Collaborative Research: The Magic School Bus and the Reanimation of American Science Education

This award, which is this co-funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL), program supports a collaborative research project the investigates the development, use, and impact of science multimedia for young children. It utilizes the history of The Magic School Bus (MSB), one of the most successful informal science initiatives of the past forty years, to study the relationship between education reform, children's media, and public-private partnerships from the 1980s to the present. It compares how different media (books, TV series, video games, etc.) introduced children to scientific inquiry in formal and informal settings. The project will generate scholarly and popular articles, online media, a science education roundtable, a book, and the groundwork for a future feature-length documentary.

The research team members will use their different disciplinary skills and knowledge to combine archival research, oral history interviews, and media content analysis to address the following questions. Why and how did MSB take shape as an informal science innovation? How did MSB's scientific storytellers work together to pursue their goals? How did MSB use media-specific affordances to represent science? What were MSB's immediate and long-term impacts? In addressing these questions, the project will study the role of animation as a tool for representing scientific phenomena for children and as a medium for increasing participation of girls and minority children in STEM. It will also study the motivations, tensions, and impacts of public-private partnerships in science education; it will analyze how private companies, including Scholastic and Microsoft, collaborated with NSF and other government agencies in the dual pursuit of profit and scientific literacy. The results of this project will advance scholarship on the history and impacts of educational policy reform and informs educators, science communicators, children's writers, policymakers, and citizens on how creative media can be used as a tool to engage and teach a young, diverse audience.