Our team has been trying to unpack "relevance" and "authenticity" for a while now, so we have loved getting the opportunity to bring different approaches into conversation. 

I just checked out your video and your project sounds amazing -- I would love your thoughts on the connections between these questions in informal and formal learning spaces.

Oh, goodness, this came up in almost every conversation! Some consistent themes:

• People have very good reasons to mistrust institutions, and empathy and attention to social positioning are key.
• Mis-/dis-information are primarily structural problems, not individual ones.

Some things that follow -- none of which we are the first to suggest:

1. All questions are good questions and should be taken seriously.
2. Credible communicators will be those who share certain kinds of lived experience, social positioning, and/or identities with the communities you're trying to reach. You can't design learning experiences FOR groups unless you design them WITH or BY those groups. (None of which is an argument for a simplistic view of identity or representation.)

John, please weigh in! I know there's a ton that I am leaving out here...

Jena, I think this is so true and yes this does seem to come up in every conversation!  I think the you are right that there are many good reasons people have to mistrust institutions and empathy and attention are indeed key! And also agree about the need for co-design not designing FOR the people we are trying to work with and support.  Wondering if you have any strategies or process for really creating a supportive environment for true co-design that also takes into account what people can realistically do.

I love this question.

In my experience, here are some (by no means all) of the things great co-design projects do well:

• Flexibility in terms of work styles and processes -- and a recognition that figuring out ways of working takes time, and it's time well spent.
• Openness to new directions.
• Ensuring people are compensated for their time and effort. Sometimes this is financial, but it can also be in meaningful symbolic capital, which looks different in different contexts (e.g. co-authorship, a title like a Fellowship, release from certain kinds of work duties).
• Valuing different forms of expertise -- especially lived experience -- beyond academic credentials. I can't say this one enough.

For a great example, I want to wholeheartedly recommend my colleagues' co-design project (I'm one of the evaluators of this project): https://stemforall2022.videohall.com/presentati...

Oh, and as my colleague Bennett reminds me, setting clear expectations up front and "being aware of what might be obvious to you as a researcher that isn't to everyone"

I'll have to return to these questions when I have a little more time. In the meantime, I wanted to clarify that we do not mean to set up an opposition between moral and intrinsic motivation. It isn't moral versus...; it is moral and curiosity, wonder, achievement, mastery.... All these things together constitute relevance--the reasons for learning. Relevance is like a musical chord, and chords have variations using different combinations of notes. Chord variants have different effects on the listener. Our complaint (if we can be said to have a complaint), is that we've been playing a broken piano, which seems to lack the keys that relate to moral motives: caring for others at various scales. The workshop was intended to explore the benefits of playing variants of relevance on a piano with all its keys--one that speaks to the full gamut of human needs and desires.

I will attempt a more elaborated answer later today, but, for now, let me say that one of the places we at Knology would like to go next is somewhere in the neighborhood of your project: helping kids to overcome between-group barriers through the benevolent act of creating software solutions with and for others. As you point out, designing for others requires perspective taking/empathy. It also requires perspective seeking about what the "other" needs and desires. In that way, those others might not seem so very other. 

And let's not forget perspective giving: unambiguously telling people what you need and want is another skill that kids need to develop, especially for kids who have been told repeatedly that their needs and desires don't matter

Thanks for asking! We're in the process of editing the proceedings -- a collection of short (<5 page), mostly colloquial essays written by the participants individually and in various groups. They'll be fully open-access, and we're planning to share through the professional societies and networks of all participants. I'd also love to share through networks like NSTA and ISTE, although I don't know if we have direct connections to those kinds of groups. Who else would you recommend?

Ooooh! I love this thought.

Hi Jennifer: The theoretical underpinnings for several of our ongoing and planned studies on science communication start with moral relevance. We've argued that speaking to moral motives provides evidence of the speaker's goodwill (benevolence). Evidence of benevolence increases trust, and increased trust opens people to the possibility that the speaker may have something valuable to communicate.

We have some evidence from the literature that this approach can work with people who identify as Black and/or African-American. To quote from a recent proposal: "The literature on social responsibility shows that people who identify as Black and/or African-American tend to favor a collective approach to meeting the needs of the communities to which they belong (e.g., Carson 2009). This applies to choices about helping economically stressed kin (e.g., Hill, 2022), as well as to the academic and career choices of secondary school students (Uriostegui, et al., 2021), college students (McGee & Bentley, 2017), and people earning doctoral degrees (McCallum, 2017). Therefore, we hypothesize that this approach to conveying benevolence may open the door to these persistently excluded communities."

I look forward to seeing such an approach work to "motivate more girls to pursue engineering."