SciOut18 Flash Talk: Lynda Kennedy
Https://rockedu.rockefeller.edu/new_outreach/flash-talk-lynda-kennedy/

First let me just thank everyone. There's so many great ideas. My brain is buzzing with connections so I'm gonna actually try and stick to my script here with a hair off in all different directions. So I'm gonna do a bit more reading than I originally intended to do. So the first step in fixing a problem I think is identifying a problem and science has a couple. We've talked about them today in our small groups. There's the diversity problem. The US News and World Report recently noted that the United States STEM workforce is no more diverse now than it was 14 years ago. So we're missing those insights and talents from women and minorities and those with disabilities. They were still not participating in STEM studies or careers. There's also a lukewarm level of trust in science in the United States. It's not getting worse though sometimes people think that it's kind of staying steady but according to a Pew Research Center study only four in 10 people in the United States report a great deal of confidence in the scientific community and it gets even more varied in terms of response when you're talking about issues such as climate science or genetically modified food or energy sources. Simple communication about scientific facts is not the answer to these issues. Trust in particular is challenging to build as facts rub up against political or religious beliefs which are ingrained in a person's identity and a scientific identity is exactly what we need to build if we hope to have groups currently underrepresented in the field study, join, and persist in a STEM career or simply gain stem literacy. This is where conscious targeted outreach and engagement to new audiences comes in. Now, this flash talk is not a place for a doctoral dissertation around the subject so I'm going to give some quick hits to ideas which have informed the way we try and address these issues at the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum. So first up we let go of the idea that the scientist or the science educator knows all and no one else has anything to offer. As was referenced earlier, too often the picture that pops up when you ask someone to think scientist is male and often white, so leveraging indigenous knowledge has become part of the conversation in STEM education and some research relatively recently. Indeed the National Museum of the American Indian here in New York City if you have a chance they have just opened a new section on the math and science practiced by Native American nations historically. It's very cool and very hands-on and it's very free because it's Smithsonian all the way downtown. In our work at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum we think of using indigenous in its meaning of occurring naturally within a place rather than connecting to a traditional culture. So when working to engage audiences with STEM concepts particularly youth and families through our community engagement and youth leadership programs we provide programs in and/or recruit participants from high need areas of the city. We leave a lot of room and opportunity for participants to become the expert and to share what they already know and understand to connect to and show off the science behind their interests, talents, and everyday practices. Examples would be showing and sharing food preparation techniques that involve sophisticated understanding of the fermentation process or chemical reactions behind hair and beauty traditions. It is essential if you want participants to develop their identity as people who engage with science daily in a masterful way that you approach the topics with respect, encourage them to take the lead, and look at it as a facilitated experience where we are all learning together instead of an expert in parting knowledge from on high to the ignorant. In short we're employing the best practices of teaching and again I would argue as Ben pointed out here that science outreach can learn a lot from pedagogy. Aside from making sure we're going to where these audiences are: libraries, community centers, schools, public housing developments, even prisons, when designing programs and experiences we at the Museum spend a good deal of thought on finding relevant entry points based on interests of the target audience and our individuals within that audience and just as an aside to get that like with NYCHA New York City public housing complexes where we developing community feedback groups so again what they need, what they want, what they understand, what they're worried about in terms of bringing their families to the museum and how we can ease all those concerns and find those relevant entry points. So having programs exploring the algorithms behind something like Spotify or the way music is produced, mixed and engineered, and recorded is a great way to engage music obsessed teens for example. Connecting to the familiar and the areas they feel confident in and stretching their thinking and experiences to new STEM concepts building scientific literacy and once again a scientific identity. Identifying these hooks and providing connections from these interest-based STEM explorations to possible STEM-based careers is especially important for many individuals from underrepresented groups who may be the first in their family to think about attending college or may already be thinking about and working on a practical level to contribute to family support even as young as 13 or 14. Well no one doubts that being a doctor or dentist or research scientist is a way to have an income, medical school's a long and costly process and challenging to imagine as a path for a kid whose schools didn't have advanced maths or sciences and who at 16 isn't an A+ student in these areas. These subjects are generally taught completely divorced from the world these students live in so they're not always successful at them at first. Technology is engaging and exciting but we see there are challenges to attracting and keeping individuals from underrepresented groups particularly women. So one of the main things I think we do well at the Museum for all audiences but particularly for our goals for girls program is provide opportunities for them to meet and ask questions of people who look like them at different levels in their careers with