This award is one component of a collaborative effort to fund the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Science Education Center Partnership between Southern University in Baton Rouge (SUBR), LA, the LIGO Livingston site in Livingston, La, through the Baton Rouge Area Foundation (BRAF), and the Exploratorium. The managing institution for LIGO itself is California Institute of Technology. The project is the continuation of the LIGO Science Education Center Partnership focused on scientific outreach to the general public, teacher training, and teacher education focused on LIGO activities in Louisiana. A previous award helped create the SEC building, with a classroom and a large exhibit hall, with exhibits developed by the Exploratorium and staffed by SUBR student docents and a (separately funded) professional staff. The multilayered partnership of HBCUs, a cutting edge research facility and a renowned informal science center created a model for future partnerships. With the expansion of this partnership the model is extended, and research on the effects of these extensive partnerships can provide information for future attempts at leveraging the resources of research laboratories for educational purposes.
This project will use the LIGO-SEC Partnership to amplify and nurture a Science, Technology, Engineering, Education and Mathematics (STEEM) pipeline that taps into under-represented audiences and engages them in techniques that encourage students to advance their education in STEEM fields. The docent program and the teacher programs will increase participation of under-represented audiences within the STEEM fields. The docent program will train between sixty and eighty under-represented STEEM majors to become community ambassadors in conjunction with LIGO Science Education Center's outreach program, and the docents will interact with between 12,500 and 5,000 participants. The teacher professional development activities target high-need areas in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The activities will develop around 250 teachers' familiarity with engineering design processes and underlying science concepts. These teachers will create and build interactive science activities to use in the classroom to engage with students. Graduate students will conduct new research in the use of inquiry and informal science methods within the formal (School) and informal (LIGO-SEC) environments. The graduate students' dissertations will contribute to the literature on Informal Science Education. The project is guided by an on-going evaluation.
