Featured Speakers:
- Karen Lionberger, Associate Director of Making Sense of Science, WestEd
- Anne Hamlin, Research Associate, Northern Arizona University
- Rasha Alsayed, Research Associate, WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director of Events and Digital Media, WestEd
Danny Torres:
Well, hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar. Our topic, Bridging Science and Engineering for Every Learner. We’ll be exploring research-backed and ready-to-use strategies for creating inclusive STEM experiences for elementary and middle school learners. Our featured speakers today are Karen Lionberger, associate director of Making Sense of Science at WestEd, Rasha Alsayed, research associate at WestEd, and Anne Hamlin, research associate at Northern Arizona University. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of Events and Digital Media for WestEd. I’ll be your host.
Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a non-partisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff partner with state, district, and school leaders, providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices. Now, I’d like to pass the mic over to Karen. Karen, take it away.
Karen Lionberger:
Thanks, Danny. Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today. We know time is always limited, so we are honored that you’re here and we appreciate your presence. We are excited to spend some time with you exploring and sharing what inclusive and engaging STEM learning looks and feels like. I want to give you a brief overview of our time today. After I introduce the team that we have, we will share a bit about our PLANETS Project and the curriculum, as well as the practical guide for promoting inclusion and engagement in STEM learning that inform the design of that curriculum.
Next, we’re going to provide an overview of our inclusive strategies for informal STEM learning that come directly from that practical guide. And we’re gonna ask you to engage as a learner in a short opportunity to participate in a PLANETS inclusion activity. You’ll notice in our agenda that that means we will be sending you to a breakout where you have some time to build some relationships with your participants that are here today.
You’re gonna come back. We’re gonna debrief that experience to really talk about how it illustrates inclusive and engaging learning, so that you can take some of these principles into your own work. And finally, we’re gonna close out our time by giving a short overview of the type of partnerships, research, and services that both WestEd and NAU engage with. And we just wanna note here, the PLANETS curriculum and the Associated Practical Guide was truly developed for out-of-school STEM learning, but we feel that the principles of inclusion and engagement truly cut across all learning spaces and are valuable for all learners.
So, we know people here today are coming from lots of different learning spaces and program, including formal K-12. We welcome you, and we think that you will also get a lot out of these inclusion strategies. So just quickly, we’re gonna introduce our team again. As Danny mentioned, Rasha and Anne and I will be co-facilitating our time today. But we also wanted to make sure that we highlight our fearless leaders who have led us through this project.
Our PI of PLANETS, who is Joelle LeMer. She’s sitting with Lori, another one of our PLANETS Project member who’s on the call today. And then also Kirsten Daehler from WestEd, who is our co-PI. And then also, we have Sean Ryan with us as well. Sean can wave too. So, those are just a few more of our PLANETS friends and family and colleagues that we have joining us today. Now, I’m gonna pass it over to Anne and she’s gonna get us started in talking about PLANETS.
Anne Hamlin:
Hi, everyone. So, I’d just like to point out that PLANETS stands for the Planetary Learning that Advances the Nexus of Engineering, Technology, and Science. And I read that out loud and it’s written here because the goal of PLANETS is to increase the understanding of the interdependence of science and engineering and the technology that results from the engineering and gathers the data for the science. So in order for all learners to be able to access and understand this, it must be done in an inclusive way.
And in order to make it inclusive, it was intentionally designed with explicit supports and educator guides to foster inclusion and engagement for all learners. So, the way that we design these explicitly to foster inclusion was a process we call co-design. We built teams, yeah.
Oh, sorry. We built teams of different expertise and lived experiences, including those in our three intended audiences, which are multilingual learners, indigenous learners, and learners with differing physical and sensory abilities, often called disabilities just so that we all know what we’re talking about. But the principles of Universal Design for Learning, addressing the needs of these explicit groups, increases the accessibility of the learning for all learners.
Included in our co-design process and very importantly was over 400 out-of-school time educators and out-of-school time leaders. A leader, for example, would be a person that coordinates summer camps at a museum or a boys and girls club after school program or something like that. But we included both leaders and educators of out-of-school time and our co-design team, and they contributed to the curriculum, much like the process of user design.