different career paths many of which do not involve working alone in a lab or 10 years of medical training or any of these other things that they imagine goes into being a scientist or working in a STEM field. In the last year we've had an array of career and mentorship Day participants such as the first black female astronaut in space, fabric engineers from Coach, chemists from L'Oreal, and a young woman whose career has had her both figuring out those algorithms for music sales and touring as a drummer for the artist m.i.a. Best of all, in our youth leadership programs we work with our kids explicitly on communication skills and we hire them as paid interns or eventually junior education staff. When a new family visits our museum or a library where one of these staff members is facilitating a program and see someone who looks like them, perhaps speaking in their home language facilitating an experience that explores a complicated scientific concept I think that does more to engage new audiences and help create a scientific identity among those who hadn't seen themselves in that light before than anything else we do. So three minutes under and I am done and while the mic goes to her I'm gonna make a quick pitch. We are working on a year-long NSF grant to try and put together methods for doing mid and longitudinal studies of girls and STEM programs at museums and Science Centers. So if anybody wants to play let me know. Thanks for that talk, Lynda - I'm a big fan of your work. One of the questions that I continue to kind of wrestle with and when you mentioned putting scientists in front of students who look like them is how we continue to ask for volunteers or not necessarily volunteers even paid professionals to come in and give their time and work to be the demonstration of someone who looks like you can be a scientist while at the same time not asking that of typically their white male peers. So how do we continue to justify using the time of current scientists while leaving white males at the bench to continue to pursue their careers without interruption and how can we balance that in a way that might be beneficial to all parties? That's a great question and we don't leave them on the bench we get them out for other things for like public panels and things like that so we definitely make use of them - absolutely. I think that for for the women that we asked for particularly for the goals program a lot of them are coming from industry so unlike academia they actually they get paid days to go volunteer. Like that's part of the structure of their environment and they realize it was such a struggle for them very much being the only girl in their coding class at school, the only woman in their college program, or one of five or something that this idea of building a network with these young women it's a ten year old program now so it's nice it's got a whole sort of peer network going on is is really at their heart. So I think it's something they would do even if they weren't compensated for it but it's much easier for people who are not in academia because academia doesn't always honor a deeper work with towards tenure-track so for the younger staff, the younger faculty it is difficult. If you followed them on Twitter in various other communities where their response would be how dare not ask us this is the work that we that we understand that we're supposed to be doing because we are at this level and we understand what is behind us and we have to pay it forward. Many of the groups that we work with at UNC Chapel Hill I'm one of those it's the creator of the Twitter handle blackinSTEM that is part of her work who she is when she takes on a postdoc position is understood that I'm going to be doing science outreach for this purpose, for this topic and so many others in the community as well whether we're talking about astrophysicists or astronomers like Judea Eisler or Daniel Lee some of those it is part of their work and understood. So I think they're creating a culture where many many who who are underrepresented scientists in their field understand that this is part of what what is required of us what is needed to to change the landscape in the future. So I don't think for many of them not saying all but it's not asking it's not stretching saying that why leaving out white males but it's saying that this is work that we must we must do. I actually want to echo that because and also say that for two years I did work with the goals for girls at the Intrepid Sea so and I remember when I was reaching out to a something I was a grad student and I luckily had a PI who was very generous with how often I really needed to be in the lab and so for me it wasn't necessarily am I going to get paid to do this it was how can I not do this and how can I actually expose myself A to these students but then also to other individuals at the Intrepid so that I can get more opportunitie-s to do this because maybe while you know white counterparts maybe the reason they can say no is because they get asked all the time to do these things and so for these opportunities I took them as much as I could because I saw it as paying it forward. So I just wanted to echo what you were saying because I actually had a conversation with Jade Ida about this very thing and that was the thing that she said that she saw it not as an extra thing but as an extension of what she was already doing. I'll make this comment quick.  My name's Sarah McAnulty. I run Skype a Scientist and one nice thing then when we're like planning big scale outreach events or programs, one thing that we focus on is making sure that the minorities that we do have don't get like quote-unquote wasted on white kids. So so like not so that we make sure that we're making use of every person to their best ability and when you're planning one of these programs that are huge that's something that you should like just for all of us in the room to like keep in mind. And there are also a lot of underrepresented groups in the u.s. that a white dude is awesome for like a rural community that wouldn't see a scientist otherwise there and we never don't want the white dudes participating we absolutely do and we can use every single one of them but we want to make sure they're going to the right place and if you have like big algorithms to sort of help get people to where they're best used, that's really powerful.