NSF Awards: 1713155, 1713276
The Fostering STEAM program supports out-of-school (OST) educators in offering equity-based STEAM programming. During our previous STEAM work with youth, our team developed a set of STEAM practices that are inherently interdisciplinary and that support identity work. Now, we are putting those practices to work as the foundation of our professional development model. We work with a range of OST partners, including libraries, science centers, and after school programs. Our research is looking at the ways that educators take up these practices and how this might impact institutional change around implementing equity-based programming.
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thank you for visiting our project video! We have been deeply engaged in STEAM work for several years and we look forward to discussions about both the practice and research aspects of this work. You can also learn more at: http://fosteringsteam.org/.
Kristin Flaming
Shellie Banfield
Great video.... I love your project! I know many elementary school teachers that will benefit from your resources. I'll be sure to direct them to your website!
Holly Morin
Judi Fusco
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Shellie!
Alison Heimowitz
School and Teacher Liaison
I am excited to see a project focused on equity-based STEAM programming. The video mentions that evaluation from your Color of Nature work showed positive results related to girls. I'm wondering if you have evaluated impact on students (e.g. indigenous youth) whose cultural ways of knowing are different from our more linear worldview?
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Holly Morin
Judi Fusco
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
This is a great question, Alison. Our evaluation showed growth in many science-related areas for our participants, which included Indigenous girls. We also conducted qualitative research during the project, which uncovered ways in which girls engaged in identity work during the design challenges we offered. For instance, one pair of girls created a stop-motion animation around a cultural practice of collecting bahidaj, or red cactus fruit, in an intersection of science, art, identity, and place.
Judi Fusco
Sean Holland
This is such a nicely produced video about an exciting project. Well done.
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks for the feedback, Sean!
Dennis Inhulsen
This is fantastic. Congratulations. We are honored to learn from the Fostering STEAM Team!
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Dennis Inhulsen
This is fantastic. Congratulations. We are honored to learn from the Fostering STEAM Team!
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Dennis!
Beth Grassi
As a science writer and occasional illustrator, I'm excited to see the arts linked to science--the creative fields of science visualization and non-technical writing are often overlooked (as highlighted by the "role" list below--no science communicator on the list!), yet are so essential for sharing scientific research.
Holly Morin
Judi Fusco
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Hi Beth!
I agree, science visualization and non-technical writing are critical for sharing science research. Our project is focused specifically on STEAM professional development of educators who teach youth, but I know there are many efforts focused more on visualization. Are you connected to the AGU group? The annual meeting there has a really active community in STEAM and a lot around visualization and other forms of communication. Let me know if you are already connected to this group or if I can help. I think you would enjoy it!
Holly Morin
Ute Kaden
Super cool video and great NSF project. Love it. STEAM is a much-needed approach to engage diverse students and integrate Native culture.
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks for your comments, Ute!
Judi Fusco
Senior Researcher Stem Teaching and Learning
What a great video! Thank you!
I love the focus on identity and equity and want to hear more about if you talk with teachers and / or students to help them understand this important connection in the process of learning.
I can’t wait to see the portal when it’s available!
Blakely Tsurusaki
Senior Research Scientist
Hi Judi,
Thanks for watching our video! Yes, we do focus on identity and equity and how it's connected to learning as part of the professional development. We get into perceptions about who does science, technology, engineering, art, and math; educators' own ideas about their abilities and how they feel about doing and/or teaching STEAM; how this impact their own and their students' identities related to STEAM; and how it impacts their learning and their students' learning.
Judi Fusco
Judi Fusco
Senior Researcher Stem Teaching and Learning
Thanks for the reply. I'd love to hear more your work here. Any papers / presentations on this?
Judi Fusco
Senior Researcher Stem Teaching and Learning
and I look down and see a connected learning link 2 posts down. :-)
Alex DeCiccio
This seems like a wonderful foundation you've built and are now developing out further. What do you consider to be the "root system" for your work? e.g tying learning to identity? or possibly working out process over product?
I can envision future work that uses the training strategies you've developed to build capacity with scientists who wish to develop and learn communication skills and methods while communicating with non expert audiences.
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks for watching the video, Alex!
