Hi Lesley,
The video suggests you were able to recruit numerous graduate and undergraduate mentors from your University for the project, and it is clear from Jordan’s interview that the mentors were invested in the project and passionate about working with younger students. This was very moving to see! I would be curious to know about both topics you raised: how did you go about recruiting volunteers, and how did you develop the partnerships?

Hi Victor,
We are fortunate that our institute, CIRES, has the foresight to start an outreach program long ago, and we now have quite a robust of individuals in our group and through grants from NSF and others we have been able to develop a lot of long-standing partnerships with school districts and teachers over the years. We are known throughout Colorado through participating in the Colorado Science Education Network (I am not Chair of the Steering Committee), as well as nationally via our various networks and professional societies. Developing partnerships is all about building relationships with districts, schools or teachers and meeting their needs, rather than focusing principally on your or your institute’s needs. It takes time and effort, but in the end it’s well worth it! One of our LOCC teachers, shown in the interview, participated in my PD program for 3 years, I visited his school several times and he’s now on our advisory board for LOCC. As far as getting mentors to volunteer (we do pay stipends, which helps), we’ve also been recruiting mentors for many years for various programs, and I’ve been a PI or co-PI on two NSF-funded GK-12 programs which has proven helpful in this way. Grad students are looking for these types of opportunities to put on their resume because the job market is so competitive. We, of course, vet them through an application process and such, but we’ve had no problem recruiting grad student mentors. The undergrad mentor is a new focus, and we will see how this goes in the next year. Hope this helps!

Hi, Victor.

Just to add a bit to what Lesley said with regard to mentors, we have gotten great response just by having our partners put the word out to campus list-servs. The program we got the most mentor response for was the summer, week-long program at our campus (as opposed to those that require travel to a more rural community). I take from this that students want to help, but it has to be convenient and limited enough in scope that they can be sure that it works into their schedule. I think that the stipend helps a lot, but I don’t think it’s the primary motivator for most of our mentors.
Thanks for watching the video and submitting questions!

Hi Lesley and Erin, Thank you both for your very thoughtful responses. They illuminate how much is going on “behind the scenes” here (excuse my pun) and how hard you work at developing good partnerships. Good luck with the next phase! Thank you.

Hi Karen,
Thanks for your nice comment. Teachers from the schools with the students that come from diverse backgrounds (>90% Free and Reduced Lunch) described the strongest impact on the students. Those students particularly connected well with the mentors – viewing them as role models. Teachers described that many students don’t have many role models in their lives and really benefited from the relationship they were able to build.
While we worked with urban, suburban and rural students in the pilot it is too soon (sample sizes too small) to report differences beyond anecdotal evidence.
We believe that the program is scalable. We will be working with teachers on lesson plans and support materials to help implementation at a larger scale.
Thanks for your great questions.
Anne

Fantastic. Thanks for your reply Anne! It’s really exciting to hear about the strong impact in underserved schools. Can’t wait to see where you take it next.

Hi Brian,

Great question. Yes – we are seeing this in Colorado also. Especially in the rural communities where the economy depends on oil and gas extraction. In fact we offered a workshop in one rural community in Northeastern Colorado for this summer and didn’t get much interest. Teachers reported back that the parents were very skeptical because of the climate topic. There appears to be an initial barrier when talking about climate because the topic is so controversial.
In our project we are encouraging the students to select the topics themselves, identifying how climate affects their communities – in Colorado that can be drought or wild fires or flooding. These topics appear much less controversial than when broadly talking about climate because those are effects that can be observed and impact communities.

Hi Anne, I imagine that most of the schools in BVSD and St. Vrain might be interested in showing a video or two in their classrooms as part of a science unit. You might want to align the videos with the science standards, so the teachers have some idea about where they fit in their curriculum.

Thanks for the question. One of the things we are exploring with the research side of this project is which people are most influential to students’ success in the project. We suspect that the mentors and staff we are providing are a big part of it, but it may be that the students themselves, their parents or other members of the community are as important or more important. That’s a long-winded way of saying that just because you don’t have grad students, etc. in your application of the project, doesn’t mean it can’t be very successful.
One of the outcomes for this project will be some guidance on how to adapt the project for use in a variety of setting. It is really important to our team to make all aspects of this project very accessible and adaptable. Once we are a little further into the project we will have a better idea of how to do that. Stay tuned!

We also have a published book chapter that describes the steps of our project, along with other types of media projects one can do with students, with suggestions of how others can do this without all the resources we are able to use in LOCC. Smith, L.K., A.U. Gold, J.N. Roonery-Varga, D.J. Oonk and D. Morrison. 2016. Media literacy as a pathway to bridge the digital and STEM divides: Interest driven media projects for teachers in the trenches. In: Improving K-12 STEM Education and Outcomes through Technological Integration. M.J. Urban and D.A. Falvo (eds), pp. 23-43. IGI Global, Hershey, PA.

Thanks, Teri! We’d love to chat, especially with our like-minded neighbors.

Thanks Teri – we will be happy to answer your questions!! You could come over during our summer workshop if you’d like. Send me an email to get details.