Thank you for watching our video! 

Our project team is very interested in your feedback. We’re especially looking for ideas about how to broaden participation in this research to Spanish-speaking science educators and students across the country. What strategies do you use in your work to involve the stakeholders and beneficiaries of your research?  What are your successful strategies for building deep partnerships?

Are you a teacher or student and would like to be involved in this work? Learn more at the links below!

• For Educators: https://go.edc.org/CCeducators
• For Students: https://go.edc.org/CCstudents

Heather and team – very ambitious and interesting work! We work extensively with our Spanish speaking community and one question we have not had a good answer to how to be culturally responsive across the diaspora. Much of our Spanish speaking community is Ecuadorian (the largest Ecuadorian population outside of Ecuador), but the Spanish speaking communities represent so many diverse cultures themselves that we are kind of at a loss to know where to start. What process have you used to think about being culturally responsive across the many different cultures that we use the catchment of “Hispanic” or “Latinex” to group together?

Emily,

Thanks so much for sharing your project, and for fluidly integrating Spanish and English language in your video -- I thought this was a great example of practicing what you preach. I really appreciated the way your project built on an existing series, was informed by a needs assessment, and used culturally responsive instructional strategies rather than just language translation. I am curious to hear what you have learned from the pilot phase, and was wondering if you have any formative evaluation results to share?

Emily and team,

I like that you are approaching Hispanic participation through community and culturally aware educators. I have noticed educational videos in the past that were simply translated or voice over literally, and so, the meaning and interesting explanations were partially "lost in translation." I think it is important to seek and train educators to transmit information efficiently into different communities using examples and words they can relate to without a doubt.

As for efficient ways to establish partnerships for developing content or even your audience, graduate students are a great resource, especially, from universities which have a pedagogical training program. Reaching out to them through their respective departments can be beneficial for you and them. Among the three institutions involved in our program for example, we have a diverse group of students from multiple countries including Spanish-speaking ones and we have a pedagogical training to develop them as instructors. Hence, I am positive there are graduate students within STEM who would be glad to partner with you and gained experience.

Thank you for offering some very thought-provoking information in your video!  I am looking forward to learning more through your links. We have discussed some of these issues as we have done work in 4-H, and I so appreciate your insights! Do you have any suggestions around how informal science settings, such as 4-H which is open to young people in K-Gr 12+, can best partner with grad students and pre-service teachers to help formal educators be more aware of this educational setting and the teaching/leading opportunities it provides? Thank you and I look forward to learning more. I'd invite you to see our video to learn more about our partnership between Chemistry research and informal education through 4-H across the country.

Thank you for tackling this important issue!  I'm so glad that you're doing this from a cultural perspective and not just a direct translation.  I hope to follow your example for future projects.

What a wonderful project, team! Thank you for sharing your video. Are you finding that you also need to change the scientists and images that are represented in the videos (alongside language and culturally-based resources)?

What an interesting project for this time we're living! I was wondering what you mean by "English learners" in college? This term is often referred to K-12 students receiving language support and also majority U.S. born. But, for college age students in the U.S. (in English) there are usual requirements for English language skills to enter college, if international students or speakers of a language other than English. So, these exams certify English language proficiency for college. Could you please share more about the students who are engage in this work. 

This is a great project and I really appreciate how the team used the subtitles in this video to illustrate the importance of the use of BOTH language AND culturally relevant contexts to support engagement and learning. I am eager to see the impact of this more wholistic approach to language adaptation as a mechanism to support accessibility. Can you share some additional details about the adaptation process and particularly an example (or more than one) of where a direct translation of an existing video was identified as being less optimal than an adaptation, and what choices were made to address that need for change? Thanks!!

Hi Emily and Team, I wondered about host relatability as well and I’m glad you bring it up in one of your comments about feedback. While I find Hank quite relatable, my students did not. I have used crash course videos in my classes at a HBCU and found that my students preferred the Amoeba Sisters (where the hosts were cartoon amoebas). This might be one of the more high impact but also high cost changes that you could adopt for making these videos more useful to Spanish speaking students.

This is such a great project!  I'm excited to see more.  This is also something we've been thinking a lot about - producing culturally appropriate Spanish-language videos and materials rather than just translation our existing English ones.  I think a lot of my questions were already answered in the discussion, but one thing we've been trying to work on is changing the way we disseminate Spanish-language materials.  Have you found you changed your strategies so your materials is reaching larger audiences?

This is such fantastic news! Crash Course played a huge role in my own education -- I moved from a middle school with almost no STEM opportunity to taking biology, chemistry, and physics all at once in sixth grade and the transition was rough to say the least. The Crash Course lessons in those subjects not only helped me catch up to my peers, but made STEM something so fun, exciting, and approachable that it came to be my favorite part of school. I went on to pursue an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering, and have since started working in informal STEM education through the STEM Ecosystems initiative -- really coming full circle back to making STEM fun and approachable for all!

It wasn't until I happened across this video that I realized just how influential Crash Course really was in my path. Making this content accessible for ALL learners is such important work. It's especially exciting to see that you all are approaching this project from the perspective of cultural inclusion, rather than just direct translation. 

I look forward to learning more about this effort -- and a huge thank you to the whole Crash Course team for inspiring this STEMist all over again!