ASTC Dimensions: May/June 2007

May/June 2007 The New Face of Teacher Education

By Bronwyn Bevan

Let's assume that you, the reader, already believe that informal science institutions (ISIs) can be powerful centers of science learning expertise, resources, and experience in their communities. You know that visitors to science museums, zoos, aquariums, and the like can see, touch, explore, and imagine aspects of the natural world that often remain invisible, unnoticed, or inaccessible in people's everyday lives. You know that ISIs draw on their spatial, temporal, textural, and material qualities to build a visitor's sense of the connectedness, historicity, relevance, and salience of science, in ways that many other learning settings cannot.

Visitors often say to ISI staff: Why wasn't science taught like this in school? That makes us nod and smile, or maybe shrug and smile. We informal educators have often been drawn to work in informal settings precisely because of these unique qualities—because of distinctions between the way science is taught and experienced in schools and the way we believe it is experienced in the real world.

That's fine. But there is something else we know: ISIs, as places, as pedagogies, and as resources, are not accessed equitably. For the most part, our audiences are white, middle class, and college educated—populations that already actively seek and secure the resources they need to further their own learning and to create more seamless developmental environments for their children.

Many ISIs undertake special efforts and programs to expand their reach to new audiences, especially to community groups that have been historically underrepresented in the sciences. But by almost any measure, these efforts seem to have little overall impact on the demographics of our institutions' regular visiting audiences, much less on expanding participation in science fields and studies.

Natural and best partners

At the Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS), we believe that ISIs can contribute significantly to strengthening and diversifying participation in science. And we believe that schools are the natural, and perhaps the best, partners for any serious ISI efforts in this regard.

Schools are the key democratic institution in every community, working across all socioeconomic lines. While ISIs bring to the table ways of making science accessible, collaborative, tangible, and joyful, schools bring to the table ways of conceptualizing science as a coherent and systematic set of practices and ideas. Museums and schools need each other—and our colleagues in afterschool programs—to create the coherent learning environment essential for initiating and sustaining engagement with science.(1)

CILS sees the key constituency of classroom teachers as the linchpin for such collaborations. Teachers have much to teach us about our communities, about our children, and about being accountable for teaching practices. At the same time, ISIs have much to offer teachers, notably (a) strategies and resources for engaging and sustaining student interest in science and (b) science-rich professional communities that can nourish and sustain teachers themselves. Working together, informal and formal educators can expand their repertoires of practice so that science learning, across multiple settings, becomes more engaging and coherent for more children.

It is past time to move beyond the either/or proposition that seems to dog the ISI discourse about working with schools, or about ISIs' role in expanding participation in science. There is a "third way" to be found in thoughtful collaborations between informal science institutions and schools. So what do such collaborations look like?

Across institutional fields

Since 2002, CILS has been researching the nature of learning in informal settings, including ISI collaborations with schools. A 2005 CILS survey of the field, led by Doreen Finkelstein,(2) found that 75 percent of U.S. ISIs provided programs for schools beyond the basic field trip. Extrapolating from that data, we found that ISIs provide programs to 62 percent of schools across the country.(3) ISI programs include teacher development (59 percent), curriculum and kits for the classroom (42 percent), and student direct service programs (65 percent).

A 2006 study of ISI-based teacher professional development programs, led by CILS researcher Michelle Phillips and CILS doctoral student Saundra Wever-Frerichs,(4) found that ISI teacher programs (which target mostly elementary grade teachers) aimed to support teachers' science content knowledge, science pedagogy, and use of the ISI as a resource, in that order. The programs incorporated such research-based design features as extended programming (more than 25 hours), program activities based on activities usable in the classroom, and grade-specific workshops. It is notable that about 75 percent of ISI teacher educators have earned a teaching credential, almost 60 percent have a degree in science, and some 40 percent have both.