I would consider identity-related and mindset strategies (including process over product) to be at the core of our work. We wrote a Connected Science Learning article recently that dives into this more: http://csl.nsta.org/2019/10/fostering-a-steam-mindset/
I do agree that the concepts in our framework could be used with scientists as well as teachers! In fact, I have started to introduce these concepts more explicitly in my course for science graduate students. I would be interested to hear more about your ideas around this!
Judi Fusco
Heidi Carlone
Holly Morin
Judi Fusco
Senior Researcher Stem Teaching and Learning
I think your work around identity and mindset is really interesting work. A colleague and I developed a course for STEM educators (Masters level) using all free and open resources and included many videos from past video showcases and included several videos around identity. I'd love to talk more about your thinking about the identity with graduate students!
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Hi Judi,
it would be great to talk! I would love to hear more about the outcomes with your students, as well!
Anupma Prakash
An excellent video highlighting the concepts and framework of a series of thoughtful initiatives in STEAM identity-building. It is really rewarding to see the long-term impacts of these efforts as those who went through the programs are now joining the STEAM academic track.
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Anupma!
Kenne Dibner
Senior Program Officer
This is a lovely video! Thank you for putting such clear effort into the presentation and framing your work. I went to your website and poked around a little with the resources, which are (a) beautiful! and (b) really robust and useful. One thing I'd like to know more about is how you're thinking about supporting teachers in reflecting on their practice - given the depth of the resources, do you have thoughts about how to engage teachers in interrogating their own thinking before, during, and after the lesson? Thanks again for your phenomenal work here - a pleasure to watch!
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Hello Kenne! Thanks for your feedback! The PD series we offer involves a day-two in person workshop followed by a series of online sessions and then the opportunity for guided STEAM work. During the workshop, we try to invoke that metacognitive frame by setting everything in the context of the practices. Teachers work through the investigations directly, with communication opportunities built in during the process, then after the investigation we work through a set of questions to guide small group and whole group reflection around how the lessons link back to the STEAM practices and how they incorporate identity and STEAM mindset. The online sessions also have embedded reflection questions.
Judi Fusco
Jeremy Pina
This is a wonderful video; finding ways to meaningfully connect with students through integrated STEAM practices is very important work.
And I have so many questions!
So, I recognize that the outcomes you're looking at in your current study are highly related teachers' practices and mind-set, and that in your prior study you looked at indicators of students' self-concept and attitudes, but I'd be interested to learn more about how your model might account for potential differences in the development of students' thinking skills, and especially those related to creativity and/or higher-order thinking -- what might be the ramifications of this sort of authentic internalization of systematic creative practices be in terms of outcomes like engagement with critical reflection, for example, or creative ideation?
Of course, I recognize this is probably, at some level, speculation -- in some sense, I'm just sharing my reflected excitement about the notion of your work -- but I'd be interested hearing your thoughts. :)
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Hi Jeremy! These are really interesting questions. Many years ago, our Colors of Nature project started with the question of whether we could support science identity among art-interested girls by integrating art and science in meaningful ways. As you note, we are now looking at other kinds of outcomes among teachers as a natural progression of our work. However, as part of the original work, we wondered if art-interested girls might have especially strong visual-spatial skills, and made some efforts towards measuring this. We eventually moved away from this direction in the interest of focusing on our main questions about identity, and we were worried about overburdening the girls with instruments. So our quantitative evaluation model does not include those kinds of co-factors. I would be interested in your work in this area and your approaches to measuring the skills you mention!
Judi Fusco
Tsivia Cohen
Thank you for your very fine video. Love the collaboration between settings! Especially helpful to hear the five modes of inquiry that you're highlighting in your work, since they align with much of what we're learning through our work at Chicago Children's Museum. Excited to see your on-line portal when it's ready to go. Any idea when that might be?
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Tsivia! Would love to hear more about what you are doing at the Chicago Children's Museum. The portal will likely roll out in stages. We hope to have some initial content ready this Fall or Winter, and will continue to add after that.
Holly Morin
Isabel Huff
This is a wonderful video and important work! I'm interested in how you support educators. You mentioned online and in-person PD. Do you give them a set of "lesson plans" to take back to their settings, and/or are you focused on broad strategies for integrating STEAM into the work they're already doing/creating their own lesson plans?
