SciOut18 Flash Talk Jonathan Frederick and Crystal Harden
https://rockedu.rockefeller.edu/new_outreach/flash-talk-jonathan-crystal/

Greetings everyone! A couple things: this is me mentally crumpling up my notes of what my prepared remarks which weren't very good anyway but after conversations I had last night and what I'm hearing today I want to kind of switch it up a little bit. But before that, I like this kind of if you hear me once clap your hands, if you hear me twice clap your hands because it always makes me reminded two things. Early in my career, I used to work with a very experienced educator who used to go like this look at my nose look at my nose look at my nose and no one knew what she was doing but everyone looked at her nose and then she would just start whatever. Which was amazing but then also my very as my second my first day and my first real job at the Florida Aquarium in Tampa Florida I was, I had to dress up as a fish. My second day I had to greet school children coming in and my job was just to orient everyone to where they're going and remind them to behave etcetera etcetera. They gave me a bullhorn and then I watched nine school buses pull up and I think it was like no exaggerated something like 1,200 children and they all kind of get off the bus and they all kind of stand there and they're excited and I'm just there with my bullhorn like uh. And this teacher comes up to me says you need me to get him quiet and I was like please and she just goes r-e-s-p-e-c-t and all the kids just stop and go find out what it means to me and they all sat down and I've never been able to replicate that but we might try that tonight at caveat. Um all right so my name is Jonathan Frederick. I work at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is a science center on campus. We pride ourselves on being the gateway to the sciences. We do a ton with like a lot of you and I mean all of the work you do with with not a lot but I don't want to spend too much time about us. I want to talk about a few projects that we work that may resonate that we've created that may resonate with what you're doing. We really believe that representation matters and it sounds like that a lot of you do as well which is great! So through our work with the North Carolina Science Festival and what we do with our broader impacts work we've launched a statewide program called Impacts which is mainly we called it Impacts kind of passive-aggressively because everyone was asking about our impacts we're just gonna call the damn thing Impacts and we'll see what we do. We have an external evaluator but we work with historically black colleges and universities from around the state. We work with minority serving institutions. We work with companies which is a little bit of a weak point in our program where we're trying to get more STEM professionals who aren't on college campuses involved and we basically provide a short course where they are trained in getting better at science communication but what I like about what we do is then we have they're committed to being a part of at least two of events. We pick events that are most likely the kinds of events that they're going to be doing in their careers when they get asked to do outreach so we have them go to a middle school and share their love of what they do and I totally echo Ben's sort of hand-wringing about what if we just send a scientist in there and they end there they lay an egg and the kids are in the audience like see I knew I didn't like science. So we want them to be good at it but we still think it's worth doing. Another event is a community style event, maybe an expo or some sort of family gathering and what I like about that is it's, I don't if it's a safe space but it's fun right and I think the scientists find it really really valuable. Odds are they gonna do some of that work in the future but what we found is that going to non science events is even more fun than doing kind of science expos, so we've been partnering with music festivals, barbecue festivals, a potato festival, which I didn't even know that what that was. It was it's there's north eastern North Carolina has a festival that is massive with Ferris wheels and rides they set up overnight. I still don't know why people get on those things we're built overnight but it's packed and the potatoes are just because they sell french fries and they're really really popular so they have a potato peeling competition and I ate like 42 pounds of french fries and it was great but our scientists had a great time there but it's kind of interesting, and I may be the guerrilla science UK folks connect to this, context matters, co-creating matters, and sort of building community because we show up a little bit out of context and it's kind of jarring to the people who just came to a potato festival to ride rides and have a great time and then there's something that seemed is sort of like schoolwork maybe or a flash on science class so we're thinking through all of these ways to approach these events and one program that I would really like to share is about what we're doing with a county in northeastern North Carolina. So my prework I wrote at like 10 o'clock at night and I was a little maybe a gin and tonic in but I'm not sure but I was uh I was trying to sound definitive about soft skills that I can never feel a definitive about so I was trying to like think of like really like how do you get better doing science outreach? You just do it. Period. Send. And I don't really feel that way but I'm scrapping a lot of because I think this project is really important and one of my take homes about what I was doing with that pre work was that we make a lot of these rules. We can break them and bend them and I think that's really really important to remember particularly when we're partnering with with with people in meaningful ways and so one of my rules that I'm breaking right now is I wish there were another picture up there which would have my boss and mentor who's in the audience and it would be straight for me to talk about this program because it's really her brainchild so ladies and gentlemen Crystal Hardin. So unexpected! I know right. How much time do I have? Where's my fingers? Oh yes I got this. So you know one Jonathan put a little context behind behind everything that we're doing in Morehead. Representation is very