Fostering Partnerships Between Community Leaders and Informal STEM Learning Institutions: Co-Constructing Research on Films for Racial Equity Dialogue

This project seeks to use films that speak directly to anti-racism, science, and environmental justice in ways that support reflection, thoughtful dialogues, behavior change, and approaches to mend and develop relationships between informal STEM learning institutions and local communities of color. In this first phase, a Partnership Development and Planning project, the team will cultivate partnerships between community leaders and informal learning institutions in two cities along the Mississippi River (New Orleans, LA and St. Louis, MO). Each partnership includes multiple community leaders, based on an evolution of collaborations. In prior work, needs, interests, and blind spots emerged through in-depth interviews with informal STEM learning professionals and community leaders. Community leaders, who have worked with a variety of local groups, noted that collaborations with anchoring institutions, such as science museums and zoos, would be beneficial in supporting STEM identities and career pathways for local youth. The project will engage in and evaluate an ethical equitable partnership framework that forefronts community needs and values, as they work toward building partnerships between science museums and their communities. Together, partners will screen excerpts and consider the potential of film to engage their community in difficult conversations connected to local and complex racial dynamics and environmental justice issues. They will explore film’s potential to expand understanding of varied epistemologies, lived experiences, and perspectives that affect people’s sense of belonging in spaces intended for STEM learning. Partners will also consider how films can offer shared vocabularies to discuss values, principles, and decisions across various historically marginalized diverse communities. Ultimately, this partnership will work to identify a future AISL research and development project(s) that benefit all partners, co-determining the research focus, purpose, audience, timing, venue, and accompanying programming for films that serve as a catalyst for difficult conversations on around race, anti-racism, and inclusion in STEM. Throughout the project the team will employ and document an ethical equitable partnership framework, informed by cross-cultural engagement practices that forefront the community that has been marginalized. They will use dialogic theory to better understand the use of critical conversations to support individual’s and organization’s growth toward change that addresses injustices. Two principles, grounded in the project’s conceptualization of equity, belonging, and broadening participation, will guide decision-making throughout. Each partnership will be cultivated through conversations, convenings, and workshops with a team of difficult conversations facilitators, educators, and an evaluator with expertise in social justice and communication. The series of initial conversations will result in separate needs statements and rules of engagement for the community leaders and the informal STEM institutions. Convening meetings will bring the community partners and informal STEM learning institutions together; leading with the needs of the community, partners will work on building trust and deepening their relationships partly through screening film excerpts and engaging in critical dialogue. Convenings will, over time, turn to designing screenings and accompanying programming while the partners work through dialogic approaches. Near the end of the project, day-long retreats in each city will engage with the broader questions of future project research foci, desired outcomes and indicators, and consideration of methods. As part of knowledge building, these processes will be documented to allow the project team to become better able to articulate the rules of reciprocity and power redistribution for current and future partnership projects. Culturally responsive evaluation will be employed to investigate, understand, improve, and describe the ethical equitable partnership development processes in a report to be shared with partners, their communities, and the broader informal STEM learning field. This Partnership Development and Planning project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.