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Blakely Tsurusaki
Senior Research Scientist
Hi Isabel,
The focus of the PD is on our set of STEAM practices and how to support the development of STEAM mindsets and identities. We use investigations/lessons that we developed as part of our work with youth as examples of these practices and how to support a STEAM mindset and identity. These are available to anyone for free on our fosteringsteam.org website and many of the educators we work with do end up using and modifying these activities. However, we are more focused on how they can incorporate the STEAM practices and mindset and identity work into their own contexts. As part of the in-person PD, we have built in time for them to reflect and think about how to do this and in the online PD and coaching, we further support the educators in developing their own STEAM investigations.
Judi Fusco
Holly Morin
Isabel Huff
Sounds like a wonderful blend! Thank you so much.
Chris Mainhart
Although your video focuses on OST partners, it very relevant to those settings where STEAM is part of the elementary curriculum. I'm currently in the 3rd year as the STEAM Teacher/Coach. Watching the video provided me with a high level of reassurance. From a UDL perspective, your emphasis on incorporating STEAM practices and mindset and identity work provides more entry points for all students to connect to the learning.
Judi Fusco
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Chris, for your comments! We agree. Although the main audience of our work has been OST partners, we have also worked with in-school teachers, including a significant number of art teachers, who have given us a lot of positive feedback about the framework and impact on their work. It is great to hear some affirmation from you, as well, as an in-school practitioner with lots of experience in this area! Would love to hear more about how you approach STEAM.
Judi Fusco
Carie Green
I love your video and your project is very inspiring. I appreciate your focus on identity, playfulness, and building inspiring meaningful connections. I wonder how you bridge connections across sites and the duration of your student's participation in the project? Thanks for sharing your inspiring work!
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Kristin Flaming
Great program. I am on the committee for SAGE STEAM camp for rising 7th grade girls in Oklahoma. It is a week long residential camp on a college campus. Art is focused on just as much as the STEM categories. Our main focus is active learning and exposing the girls to possible STEAM careers. http://bit.ly/2z21gcT
Judi Fusco
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Carrie Tzou
Associate Professor
Thanks so much for letting us know about your program! We'll check it out!
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Carie! These are great questions. Our current work with OST providers has been somewhat sequential rather than parallel, which hasn't offered a ton of opportunity for real-time connections between sites, but we hope to build in some of the experiences and the work that was developed by the partners across different settings as we move forward with the Portal to provide some of that bridging. The second part of your question asks about duration of activities for students. When we did direct work with youth through our former project, Colors of Nature, this was in the context of 2-week summer academies.
Marley Jarvis
I love your focus on STEAM and identity. Also hurray for adding some lovely and playful illustrations! I'm a science communicator and casual illustrator (I chose to illustrate my video, too!) and I am so excited about the role of the arts in expanding how we think and talk about science. Thank you for your work! We (University of Washington Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences) think a lot about identity formation and how our brains are primed from birth to learn in connection to other humans. I'd love to hear a bit more about what kind of identity work you do with educators. For example, in the early learning settings that we often support, many preschool teachers don't see themselves as "math people" which translates into math anxieties that the students pick up on. Is this the kind of thing you address? If so, how?
Judi Fusco
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Carrie Tzou
Associate Professor
Hi Marley! Thanks so much for your question! We have actually gotten that question a lot with our work with librarians who work with families with very young children. This has been a challenge for us and we would love to know more of your work with preschool children! Because this project is based on work we did with middle school girls, we are tending to have materials that are more appropriate for upper elementary through middle school-aged youth.
Marley Jarvis
Here's one of the studies I was thinking about, which is in early elementary school from Beilock, Gunderson, Ramirez, and Levine, 2010: https://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/1860 . What they find is that, at the beginning of the year the level of "math anxiety" that the female teachers had was unrelated to their students' math scores, but at the end of the year, it was--but only for girls. The girls who's math scores were most impacted tended to also have taken on the stereotype that "math is for boys." At I-LABS, we've done a lot of work on to develop a timeline of sorts for when this stereotype takes hold. It appears that children tend to develop this stereotype often by the second grade (Cvencek, Meltzoff, and Greenwald, 2011: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01529.x).
I think it tells us just how important it is to give all children AND educators access to engaging STEM experiences (and to start early). We know that our brains are malleable and change based on what we do often and in a meaningful way. So it could be wonderful to incorporate activities that boost parents' and educators' STEM confidence and STEM identity along with the children's, as we know ultimately we are always serving as models for kids that look up to us.
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Carrie Tzou
Associate Professor
Thank you! I am familiar with the math anxiety work, and agree with you about the need to start these experiences early! AND, our field is desperately in need of research-based STEM/STEAM experiences for early learning!
