Hi Laura: Thank you for your comment. We are following youth through the middle grades (mainly ages 12-15) as they navigate informal STEM in their lives. We are collaborating with community centers, museums, and zoos across our partner sites. While we are interested in how youth build connections between their ISL experiences and school science, this is not a direct focus of our work, at least on this project. We are most interested in how youth access, navigate and connect experiences in and through ISL, what this means for their STEM pathways, and the practices which open up and constrain their pathway authoring. One piece we are particularly interested in is how community centers and designed spaces such as museum build organizational connections (rather than just person connections) towards facilitating pathways for young people -- how such connections are established, maintained and the ways in which they support young people. Angie

I really love this idea of how informal spaces generate pathways!  I'm wondering how this connects to school day science?

Hi Anushree: Thank you for your comments. Our project, which is grounded in longitudinal ethnography and participatory design based research, is using the lens of "expansive learning" to guide our methods of assessing impact. For example, we think of impact in terms of science capital, science agency and science identities alongside more traditional outcomes such as science learning (knowledge & practice) and participation. We are using both large scale survey of participants across our sites, as well as multi-modal portfolios co-produced by youth + researchers, and practitioners + researchers. One outcome that we hope for is research informed policy ideas related to the high leverage practices that organizations can take up regarding equitable and transformative pathways (e.g., naming specific outcomes, and naming specific practices at the cross-organizational, organizational and program levels). Angie

Hi Stephen:  Thank you for your comments! This is a tough question to answer briefly, but I will try. In our Phases 1 and 2 of our project, we are collaboratively engaging with youth and with practitioners to co-produce portfolios of youth's ISL experiences over time (years) and of the potential high leverage practices which may support these experiences. I say co-produced because youth and practitioners are actively involved in assembling these portfolios through our joint experiences together -- identifying moments/experiences/artifacts that matter to them in their work/practice, and they are also involved in reflexive dialogues on the meanings of these portfolios. These dialogues are working us towards initial conjectures that we will test in our DBR work (phase 3 - we are not there yet). So, during Phases 1 and 2, our practice and youth partners are co-authoring with us the starting points of our DBR work. Then during Phase 3, we will work in expansive R+P teams (youth, practitioners, researchers) to co-design how the conjectured HLPs may be integrated in ISL experiences. Let me know if this is clear! Angie

Angela,  I enjoy watching the students interact and also appreciate the changes of research “capture” so neat that the kids join in the research. The timeline of their crossing pathways between informal and formal is powerful.    The use of that timeline connected the problems that I think about regarding formal vs informal STEM, also how hard it is to cross over in our own “languages” that tend to both be based our “experiences” but also on our learning cultures where we emerged.  Trying to talk about that bridge is difficult anywhere.  I wondered if students engage across the project  sites to compare their interests?

Hi Betsy: Thank you for your comments! We have purposefully involved youth who are involved cross setting as a way to open up the dialogue amongst the youth and practitioners. One interesting outcome thus far has been because of that two of our community partners are not starting a collaborative where the youth involved in both settings will help plan a joint program! Very exciting!

Hi Lisa:  We have 48+ youth across our four sites, involved intensively on the co-production of their ISL pathway portfolios. These same youth will contribute to the design-based work if they opt to do some. We imagine that some will and some won't (because some may move to new cities, as one youth will be this summer, and some may become involved in other activities as they move from the middle to the high school). It will be interesting as we begin our design work to have  a strong youth voice -- both youth who have helped construct the basis for the design work, as well as new youth who can contribute new ideas to the process. Thank you for your comments! Angie

Hi Kris: This a a great question in terms of describing/documenting competencies. One of our goals will be to really make clear concrete high leverage practices, and tools that may be supportive in helping practitioners enact those practices. It will be important as part of that work to develop supportive tools that help practitioners and leaders to "see" how those practices develop -- the leverage points, the incremental steps and so on. This I think may help push us along what it may mean to talk about such competencies for equitable teaching and learning in ISL settings.

Hi Maureen:  Thank you so much for your comments. It has been interested to make sense of youth document and describe the institutional barriers, which is not always the same as adults do. I was particularly taken by two of the youths' efforts to include a stop motion animation video in their portfolio as they wanted the teachers/researchers to not only "understand" their pathways and the barriers they face but also to "feel" their pathways. (Hope that made sense!)

Hi Lorena: I would be happy to send you a few papers that may be of interest. One paper that served as a critical analysis upon which this study is build is this paper I co-authored with Daniel Birmingham: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002... -- I am also happy to send this and a few others papers if you send me your email (acb@msu.edu).

Hi Merle: Thank you for your comments! It was important for us to have the youth play a central role in the video as they do in this project. We are working really hard to ensure that we take an expansive r+p approach where youth and families voices are at the table with researchers and practitioners in equitable ways!