Thursday
September 25, 2008
by Maureen Kelleher
There’s much fuss these days from the corporate world to Congress about America’s declining numbers of engineers, scientists and mathematicians. Grant money is flowing for Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (STEM) education both at the K-12 and higher education levels.
One interesting sidelight in this story is the rise of STEM beyond the classroom: in after-school programs, summer camps and informal, community-based workshops. Last week, Project Exploration http://www.projectexploration.org and the Coalition for Science After School cohosted the first national conference on science and technology in out-of-school time here in Chicago.
The 250 attendees expressed energy and enthusiasm for their new and rapidly developing field, which sits at the intersection of two hot educational trends: STEM and learning in out-of-school time.
Yet I walked away somewhat unsure of the relation they could or should develop with schools and classroom teachers. “Our relevancy to formal education should be strengthened,” said keynote speaker Eric Jolly of the Science Museum of Minnesota . But how?
Clearly conference presenters didn’t want their programs to look like classrooms, often for good reason. Being outside the formal classroom offers advantages: more time to do labs and observations, a focus on personal relationships and youth development, an ability to focus activity on student interests rather than on a state-mandated curriculum, just to name a few. Yet many participants also acknowledged they want to do a better job of helping students understand the science behind all those fun projects.
I met exactly one person with a foot inside and outside the classroom door: Linda Marten of Chicago’s Foreman High School, who teaches biology and runs their two-year-old science37 apprenticeship program. Though Marten is delighted to have a way to give students real lab exposure, it’s been a challenge to teach school all day and then run a program afterwards for three hours twice a week. (Last year it was three times a week until she could recruit some colleagues to get involved.)
I left this conference with more questions than answers. Where are kids getting hooked on science, inside or outside the classroom? Should we just make school look more like good out-of-school time programs, and if so, how could we do that given the testing and curricular pressures teachers face? Should the classroom and after-school be separate in terms of personnel but mutually beneficial by giving students hands-on experience relevant to content learning?
Closer to the ground, I met many good-hearted staff from local museums, but can’t say I’ve always seen clear connections between what they do and what goes on in schools or after-school in hard-to-serve neighborhoods. How helpful are Chicago’s museums in supporting classroom science teaching? How much of a role do they really take in reaching the hardest-to-reach young people outside of school time?
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Maureen asks, “Should we just make school look more like good out-of-school time programs, and if so, how could we do that given the testing and curricular pressures teachers face?”
In southern New Mexico I am involved in a program to bring active and retired scientists and engineers (from White Sands, NASA and the Physical Science Lab at New Mexico State University) into the schools as volunteers. The program has been around for a dozen years and has been very successful.
This year, we have been asked to make sure that the volunteer presentations fit the new curriculum maps. The maps were created to fit science and math curricula to the Standards and to NCLB testing. The “testing and curricular pressures” Maureen mentions are being transferred to people who just want to turn kids on to STEM education and are willing to give up their own time to do so.
I really think the pressure of meeting NCLB requirements is making all types of active, inquiry education a hard-sell to school boards and administrators.
So, is out-of-school time a safe haven where hands-on inquiry can be done without those pressures?
Someone I spoke with last week said many out-of-school time providers would just as soon have the schools “get out of our way and let us do it.”
I can see the appeal but fear that out-of-school time doesn’t yet reach enough young people (especially the hardest to reach ones) and that we don’t yet have a deep enough network of providers who really know their science. It’s quite a conundrum.
Where are kids getting hooked on science, inside or outside the classroom? Should we just make school look more like good out-of-school time programs, and if so, how could we do that given the testing and curricular pressures teachers face?
