July 17th, 2024
Cheryl McCallum, Tiffany Espinosa, and Tricia Zucker share more about Breaking Stereotypes through Culturally Relevant Storytelling: Optimizing Out-of-school Time STEM Experiences for Elementary-Age Girls to Strengthen their STEM Interest Pathways (NSF Award #2115579)
Understand that each one of these community partners is not only a unique place with a unique facilitator and a unique group of children, but every day is a unique day for them. They’re doing absolutely critical work that we want to support and we need to have a heavy investment. You can’t act like you can just give somebody a package, and they’re going to be able to deliver it. It just doesn’t work that way in these settings.
What is your project’s big idea and what inspired you to start this project?
Tricia Zucker: It’s well known and documented that women are underrepresented in STEM careers. We wanted to start addressing this early by using an existing, hands-on after school program called A’STEAM. We wanted to make a change in A’STEAM’s programming to see if a small shift to include more storytelling could make an afterschool program both engaging for young girls in the K-5 grades and if it will put them on a pathway toward increasing their interest in STEM. We specifically wanted to look at the 3rd to 5th grade years when those STEM stereotypes begin to form and if adding more storytelling about women and STEM could prevent some of these later pipeline issues.
Cheryl McCallum: The museum has always developed curriculum and done similar kinds of after school work out in the community. We are built as a team of educators who develop informal learning experiences for kiddos that happen both in our museum and then outside. We partnered with the YMCA of Greater Houston (YMCA) in 2012 because we wanted to expand our footprint in the Houston community to connect with children on a more consistent basis.
We learned that the YMCA needed hands-on, high quality STEM engagement because they didn’t have a curriculum, nor did they have any teachers. This led to us creating A’STEAM, first as a summer program, then we expanded it into an afterschool program at YMCAs because it was so successful. We started with 28 afterschool sites in 2012 and it eventually grew to 154.
The model was successful because we identified a challenge and used engineering skills to design engaging inquiry-focused hour-long sessions. We didn’t intentionally look at how the program might relate to boys and relate to girls in our design work. Some of our evidence showed that both were engaged, but not that one engaged over the other. However, we never looked at how girls could change their views of themselves as potential scientists. The current project will allow us to understand how A’STEAM impacts girls as well as boys when delivered with our basic model or a version that includes more stories of females doing STEM. These are both stories of famous female scientists and engineers as well as stories from children’s books we’ve selected that feature more everyday female characters who are doing STEM.
How did you build trust with the community members that you worked with?
It’s key to maintain that trust and relationship once it has been established. That connection needs to continue throughout the delivery process.
Tiffany Espinosa: We continue to work with YMCA partners as well as a variety of community organizations and schools that provide afterschool programs. We prioritize outreach programs in communities where children do not already have access to informal STEM programs. It’s about the communication that we have with them, our availability to train their staff, and our ability to provide support and mentorship for them throughout the years. When we support our community partners’ staff to provide A’STEAM in summer or afterschool activities, we never dropped off the kits and had the training and walked away.
We constantly provide support to our partners, often co-leading programs with the site staff. We also share feedback and research on impacts that the curriculum was making for their students. It’s key to maintain that trust and relationship once it has been established. That connection needs to continue throughout the delivery process.
Cheryl McCallum: Those who run afterschool programs encounter a lot of barriers: working part-time, being 1 or 2 people with 30-60 kids, or not having a planning period. I feel like understanding these barriers has been one of the success points in developing the trust and relationship with partners like the YMCA. We’ve been interested in and able to provide support for their team with exciting STEM activities that were easy to deliver with minimal preparation with groups of students across Grades K-5. If they let us know that they’re struggling with the training because they didn’t have time, we’ll tell them that we’ll come in, prep them for five minutes, and we’ll co-teach with you. If they tell us their supplies didn’t get delivered, we’ll tell them that we’re sending somebody out right away. It’s that kind of flexibility that’s required on our team to just show up and be there and support them.
Trust was built in that way as well. There’s a sense of camaraderie in sharing, “We can do this with you again, because we did it successfully together. We both held up our end of the bargain, and can go even farther than that to make things work in your current situation.”