This was accomplished with a highly structured, iterative review, testing, and feedback process that deeply informed the final guides and materials.
Rasha Alsayed:
Before we dive in, we’d love to hear from you. So, take a moment to respond to one or both of the questions on your screen in the chat. Either share something that you’re already doing to create inclusive learning experiences, or tell us what you’re hoping to get out of today’s session. I’ll pause for a moment to see what comes up in the chat. Amanda, we’re definitely going to be getting into making sure to address learners with diverse abilities, so thanks for bringing that up.
Krista, yes, you’re in the right place. We’re going to be trying to address some of these, like how can we be some giving some principles on being more inclusive, whether it’s program design or instructional design. So, hold onto that. Oh, perfect. Yes, Veronica, we have the right thing for you. Okay, well thank you all so much for sharing. Let’s, oh, actually more people are sharing. Yes UDL, Carol. Yes, we’re gonna be working on that as well. Great.
Thank you all so much for sharing this with us, and I’m excited to share what we’re going to be sharing with you next. Much of what we’re going to be sharing today is grounded in the practical guide that Anne shared about, and we wrote specifically for out-of-school time professionals. We’ll be sharing the link in the handout at the end of the session. We developed it by talking to many out-of-school time educators in the field about how they make their learning experiences more inclusive.
We also grounded it in the work, in the research that we see. The guide focuses especially on the three intended learners that were previously mentioned and was really grounded in universal design for learning and culturally sustaining pedagogies. From that work, we pulled these five principles that you see on the slide, and they served as the foundation for revising the PLANETS curriculum. They’re what we’re going to be focusing on today.
So I’ll give you a moment to read through these principles and while doing so, think about some of the things that were shared in the chat, what you’ve been wondering about. And there are many areas of alignment there. We’re going to be transitioning now to an activity that will help us understand how you could leverage these principles. We hope that this helps to illustrate how these principles can really foster inclusion for all learners.
Karen Lionberger:
Great. Thanks, Rasha. So, you’ve gotten a little bit of background about the the project and the practical guide. So now, we wanted to take a moment and just have a short inclusion activity experience for you as a learner. These inclusion activities are woven throughout the PLANETS’s curriculum. The activities are used to help students build feelings of belonging with their peers, as well as their educators and teachers, and helps promote their STEM identities.
And the thing that we wanted to show today, I see a lot of comments of like, I’m looking for inclusion activities. I’m thinking about belonging. I think the thing we really want to emphasize is when you approach this with intentionality, even small moves matter deeply. So, we’re gonna focus on for today the PLANETS inclusion activity of designing a NASA mission patch. So, we can go ahead and put the patches up.
Every NASA mission patch has a unique, or every NASA mission has their own unique patch. And as you can see, patches are colorful. They use images. They use symbols. And they often indicate maybe who the astronauts are or important parts about the mission. You may recognize one or more of these. Maybe you recognize both if you’re following along with some space programming.
But we’re first going to look at the Apollo 11 mission patch at the top left. I’m sure many of you, if not all of you, know that this was the 1969 mission that landed humans on the moon for the first time. And in the bottom right is our Artemis II patch. We are, fingers crossed, hopefully going to launch soon. We’ve missed a few windows, but safety first as NASA says. So, we’re hoping that it will launch soon.
And Artemis II is also historic and attached to the moon, because it’s our first human crewed mission back to the orbit around the moon in over 50 years. So, we are going to invite you to take an opportunity to look at these two patches. Feel free to note anything about the patches that are jumping out to you, similarities, differences, just things maybe you wonder.
Anything that jumps out that you would like to think about or you can share it in the chat as well. So, we’re gonna need about 15, 20 seconds to take some comparisons. Okay, well, I don’t see a whole lot of chat and chatter coming, but here comes a little bit. That’s great. I think people are waiting to see what others are saying maybe, but I’m seeing some stuff float in. Yeah, great comparisons here.
Oh, is that a two in the red? Like I have not thought about that, Lori. Very interesting. You always catch something unique. Okay, well, I’m going to share just a few things that are actually specifically about moments of inclusion from these patches. Some of you may have noticed that in the Apollo 11, the Eagle’s talons are holding onto an olive branch. And this was very specific to denote that we are coming in peace on this moon mission.
