The "Dear Researchers: Some Unsolicited Advice from the Community" workshop presented at Consmark 2018!

Bobby Wilson, John Annoni, Karen Purcell and Marilú López Fretts presented the workshop "Dear Researchers: Some Unsolicited Advice from the Community" at the Conservation Marketing & Engagement Conference (Consmark) in Arlington, Virginia on October 27, 2018.

 

Community researcher John Annoni, of Camp Compass Academy,
dialogs with workshop participants.

 

Karen and Marilu check the technical aspects before the workshop.

 

Community researcher Bobby Wilson, of Metro Atlanta Urban Farm,
takes on the research results during the workshop.

Workshop participants discuss the activities based on the ICBO workbook.

 

 

Karen and John discuss details about the workshop at George Mason University's Founder's Hall.

Bobby and Karen review notes before the workshop.

The ICBOs present at the North American Association for Environmental Education Annual Conference

On October 9 and 10, 2018, José González, Marilú López Fretts and Karen Purcell presented at the NAAEE Research Symposium and did a workshop at NAAEE annual conference, in Spokane, Washington. We were excited to share our "20 ICBO Rules" with environmental education researchers. We had great conversations with our participants and piloted interactive activities with our workbook for Informal Science Educators.

We didn't just work at the conference! We rode on scooters and enjoyed beautiful carousel.

Our Latest Presentation at the ASTC Annual Conference

The ICBOs presented at the ASTC annual conference on September 30 in Hartford, Connecticut. Bobby Wilson, Karen Kitchen, and Marilú López Fretts engaged in deep conversations during the poster presentation. Our newest ICBO poster features original art and reflects the evolution of the research framework.

Later that afternoon, they participated in a group discussion on the two strands of research during the session Examining Contextual Factors of Partnerships to Improve Cultural Diversity in Informal STEM Programming.

Bobby and Karen shared some of the ICBO results - mainly focused around ACCESS and Co-creation.

At the end of the session, the ICBOs piloted our newest version of the Informal Science Institution workbook filled with quotes from our research, artwork, and reflective questions. Make sure you get your copy. A pdf version of the ISE workbook is available for download here!

 

Finalizing our Community Framework

We continue to analyze our data and dig more and more deeply into our results.  As we have done so, we have discovered that our Community Framework continues to evolve and grow as we further understand our findings.

In the latest iteration of our Community Framework we find the same themes: Power and Privilege, Trust and Transparency, Realities and Relevance, and Commitment and Collaboration. But, we've found that Power and Privilege and Realties and Relevance represent challenges while Trust and Transparency and Commitment and Collaboration represent tools.

We've found that to represent the interplay among all the themes and the relationship between the tools and challenges, we needed to: 

1) Ensure that all the themes were clearly connecting with all the other themes -- thus all the colors  in the framework touch. 

2) Power and Privilege, represented in the blue is the category that most influences collaborations and all the other categories. It is the foundation of equitable collaborations and thus, appears on the outer edge as the base of the framework (looking at it from above). Realities and Relevance, represented in yellow indicate that even when following best practices and exhibiting the best of intentions, these break down when implementing programming and these challenges may prevent successful collaborations.

3) Trust and Transparency and Commitment and Collaboration depicted as two figures, one brown and and one cream, are connecting with each other, perhaps hugging, perhaps dancing. These are tools utilized to overcome the challenges. 

It is important to see the tools in the context of the power dynamics and the realities of the collaboration!

We can't promise that our Community Framework won't continue to evolve, because it is a living, breathing framework that changes with our communities and adapts to our collective understanding of our work.

The Partnerships for Impact Workbook is here!

 THIS WORKBOOK FOR INFORMAL SCIENCE EDUCATORS AND OUTREACH SPECIALISTS WORKING WITH DIVERSE COMMUNITIES is now available for download!

 

To download the workbook, please click on the link below:

ISE Workbook

This workbook is a product of research conducted by the ICBOs and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology over three years, focused on how to create equitable partnerships between informal science institutions and community-based organizations in underrepresented communities.

The objective is to improve equity, diversity, and inclusion in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). The research comes from questions asked by community researchers to more than 30 other community organizations. It represents the community perspective.