Informal Science Education Programs - How can they improve equity in the K-12 context?

A few years back I attended a poster session at the National Association of Research on Science Teaching (NARST) about informal science education programs in science education, programs organized at lunch time, after school or on weekends. I had been a skeptic about the importance of such programs in impacting educational opportunities for the most marginalized of students in science, often poor, sometimes girls and frequently youth of color. However, this session changed my mind and since that time I've kept my eye on the literature about such programs and how they might integrate more with the K-12 educational system to facilitate learning experiences in science education for students and teachers.

At the NARST session I talked with science education researchers Hosun Kang, Jessica Thompson and April Luehmann about their work with informal science education programs. These programs often selected participants based on who was not succeeding in the formal school science contexts. They were structured to have students choose topics to investigate that were important to their lived experiences and were paced for individual students or groups. Students used group organizers as facilitators and resources but saw them as collaborators not as people with more control over the project work than themselves. If teachers were involved, they were learners and collaborators. In these spaces, students were able to use their own discourses and were encouraged to learn parallel scientific discourses. They engaged in scientific inquiry on their topics and often gained deep conceptual understanding in the areas they investigated. They learned how to question, research background information, interrogate the quality of information, define experiments and conduct them, and propose claims with evidence to support them. In short they learned to be scientifically literate. The adults involved in these programs learned that the students knew more than they often expected, were capable of more than they anticipated and were more motivated as learners than they had often experienced in the K-12 classroom settings.

While the above researchers have been thinking about out-of-school programs and their influences on in-school learning, several researchers are explicitly trying to bridge these spaces. Megan Bang's work in understanding indigenous peoples interactions in STEM combined with her work in teacher education brings together knowledge gained in informal learning spaces with student experiences in conscripted classroom spaces in a way I find fundamental for improving students' daily lived experiences and future potential participation in scientific discourses and practices. Danny Birmingham is also doing some terrific work in bringing the voices and lived experiences of young African American girls to teacher learning he facilitates in professional development spaces. I'm excited to see more work emerging at these intersections.

Existing out-of-school programs to explore:
April Luehmann's Science STARS program.
Angie Barton's GET City and C2S (Hosun Kang worked on this) program.
Jessica Thompson's Lunchtime Science program.

Other equity oriented informal science educators that I am familiar with are Takumi Sato, Kristen Poppleton, Kathy Reagan, and Stacey Forsyth. Please comment with other researchers or programs you are aware of that may be of interest to teachers and researchers in thinking about science and equity in education. I know many scholars of color have been working in this space for a long time but I am not always familiar with your work and would love to know more about it.

A tale of communities - bringing science into conversation with equity in the service of scientific literacy

I am a scientist.
I am an educator.
I am an equity scholar and activist.

I see all as integral to the other and yet...
I realize not everyone sees things the way I do.

From this starting point I decided to write about my thinking more systematically to try to share how I see the connections forming between science, science education and equity.

Please follow me on this weekly journey to make sense of this complex intersection of spaces. You can subscribe via email at the bottom of the blog space.

I would love to hear feedback, talk back, shared thoughts in a respectful and constructive manner. Please comment as we go forward when the mood moves you as the best thoughts are collaborative in construction.

If you want to know who I am in a bit more detail, my influences, collaborators and colleagues, please visit my personal site.