017 WOW educator Patti Bartlett-Gladstone, who taught the students who relocated the nest. “We looked at the latest engineering model for osprey nests, and the class came up with several ingenious innovations, and that’s what we built in real life. It was a hands-on project and it’s something that needed to be done, and it was something the community really wrapped themselves around. It helped kids, ospreys, and the community.” (Read more of the story here.)
Replicating the program
In the same way that Wings Over Water used the Green Eggs and Sand program model as inspiration, other institutions can replicate similar programs in their own communities by using an exciting and locally relevant species or phenomenon as a bridge to E-STEM, thus integrating physics, biology, engineering, and ecology. Centering an E-STEM program around a local species lets educators bring real-world science to their students and creates the opportunity to work with a diverse team of community experts—scientists, agencies, nonprofits, museums, environmental educators, and more.
It is its diverse group of partners that allows WOW to provide its programming to educators for free. WOW does depend on some grants and private funding, but much of the support is in-kind. Having a university as a key partner has been essential to WOW’s success. WOW was born from research already being done by UM; communities looking to replicate this program can seek out universities, researchers, science centers, state agencies, and citizen science programs to identify a species upon which to center their program.
With so many collaborators, however, it’s important to ensure that involvement in the program is mutually beneficial to the program and all its partners. We made sure that WOW helps the pilots at NorthStar Jet/Neptune Aviation and researchers from UM, Lockheed Martin, Raptor View Research Institute, and Clark Fork Watershed Education Program achieve their personal or institutional goals for broader impacts and science outreach in the community. For environmental education organizations such as spectrUM and the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), we provide meaningful outreach or education—helping NWF recruit teachers from WOW for their Eco-Schools program and having the WOW teachers lead E-STEM lessons for spectrUM’s summer camp during the professional development institute. And, when the teachers bring the program back to their classrooms, the research their students conduct benefits their communities, partner researchers, and fellow program participants, too.
Perhaps the strongest aspect of the program is that the WOW curriculum is a living document, constantly being tweaked and adjusted according to teachers’ experiences. The teachers themselves get to inform future iterations of the curriculum, providing feedback throughout the year on what worked and what didn’t in their classrooms, helping the WOW team—as well as their fellow educators—build, expand, and improve the modules for years to come.
At its very core, WOW is a collaborative, symbiotic program that benefits all its partners.
Allison De Jong (adejong@montananaturalist.org) is communications coordinator at the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula, Montana. Jenélle Dowling (jenelle@adventurescientists.org) was staff scientist and Wings Over Water coordinator at the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula, Montana, and is now scientific director at Adventure Scientists in Bozeman, Montana. Erick Greene (egreene@mso.umt.edu) is professor in the Division of Biological Sciences and Wildlife Biology Program at the University of Montana and codirector of the Montana Osprey Project in Missoula, Montana. Sharon Leigh Miles (sharonleighsc@gmail.com) is a volunteer with the Montana Osprey Project in Missoula, Montana.
Want to learn more?
Want to apply to this year’s program? WOW is now accepting applications for the 2020 summer institute, taking place June 22–26 at the University of Montana in Missoula.
Resources
Missoulian article on osprey banding
Montanan article on ospreys and Montana Osprey Project (pp. 17–19)
The Wings Over Water (WOW) collaboration began with ospreys.
The Wings Over Water (WOW) collaboration began with ospreys.
Brief
Building Community With Educators
After a string of successes in our teacher professional development programs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS), I recently began to notice a disconcerting trend: Teachers stopped coming. Despite efforts to draw program participants, it became harder to convince individual teachers to sign up for course offerings. In talking to colleagues at other museums and science centers, I heard similar stories.
An article in Education Week notes similar patterns. It describes a national trend toward an increasing number of mandatory teacher training sessions on various nonacademic topics (Blad 2019). As one teacher stated in the article, “The opportunity to dig deep into topics of direct interest to me and my students gets curtailed when the statutory requirements become burdensome.”
Because more decisions about professional learning seem to be made at the district level, we at DMNS decided to shift our focus there. We reached out to district science coordinators using appreciative inquiry approaches to ask them about what they hoped and imagined for their teachers (Miller 2004).
Image courtesy Denver Museum of Nature & Science
As we listened, we paid close attention to potential partnerships, looking for people and districts that were easy to work with and interested in what the museum had to offer. This was a subtle but meaningful shift that afforded us time to really listen before making any suggestions or plans.
The feedback we received from these listening sessions helped strengthen our ability to provide effective professional learning and positioned us for longer-term projects and funding opportunities. For example, our partnership with Denver Public Schools, along with the Denver Zoo and Denver Botanic Gardens, has been sustained by a multiyear program funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York called Urban Advantage Denver (UA). The UA partnership forced us to dive deeper into Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), benefiting all of the program partners with a shared vocabulary and understanding. This has been a boon for us as professional development providers, as Colorado begins implementation of new NGSS-based standards.
A partnership with another Denver metro area school district grew with an Institute of Museum and Library Services award (MA-10-16-0411-16). This collaboration uses a model in which all elementary students come on scheduled field trips to the museum while their teachers receive professional development. To build greater capacity, the grant included another local district with high needs, allowing us to serve over 500 teachers. Now that funding has ended, both districts have dedicated budgetary funds to continue teacher and student programming with the museum.
Image courtesy Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Like in any relationship, there is a risk of compromising too much. We have to keep in mind that, although we want to deepen our role with local school districts, we do not want to lose sight of who we are and what we have to offer. A common scenario we face is avoiding “scope creep.” Districts with the best intentions will come to the table with a large, often unrealistic checklist of needs at the risk of compromising the value of our offerings. Sometimes, we have had to draw the line, establishing boundaries on what we can offer or negotiating what is most important in an effort to maintain quality over quantity. Our value as an informal institution is that we can make learning fun with opportunities for wonder and curiosity, showcasing resources and expertise that schools cannot provide. We are well suited to explore phenomena and engage in science and engineering practices. However, at times we have struggled in the program development process when we have forgotten what our strengths are.
These collaborations have given us a framework for how to build better community partnerships based on professional relationships and trust. We try to keep this human-centered approach in all of our community work. Although we have had a great deal of success in finding funding and partners to support our work, there is still more that we can pursue. For example, we have yet to consider rural community partnerships and conduct listening tours with key players in those areas. The road forward requires some formal action, starting with getting to know the people and resources within those communities.
Robert Payo (Robert.Payo@dmns.org) is teacher programs coordinator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Denver, Colorado.
citation: Payo, R. 2020. Building community with educators. Connected Science Learning 2 (1). https://www.nsta.org/connected-science-learning/connected-science-learning-january-march-2020/building-community
After a string of successes in our teacher professional development programs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS), I recently began to notice a disconcerting trend: Teachers stopped coming. Despite efforts to draw program participants, it became harder to convince individual teachers to sign up for course offerings. In talking to colleagues at other museums and science centers, I heard similar stories.
After a string of successes in our teacher professional development programs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS), I recently began to notice a disconcerting trend: Teachers stopped coming. Despite efforts to draw program participants, it became harder to convince individual teachers to sign up for course offerings. In talking to colleagues at other museums and science centers, I heard similar stories.