Thanks, Shellie!  

Thanks for the feedback, Sean!

Thanks, Dennis!

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!

Thanks for your comments, Ute!

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.

Thanks for the reply.  I'd love to hear more your work here.  Any papers / presentations on this?  

and I look down and see a connected learning link 2 posts down.  :-) 

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!

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!

Hi Judi,

it would be great to talk! I would love to hear more about the outcomes with your students, as well! 

Thanks, Anupma!  

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. 

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!

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.

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.

Sounds like a wonderful blend! Thank you so much.

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.

Thanks so much for letting us know about your program! We'll check it out!

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.

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.

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! 

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. 

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

Thanks, Michelle!  The portal should have some initial content in the Fall or Winter, and we will continue work on it in subsequent years. 

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.

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.  

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. :) 

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?

Thanks, John!