Tricia Zucker: We describe the A’STEAM training and support as a gradual release model that is customized for each site. The museum educator does a lot of modeling and co-teaching at the beginning. The research team will then lead interviews with each site to find out what supports are needed for them to sustain. These interviews are both interesting and helpful, because each site asks for something different and we’re able to offer more individualized site specific supports. This level of informal STEM support makes it possible to work on amidst the many competing priorities. Our research is also showing that offering A’STEAM often leads to improved behavior, likely because the kids are highly engaged and really locked in.
Did you get feedback from participants and community members? How did you incorporate this feedback into the project?
Tricia Zucker: We built in continuous improvement cycles to work out kinks. For example, we began to make sure that all the materials, including lesson or activity guides, were available digitally and in a paper format. It’s small things like that.
We’ve also made improvements with an implementation strategy of “reminders.” These are simple emails and text messages we use to remind the sites that they have activity resources, online modules, and staff who know how to use these resources, even after the project has ended. Keeping that communication going has allowed for a variety of sorts of technical assistance to help sustain these programs as much as possible. However, there are some sites that have not sustained too and we are interested in unpacking the factors that make it hard to sustain as the gradual release of support from the museum winds down.
Cheryl McCallum: One of the benefits of our partnership is that we’re not researchers, and we don’t intend to be. The Children’s Learning Institute team are the researchers but they are also educators. Many of them are former classroom teachers and we have a co-development process that allows for a combination of external evaluation along with a partner who’s familiar with continuous improvement.
We’re also constantly conducting critical analysis based on our professional perspectives and what we’re learning as the project goes along. For example, our informal education can sometimes be a little too informal. Those who aren’t trained teachers or haven’t been doing informal learning facilitation for years may have a little bit harder time picking up on the steps required for this process. The Children’s Learning Institute initially brought in a formalized activity guide that includes a softly scripted, step-by-step plan, so that those who gravitate towards being more comfortable following something like that at least have it in hand.
Tricia Zucker: Both the research and the museum site don’t just collaborate, but it’s a true partnership that began more than 15 years ago, so there’s a lot of trust involved. There’s not any sort of dynamic power plays; it’s humble across the board. We all focus on continuous improvement and doing what’s good for the kids; for example, when the researchers complete the fidelity monitoring observations, the museum outreach educators receive these data eagerly to see where they can improve or what modifications were made to fit the local site needs.
These continuous improvement efforts are not viewed with a judgemental lens. Tiffany sits with the educators who share their ideas of where the work was clunky and where we could streamline. This continuous improvement between the museum and research partners is such a wonderful thing for everyone; we get to interact within A’STEAM, including both the kids and the site educators.
Tiffany Espinosa: We’ve had feedback from facilitators at the end of the year that this work has given them new ideas or that these are things that they can replicate in the future. We know this all leads into the overall stability of the project and we are eager to see if our recent improvements and the gradual release model help our diverse community partners sustain the program after the period of intense co-facilitation ends.
What recommendations do you have for those who want to do similar work and/or collaborate with similar audiences?
You can’t act like you can just give somebody a package, and they’re going to be able to deliver it. It just doesn’t work that way in these settings.
Cheryl McCallum: Understand that each one of these community partners is not only a unique place with a unique facilitator and a unique group of children, but every day is a unique day for them. They’re doing absolutely critical work that we want to support and we need to have a heavy investment. You can’t act like you can just give somebody a package, and they’re going to be able to deliver it. It just doesn’t work that way in these settings.
We’ve also had to be open to making big shifts. That was an early lesson: there are certain things that might not work the way that we envisioned it. You have to be prepared to make shifts and have the resources to make those adjustments.
Tricia Zucker: What’s really interesting about this project is that the kids never know the project’s intentions include exploring ways to prevent any early gender stereotypes about females doing STEM. We have boys and girls learning and being engaged in hands-on STEM activities together. It turns out the boys are just as interested as the girls in hearing about famous female scientists or listening to books where the characters are girls doing STEM.
We’re still in the process of collecting data on how the gradual release model can help afterschool sites sustain A’STEAM as the museum support fades, but we’re seeing a promising, marginal shift at many afterschool sites and a few rockstar sites that are really creatively expanding the program.
Overall, our big takeaway so far is that bringing in a little bit more of a focus on women in STEM doesn’t require overhauling your current STEM work, and it doesn’t require kicking the boys out. It just is spotlighting some of the things that might otherwise not get that attention.