Marley Jarvis
Absolutely! It would be so cool to have programs that have identity-based work (i.e., addressing math anxieties) for both the adult teachers or parents and the kids they work with within the same program.
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Deanna Buckley
I am sending your video to several colleagues - great project!
Carrie Tzou
Associate Professor
Thank you so much! We would love to hear feedback from them!
Perrin Chick
What good work you are doing in the out-of-school world. I would love to learn more about how you structure and balance the in-person sessions with remote engagement. We work closely with the Alaska Afterschool Network, coaching their educators on their STEM facilitation skills. Perhaps there is an opportunity for us to collaborate.
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Hi Perrin! We would love to hear more about your work. If you want to send me an email for a follow up conversation, I am at: ldconner@alaska.edu
Michelle Quirke
Laura, This is a dynamic video that captures the connection between learning and identity. I look forward to learning more about the STEAM portal in the future.
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Michelle! The portal should have some initial content in the Fall or Winter, and we will continue work on it in subsequent years.
Lynda McGilvary
Laura, you did a fantastic job on this video. It clearly and concisely tells the story of many years of research and learning for your team. Although I am somewhat familiar with your work, and a big fan of the Colors of Nature project, your video provided answers to all the questions one might anticipate. The creative delivery through an artistic-animation was the cherry on top of the sundae! Congratulations on the great work you do and the wonderful video that explains it so well!
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Lynda! I'm glad you enjoyed the video! Much credit goes to Mareca Guthrie and Perrin Teal-Sullivan, members of our project who did the actual animation and production.
Heidi Carlone
Love this work and the beautiful visual representation of it in the video. A couple of questions:
(1) How do you respond to the critiques of STEAM-- that we can't just smush all of these ways of knowing together into one acronym-- STEM and STEAM just end up being meaningless in such cases. I ask because we've gotten that critique about our work. :) Integration is such a tricky thing! We're finding it challenging to study disciplinary-linked identity work in such settings, too. That said, I am fully onboard with an approach that broadens our definitions of science and who can do it.
(2) I'm dying over this animation. Was there a particular program that you all used?
Thanks for the provocative work, team! I will be stalking your website. :)
Alex DeCiccio
Chris Mainhart
Heidi, the critical aspect of STEAM is the fact that multiple entry points are provided to engage students at a young age rather than exclude at an early age (past history). If Pre-K to 3 students love STEAM they will continue to chase it, especially when it becomes less integrated. Their early love experience with all things STEAM will sustain them when the content becomes a steeper climb. Their early experience with PBL and the engineering design process will help them become comfortable with working on solutions to a problem over and over again. Without the early STEAM experience, too many students are put off by not getting the right answer after the first attempt. An early experience with "failure" followed by a collaborative experience of success helps students to see the value in working with someone else to solve complex problems. Those educators who critique STEAM as being less rigorous need to visit early childhood settings that embrace a STEAM approach.
Alex DeCiccio
Heidi Carlone
Chris-- Nice! Beautifully explained. Thank you.
Alex DeCiccio
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks for your comments, Heidi, and your reply, Chris! Our team has thought a lot about the question of what STEAM means.... it can get really philosophical in terms of where science and art begin and end. I guess my response to those kinds of critiques would be that we try to focus on the productive space where science and arts practices overlap in an authentic way (our ideas were grounded in looking at science/art overlap specifically but we think our practices hold for integrating other STEM areas with art). There are also areas of non-overlap but we think focusing on the overlap is one way to support identity work. And, we believe that STEAM also has some emergent characteristics. I would be interested in hearing how you respond to critiques of integration, Heidi?
the production work and animation were all done by two of our team members, Perrin Teal- Sullivan and Mareca Guthrie. I am very grateful to have them on the team and will let one of them respond with program and other details!
Heidi Carlone
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Learning Designer
Thanks, Heidi! We originally planned to have live interviews with both the team members and workshop participants but the pandemic had other plans for us (ALL of us), so we went down the animation rabbit hole instead. It ended up being an exciting challenge and now that we have some of the tools figured out, we want to make more! This is what ended up working for us:
Drawings: We used two apps, Paper (by WeTransfer, for iOS) and Sketches (by Tayasui, for iOS, android, desktop). The free versions are very robust, so you can download and start playing around with them right away if you are interested. The tools are mostly the same, but there are some differences in layout and functions so which ones we used were based on personal preferences. The "pro" upgrades are a few bucks and offer more customizable palettes and additional tools that can be extremely useful if you decide you like working with them. Using a stylus (instead of your finger) to draw on the screen can really help with fine lines and control.