We wanted to understand why, despite the many exemplars of high-quality ISI-school collaborations, ISIs are generally not at the table when communities strategize efforts to improve science education. In a secondary analysis of the 2005 data, we found that many ISI programs for schools were under-enrolled, that quite frequently schools were not paying for the programs, and that ISIs were not evaluating the effects of their programs on school or teacher practices.(5)

However, we also found that when ISIs (of whatever size) attended to school needs, including engaging in some form of collaborative design and assessing school programs by examining how those programs impacted school practices, there was a strong correlation with their own institutional growth. School partnerships that take school needs and outcomes into account, it seems, correlate to institutional growth for ISIs.

Anecdotally, we know that individual, knowledgeable leaders are almost always at the helm of successful partnerships. But what else is at play? CILS is currently conducting a third study to understand what we call "transformative partnerships," those in which the partnering organizations undergo change themselves to effect change in the way that science is experienced in their communities.

Building on the research literature on partnerships, and using ISI-school partnership criteria emerging from the 2005 study, we are examining three robust ISI-district partnerships.(6) Our preliminary findings indicate that these three have the following characteristics in common:

• shared long-term goals pertaining to transformation of science teaching and learning in their communities
• use of research-based approaches that draw on the affordances of both ISIs and schools, including experiential learning, distributed expertise, everyday science, and interplay between content and process
• strong and evolving personal relationships among ISI and school leaders
• clear, beneficial outcomes to each partner
• ongoing assessment related to the institutional goals of both partners.

We intend to apply this rubric to the ISI-school relationships reported in 2005 to test whether it can explain strong or weak collaborations across the field.

Supporting ISI educators

Establishing any partnership or collaboration (much less a transformative one) is not straightforward. Strong vision, leadership, and boundary-spanning skills are essential on the part of the ISI educators who take on this work. Yet there is today little to no professional training available to prepare informal educators for working with schools.

Although some call for the establishment of professional preparation programs for informal educators, I think this is a mistake. Our field values and benefits from a level of informality, serendipity, and eclecticism that formal preparation could quash. But working across the institutional fields of informal and formal learning is significant work—and perhaps not adequately recognized as such by our field.

Informal educators who work with teachers not only need to be knowledgeable about science, exhibits, informal contexts, workshop design, and adult learning; they also need to understand education policy, partnerships, classrooms, issues of cultural and linguistic diversity, child development, and assessment. This knowledge must also be current to maintain credibility in the school world.

Through the CILS Informal Learning Collaborative program (ILC), which provides professional development to about 100 ISI-based teacher educators, we have documented the need for three types of support:

1. access to new ideas, knowledge, and people from outside the ISI field
2. ongoing and sustained opportunities to reflect on, adapt, and integrate new ideas into practice
3. opportunities to participate and take on leadership within a trusted professional community.

Our evaluation shows that these strategies affected the quantity and quality of programs participants offered to teachers and schools.

What the CILS data seem to show is that investing in staff who can build effective school partnerships helps to create the conditions in which our institutions can thrive. Such partnerships help us to meet our missions of expanding popular interest and participation in science, they correlate to institutional growth, and they can transform our institutions from relatively rarefied cultural icons to equitable and essential resources for our communities.

Bronwyn Bevan is director of the Center for Inquiry Learning in Schools (CILS) at the Exploratorium, San Francisco, California. The CILS studies cited in this article can be downloaded at www.exploratorium.edu/cils

Endnotes
1. Eric Jolly, Patricia B. Campbell, and Lesley K. Perlman, Engagement, Capacity, and Continuity: A Trilogy for Student Success, GE Foundation, 2004.
2. CILS, ISIs and Schools: A Landscape Study, 2005.
3. By contrast, another study that CILS is conducting, with Harvard's Program in Education, Afterschool & Resiliency (PEAR) and others, found that ISIs partner with just 13 percent of after-school programs.
4. CILS, Informal Science Institutions and K-12 Teacher Professional Development, 2006.
5. This could mean that ISI programs are not meeting school needs. Or it could mean that ISIs are deeply committed to working with schools, and that they continue to fund and offer programs despite competing district priorities (in reading and mathematics, for example).
6. They are the Urban Advantage program at the American Museum of Natural History, the Youth Exploring Science (YES) program at the Saint Louis Science Center, and the Exploratorium Teacher Institute.

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