The other thing you might notice, and I think some people are noticing in the chat, there are no astronaut names on the Apollo 11 patch like there are on the Artemis patch. This was intentional. This was the 11th mission in the Apollo portfolio and they really wanted to say that, Look, this is about everyone who’s contributed up to this point.
And you may notice that the Artemis patch also has some sparks of inclusion as well. If you don’t recognize, that is the picture of the Apollo 8 Earth rise that was taken during the Apollo mission. So calling inclusion back to, hey, we are just building on great work from across many decades of NASA. And I know Lori called out like there’s maybe a 2 in the red, which is super cool to think about.
But also the intentionality of using Roman numerals for the II next to the A to mean that space is for everyone. So, this spells out all. So, a few moments of inclusion even hidden in our NASA mission patches as well. So now if we move on, what we’re going to do is give you an opportunity to also design your NASA mission patch.
So, what we want you to do is engage in this inclusion activity that we typically have in our PLANETS Program, but we want you to think about what this might mean if you design a patch for your program. And by program, we mean wherever you’re coming from today, any learning space, whether it’s a classroom, whether you serve a district or you serve an out-of-school time program. How would you represent this to other participants?
So first, you might wanna think about what are key features of your program that you would like to represent? How would you represent that? The second thing you might wanna think about is what are aspects about maybe you or your fellow educators that are important to surface on this patch? And the third piece that we want to think about is what about your learners?
What’s unique about your learner’s culture, linguistic assets, all the beauty of diversity that the learners bring to that community of learning? And how would you represent those? So, we’re gonna give you a little bit of time. Find a way to digitally jot this down, physically jot this down, however you want to record notes. But keep in mind, you are going to be sharing this with participants in the breakout.
So, make sure you have a few things that you wanna share. And we generated a list for you to consider if you’re getting stuck of like what are you talking about, what could I add. Here’s a quick list of things to consider. So, you can cruise that list on your own. And we’re gonna be quiet and give you about 40, 45 seconds to think about your patch, design it, and think about what you might wanna share with your colleagues when you move to the breakout.
Okay, take maybe a few more minutes, just jot down some final ideas about how you might uniquely represent your program. And then if we show the next slide, we wanna just quickly give your attention to what we will be asking you to discuss. So, we will hopefully be broadcasting this so you don’t have to memorize it, but we will also put this into the broadcast in the discussion or into the breakout rooms.
But we want you to share these things about your patch or your program with your participants in your breakout room. So, we’re gonna let you be in the breakout room anywhere between 10 to 12 minutes. Some members of our team are also going to join you, and we’ll see how long we need before we bring you back.
Anne Hamlin:
Okay, so the point here is that inclusion is not hard to do. It can be very simple. We’ve done this activity with hundreds of teams of students over the past seven years. Here are some of their mission patches. You can see evidence of inclusion in each of these mission patches. Maybe when you were talking about yours, you had some similar ideas.
So, we have cultural elements. So, we have over here in the corner with the purple background, there’s some ceremonial rattles and fans. Up at the top, there’s a basket design. There’s also land, often land forms and location identifiers or you know, biological identifiers. We have the peaks here in Flagstaff. So, the mountain profile is on this one.
There’s also some yucca plants on this one down here, the triangle one in the bottom. There’s some school mascots usually. So we have an eagle up here with a astronaut helmet, and then a cougar pouncing over here in the lower corner. There can be pop culture characters and icons that are important to their identity as kids, right?
So we have, this is hard to see, but there’s Baby Yoda is in the triangle one in his little egg that he travels around in. And Stitch is here, as well as Sonic. And then, there’s also of course, elements of the mission itself, right? So, there’s rockets. There’s planets. There’s asteroids. Things from space that embody the mission itself.
And this activity is an introductory activity for the curriculum that it’s included in. And it sets the stage for inclusion and belonging in STEM, which increases their confidence and engagement with the content going forward. So, a little can go a long way, especially at the beginning.