Video Production: We used a mix of programs in the Adobe Creative Suite for production. We were familiar with some of these, but new to others and relied on a lot of tutorials and trial and error to figure them out. We used Photoshop to import and organize the drawings, and to make adjustments and compilations. In the process of making the video and wanting to bring some life to the still images, we discovered Character Animator, which allows you to use key-strokes, audio files or your own webcam and face to animate a drawn character's movement. You build your character in Photoshop with each feature and feature-state (open, closed, etc) on a different specially-named layer that Animator recognizes. It's like making your own live-video filters and it is completely enchanting to move your head around on the screen and have a drawing mimic you! Finally, Premier Pro was used to cut and combine all of the elements and create the final video. Besides the characters, all of the motion is done in Premiere Pro using "keyframes" that allow you to change the size/shape/orientation/opacity of any clip across time. If you are a new user the extensive menus and tools can seem daunting, but once you get oriented and learn the basics, it is actually quite intuitive.
Finally, we used a cloud drive to send enormous project files back and forth across the 3,000 miles between us, and a lot of facetime and screen-sharing to figure it all out. If you find yourself working on a video project and have questions, please reach out! We would be happy to share what we learned in more detail.
Heidi Carlone
Judi Fusco
Heidi Carlone
Perrin and Mareca,
Your work is absolutely stunning. It sounds like this was a ton of work, but let me tell you, it is a beautiful, impactful way to tell the story. I'm going to copy what you wrote here for future reference, but it sounds pretty darn complicated. :)
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Heidi Carlone
Re: Laura's question about integration. I agree with what you say. I think what you all are doing here is much more INTEGRATED than what I see in most projects, which is much more about COORDINATION. I love that! You can really see this integration in the kits/curriculum you posted on your website. With a truly integrated approach, you maintain the authenticity of the fields/disciplines and don't lose the distinction of those fields/disciplines. You also don't privilege one way of knowing over another. I think that's important.
Right now, our approach is much more coordinated, though I would love to discuss how to leverage more authentic integration. We're coordinating science, engineering, computing, and making in the context of envrionmental problems (e.g., stormwater runoff, biodiversity of a state park) which provide multi-faceted problem studying, solving, and communicating. Still, I'll be thinking about your approach for a long while.
Blakely Tsurusaki
Senior Research Scientist
Hi Heidi,
Thanks for watching our video and for your thoughtful questions and comments!
As Laura mentioned, we have focused on an overlap of (some) practices as a way to get at the integrative nature of STEAM. Like you said, part of this work is about breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries and expanding people's images and ideas about what the science, technology, engineering, art, and math are (which relates to identity). This also goes beyond practices, but includes ideas like creativity and personal relevance that cross disciplines.
We've also gotten questions about STEAM so we've spent a lot of time thinking about integration, what it means to us, and why we think STEAM is important. I like how your project is looking at modes of engagement in investigating problems. I think that's a great way in to the importance of STEAM - because investigating questions/solving problems in the real world requires interdisciplinary work. And the roles that the youth are playing, like tinkering, are roles where they are doing science, math, engineering, etc. as part of that role. Do the youth recognize that they are doing science, math, art, etc in their roles?
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Hello Heidi, thanks for your thoughts. I do think the focus on integration is one of the key strengths of our project. That said, the coordination approach that you are taking also seems so consequential for identity. I watched your video and I love the way learners have the opportunity to see themselves in practices from the different disciplines you mention in the service of a project that can be tackled from so many disciplinary perspectives. Would love to talk more
Tina Harte
As a SciGirls trainer and Informal Education Specialist, I was very excited and engaged in viewing your video. STEAM is such an integral part of educating not only girls, but all learners, Thank-you for sharing.
Perrin Teal Sullivan
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Tina!
John Chikwem
This is a very good video because it is an attempt to engage a diverse group of students including girls.
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, John!
Rebecca Ellis
I love the connections your project makes between STEAM and the self. Thanks for sharing your video!
Laura Conner
Associate Research Professor
Thanks, Rebecca!