The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), in collaboration with the Yale Project on Climate Change and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, is conducting a three-year project whose goal is to build the capacity of twelve science centers as well as of twelve NSF-funded Long-term Ecological Research Centers (LTER) for the purpose of engaging the public in climate change science. The twelve sites span the USA from the east coast to Hawaii. The goal of these simultaneous projects is to illustrate local indicators of global change. Additional partners include ScienCentral, Inc. (TV media producers), the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the American Geophysical Union, NOAA, Natural History magazine, and a national board of advisors.
Deliverables include: (1) twelve local demonstration projects with launch programs, exhibits/programs, TV spots, citizen science activities, and an interactive map illustrating the work of the twelve sites, (2) professional development for informal STEM education professionals and LTER research faculty, (3) a national survey to assess the USA population?s climate literacy, and (4) a culminating workshop for the ISE field, a permanent resource database, and a final publication. Evaluation processes are being conducted by David Heil & Associates.
In 2005, research from the Yale Center for Climate Change Communications showed that while most Americans at that time accepted that global climate change was happening, many considered it a problem that would impact future peoples in faraway places. The Communicating Climate Change project (or C3) was created to help show that climate change is happening now, in our own backyards. Led by the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), 12 science center and museums were selected to participate in the project. The museums, working with local research partners, were tasked with developing programming that demonstrated the connection between a local environmental indicator and global climate change. Participating museums chose to do this through a variety of programs, including citizen science. Supporting the project’s citizen science efforts were the project Co-PIs at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) at Cornell University. The project was also guided by research produced by Co-PI Anthony Leiserowitz, [title] of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, which can be found here: http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/ Programs and projects funded by C3 can be found at our partner science centers and museums. More information about their citizen science activities can be found here: www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit/projects/c3/c3/ Although the project supported outreach to both the public (in the form of science center programs) and science center professionals (in the form of professional development activities), the latter were the primary focus. The main professional development tools created during this project supported the implementation of citizen science in science centers and museums. Citizen Science Workshops Over the course of the project, we realized that citizen science was a powerful tool that could help science centers and museums connect their publics to many issues, not just climate change, and after spending three years working to develop citizen science programs at museums across the country, we had a number of promising practices we wanted share with the field. As our primary method of dissemination for the project, ASTC and the CLO organized a series of regional workshops called "Integrating Citizen Science Into Science Center Programming". These workshops were successful professional development opportunities for ISE professionals from both science centers and citizen science projects. To learn more about the workshops and about how to implement citizen science programming in a science center setting, visit: www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit/contexts/science-centers/workshops Diversity Task Force We also recognized that it was important to improve the cultural inclusiveness of citizen science projects and to explore the role that science centers might play in this effort. To this end, CLO convened a team of citizen science (also known as public participation in scientific research, or PPSR) practitioners and researchers, science center administrators, and experts on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Informal Science Education (ISE) settings to develop evidence-based recommendations. The goal of this task force was to advance the development of cultural competence across the field by highlighting PPSR programs that feature promising culturally inclusive practices. We conducted case studies of efforts to engage communities that have been most marginalized and disenfranchised in the sciences and PPSR, including communities of color, low-income communities, and tribal communities. However, we expect the insights gained from these studies to speak to cultural inclusiveness in broader terms. The product of this effort is a pair of documents available online at http://citizenscience.org/promisingpractices. The first is a report of the team’s effort which includes a summary of promising practices for enhancing cultural inclusiveness, lists of resources that may be needed to support each practice, a discussion of the role science centers may play in connecting PPSR with underrepresented audiences, and suggestions for next steps in advancing cultural inclusiveness in the field. The second document contains the full text of the 11 case studies. The website where these documents are available also contains a series of webpages which provide brief summaries of the promising practices along with exemplary excerpts from the case studies which point the reader to the documents. The website and the document will be advertised across the ISE community, including science centers and natural history museums, the USFWS National Wildlife Refuge System, National Geographic Education, and other related email lists and newsletters. For more information on the C3 project, please email profdev@astc.org or visit www.citizenscience.org.