Karen Lionberger:
Great, thanks. So, what we were hoping is to just have that small moment to engage this short hands-on maybe more minds-on experience of thinking about your program patch to help demonstrate just a few of those PLANETS’s inclusion principles that Rasha shared with you earlier. While the inclusion activity is a deeply embedded instructional strategy itself, the type of instruction that it represents speaks to the commitment of an inclusive program design for all learners.
So for example, we wanna unpack just a few of these principles to give you a little bit deeper insight. So for example, the patch itself really gave you a chance to sit and explicitly consider and represent the cultural and linguistic diversity of your learning community and your learners that are in your program, your classroom, or any learning spaces that you are thinking about.
In addition, just time in a breakout room to share these patches had a moment of relationship building, community building, and with strangers. So even the breakout room I was in, I just heard such great deep conversations around these really meaningful things you were thinking about to represent your educators and your learning spaces.
But we also wanna recognize kind of the deeper instructional strategies that build inclusion. So for example, we asked you in kind of that list to think about are there any multimodal, expressive things that you might wanna include? So, I heard a few people talking about like animation and sound, which are great ways to build in some multimodal experiences into the patch.
Very different than what we see in our NASA patches, but I love those innovations. We also asked you to think about languages. So if your learners, their preferred home language is maybe not English, there’s a way that they can bring that forward. And you saw in some of the patches that Anne shared that students want to share about themselves.
They want to share about their lived experiences and bring those assets to the table with their peers. And then finally, we really asked you to dig deep and just think about anything authentic and relevant about your learners or about yourselves and your programs that you wanted to share. And I know in all the breakout rooms, I’m sure people were sharing really deep, personal things about the programs that they’re working with and why they’re here today.
So we wanted to just highlight quickly, we realized this is a lot to take in. We wish we had more time and this is a short webinar. However, we will be sharing with you a handout towards the end that will dig into these principles more deeply and also help illustrate some of the deeper principles that Anne’s getting ready to share with you now.
Oh wait, sorry, actually still me. Sorry. One of the things that we’re gonna share in the handout is this is an extracted snippet from the Educator Guide from PLANETS. So, the Educator Guide is a very robust, you know, a deep educator guide that supports the implementation of PLANETS. And what you see circled is this is the inclusion for the NASA mission patch.
These are a list of inclusions that you could implement. And as Anne said, you know, they’re not these monumental moments. They’re small, but they’re super meaningful for the learners. And then, we’re highlighting another one that just quickly, we asked you like, Hey, what’s something about your name that you wanna share? And it’s so powerful for students to have an opportunity to share something like that before they get started in their learning environment.
Okay and then now, Anne’s gonna give you some more examples from our PLANETS curriculum.
Anne Hamlin:
Okay, so across the breakout discussion groups, I’m sure many creative ideas for program patches were shared. When you make decisions about your patch, you may have been thinking about how to represent the diversity of your learners, or navigate questions like how do I represent this mission visually in a way that communicates across language bearers if you work with multilingual learners, or maybe what symbols carry meaning that you could display.
If you work with learners who experience blind or low vision, perhaps you might’ve included audio features or tactile features so that the students could engage with the design and share their ideas. So, these are the exact kinds of questions that inclusive design asks us to be mindful of when designing STEM learning for all learners.
And they’re the same questions that underpin the design of the PLANETS curriculum that includes explicit supports for multilingual learners, learners with diverse abilities, and indigenous learners. So, we’re getting ready to share a few examples from the PLANETS Educator Guide. Great. Okay, so this first example is a strategy for multilingual learners.
And vocabulary is as associated with science and engineering is really difficult for all learners, sometimes even adult learners, right? But especially multilingual learners who are navigating making meaning across different languages. To ensure learners have multiple means for accessing the language and the knowledge of the unit, it’s really important to actively listen to what they’re saying and capture their ideas and use of vocabulary and language during these discussions, using words of any shared language, diagrams, as well as pictures.
So in PLANETS, this strategy is called the Our Ideas Poster. And it’s a collaborative and iterative poster that’s constructed over the course of the unit and displayed throughout the unit for learners to refer back to. And so, while this is an important sense-making tool for all learners, it is critical for multilingual learners who need to refer back to that, what that vocabulary means in their language or via pictures or even just the definition itself.