important to us. So the Impacts program in our new project called the Saunders Science Scholars program came about because Morehead is really committed to representation and we started a few years ago focusing on diversity and inclusion in our entire organization. How does that look? We started not only with professional development trainings for our staff but we also implemented diversity statements and diversity strategic planning with our staff. We have trainings on implicit bias. We do actually culturally competent assessments of our staff. We have hiring questions about diversity successes in every interview from our undergraduate students to our director level positions so much so that our representation of our staff has increased gone from 8% around 2008 or 2009 to now over 33-35% in 2018 so we take it very importantly. We're starting with our staff to create a culturally competent workforce and environment also where our staff feel safe talking about diversity inclusion. What does it look like? We're always in the room asking the hard questions so this spreads over into our marketing efforts, program design efforts, and thus many of the great programs that we're doing like Impacts are new. I call them my babies this is this is my I'm five years from retirement so this last project is my it's my baby because I'm gonna go off into retirement after it's after I see it to completion. It is a six-year project we're doing with a rural county in North Carolina. Earlier when people were talking about bringing together your your funders and what are your funders want and then your community partners this is a full collaboration of a funder who came to us and said I love what you're doing here in the Triangle but I want to give you funding to replicate this in a rural area and I have certain requirements. I want it in a rural County. I wanted to focus on females, particularly females of color. Now it's private funding. We're a state organization with private funding. I can do that. I do not break federal laws. Then so then we had to find a partner so we had great partnerships with certain counties. We went to a County and before we even started planning I knew we had to have the right partner at the table for what we what I needed to undertake. We went to a district, a very small district only has five schools in the entire county: three Elementary Schools, one middle school, one high school and we went to the district. The assistant superintendent and superintendent were merely on board with this idea of creating a family Science Enrichment Club mentoring ten families for six years with monthly science club meetings. A child and an adult must attend monthly science club meetings. During the summer we provide a one-week summer camp. Also in addition to that all of our other outreach opportunities we offer at Morehead like the impacts program, scientists coming out, our mobile vehicles, our science onstage programs, we would also pour those into the county. So we develop a partnership where we we don't like the word adopting but it's a full collaboration of all of our force into one County. The district came to the table and we thought we knew what they needed they came to the table and said that's great but I really need you to do this. Like we thought okay we'll give these families iPads as you know their one year end of year celebration,  whatever you want to call it. The district said and that's not gonna work out because many of our families don't have internet access. It's poor out here and they can't afford it. They'd rather have their phone on than internet. So okay so that was out. So we're now going with a different idea. We're gonna give them drones. It's out in the country - all they can do is fly drones. There's space everywhere. We can do Sky Watch there's no light pollution there's nothing out there. So it's those kinds of things we sat down with the partner and designed so now we have this collaboration with the partner. They're fully on board. Then we went to the school board. The school board they're fully on board because the district is behind it. The school board is behind it. Now we have the county manager and we have the mayor on board because the district got behind it. We just finished our selection process. We thought we had ten families. We couldn't decide. We ended up with twelve families and in the interview and the interviews the families were talking about the lack of resources. This is a county where it borders Virginia. It's kind of one of those forgotten counties. And the lack of resources to science is unbelievable. One of the kickoff events we did was a we took science to a Friday night football game. We just did a science tailgate where we popped up with our mobile vehicles. People like we have a university that has a drone aviation trailer truck. They pulled up at the tailgate. We have 4-h pull up at the tailgate and as people were going into the football game we're like hey let's do some science and they were like hey great so much so that everyone's asking well are you coming to the next football game? That's not in the plan but we'll figure that out. But this is a full a full collaboration. We're going to follow these children for six years. My goal is to our goal to impact this program is to see them graduate and go on to college and receive scholarships and all that but we're gonna try to track them through high school to hopefully see them enroll in higher education science courses and we're - how are we doing that? We talked about metrics so we're doing research and evaluation. Two very separate things. We're evaluating each event that we're doing but then we are researching how are we what's the impact of this program? How is it impacting the science identity of these groups that we're studying? We're studying a rural, we're studying females, and we're studying african-american females and so we have metrics set up between quantitative data such as their scores to qualitative data with studies of their interests and attitudes through various various validated metrics that we're using to study impact over the next six years. This is a model that other districts are already trying to figure out. How can we do this in our in our district? If this if this works it will be a model for North Carolina. It's gonna work. It's got to work but that's what it is okay and I think I'm done.