So another example is for learners with diverse abilities. In order to access things like visual graphs, we worked with scientists at the USGS, the United States Geological Survey, to create multiple ways to access graph data with senses other than sight. This is just one example. We’ve done lots of accommodations like this.
But for example, we created swell paper graphs that could be bubbled up in this kind of glorified toaster that’s common in schools for the blind. So that the graphs actually, the lines raise and the graph becomes tactile. And it has braille in the axes instead of just regular letters.
And then another way, we’ve also for maybe programs that don’t have access to that technology, we’ve also included a way to do this with puff paint or wax sticks or just even glue that has dried overnight. Just trace around the graph to make it tactile. We also created audio files that use a tone scale, so low pitches to high pitches, to communicate the graphs highs and lows with the tone.
So we’re gonna listen to this graph, which represents what colors we see and colors we can’t see, in the light that is reflected off a greenish mineral called olivine. There’s a picture of it up here. It’s kinda a glassy olive green color. And you can reflect, you can actually graph the colors that it reflects back to us. So while this is played, we’ll try to move our cursor along the graph if you could share the sound.
Rasha Alsayed:
As we start to wrap up our time together, we wanted to return to our why and your why. And we always return ourselves to this quote by Dr. Camille Farrington in the book, Failing at School. When students have a sense of belonging, they tend to interpret setbacks and difficulties as a normal part of their learning rather than as signs that they’re out of place.
And we also know that there are 50 million school-aged children in our country engaged in formal and informal learning. And so that gives us all 50 million opportunities each day to make a child feel like they belong in STEM spaces. And so we really hope that you will carry this with you.
That with even small investments in belonging, we can really yield disproportionately large returns in learning. And so, let’s go back to think about what we shared earlier in the chat at the beginning of the webinar about why you’re here and what you’d like to learn. And so let’s just take a moment for you to think about some of these questions on the slide.
What’s one new idea that you’re thinking of taking to your program? Or what other supports would be helpful to you in your program? And if you feel motivated, please share those and your reflections in the chat. But I know we’re close to time, so please continue to share, and we’ll advance as well. Anne?
Anne Hamlin:
Mm-hmm. Oh, sorry. Alright, so, At Northern Arizona University Center for STEM Teaching and Learning, PLANETS is one of our projects. We also offer a whole host of other STEM-based experiences like Culturally Responsive Robotics curriculum, Youth Engineering Solutions curriculum and professional development, Model-Based Inquiry professional development and curriculum, The Power of Data which is all about GIS and incorporating geographic data into learning, and F4R, which is Fusion for Resilience, that’s a great community-based project about energy and food and water.
We also are part of the PLACES project, which I’ll let our WestEd folks talk a little bit more about. So, we have all the links in the chat. And, yeah. Karen?
Karen Lionberger:
Great. Thanks, Anne. So as Anne mentioned, you see a lot of the collaboration across our two organizations. We love working together. So you see PLANETS represented here on the left side for WestEd, and also, directly underneath that, we do a lot of work in supporting multilingual learners with engineering as well in other part of our projects.
Our right-hand side, as Anne mentioned, we also partner with NAU on our PLACES project, and that is specifically place-based, data-rich professional learning. And directly underneath that is another project that we work on in addition with data science professional learning as well.
But in general, you see here we have our Making Sense of SCIENCE Program. We have over 20 years of working with research-based professional learning and assistance with districts and states and schools, and we would love to partner with you. And if you have any ideas about partnership or working with us or just want some more information, feel free to reach out to anyone listed from NAU or WestEd. We would love to talk with you about the work that you’re doing and ways we can get involved.
Danny Torres:
And thank you, Anne, Rasha, and Karen for a great session today. And thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. Feel free to reach out to Anne, Rasha, and Karen via email to discuss this work or if you’d like support in this area.
You can reach Anne at [email protected]. You can reach Rasha at R-E-L-S-A-Y-E @wested.org. And you can reach Karen at [email protected]. And we also have some resources to share, including the Inclusion Principles Handout and Promoting Inclusion and Engagement in STEM Learning Handout. Links to those resources will be provided when we share out the webinar recording.
And if you’re interested in learning more about WestEd and staying connected, you can sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at wested.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen here. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. With that, thank you all very, very much. We’ll see you next time.