Educator Professional Development Program

Before proceeding with this module, please make sure that have the following materials available and ready for use

Every person who comes to your museum brings their own wealth of knowledge and experience. They get to choose what they are interested in exploring and how much time they want to spend at any given exhibit. As museum staff, our job is to help support learners’ journeys. However, just like our visitors, we too bring our own experiences and interests to every interaction. How each of us individually identifies with STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) has the potential to shape how we interact with learners at our museums.

Engineering has its own stereotypes that are perpetuated in society. For example, in schools, engineering design activities often focus on the same challenges used for generations: building bridges, designing projects that protect fragile items from a fall, designing boats, and using LEGOs bricks to build towers. These examples reinforce the idea of engineering as a professional and college related career. However, research in museums confirms that more people engage with the engineering design process when engineering is designed and presented as altruistic, creative, and collaborative (Lakin & Davis, 2019). Examples of this approach include designing and building a zip line carrier that will move an injured or stranded person safely and quickly out of danger or generating ideas for creative designs that will help different people and animals in various disaster scenarios.

Even when presenting and designing engineering in altruistic ways, an ongoing challenge is that the engineering design process is often associated with engineering careers, many of which involve higher education. However, regardless of our education or how we identify with the STEAM field, we all use engineering practices in our everyday lives and with our communities. As educators, we have the opportunity to expand the view of engineering to highlight how we as individuals and communities use engineering practices.

In this module, you will have a chance to reflect on your own personal definition of engineering and explore ways in which people talk about engineering.

For the Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) project, we defined engineering as “a problem-solving approach that involves strategies and skills anyone can use to solve challenges within their day-to-day lives and in their communities”. What has come to mind as you’ve spent this time reflecting on engineering?

In Module 2, you will look at a new framework that identifies the nuanced engineering practices people already use while interacting with exhibits. Understanding these practices can help us make, evolve, and/or strengthen people’s connection with engineering.

Before proceeding with this module, please make sure that have the following materials available and ready for use

You will begin this module by watching the Engineering Practices in Action video, a compilation video of families using exhibits at the Creatividad silvestre | Wild Creativity exhibition.

These families were filmed as they worked together; no facilitators or educators were present. As you watch the video, use the Engineering at Exhibits section of the Module 2 Worksheet to record at least three specific moments that suggest families are using engineering at an exhibit.

Many people are familiar with some version of an Engineering Design Process – common steps in this process include ask, research, imagine, plan, create, test, and improve. We have included an example of an Engineering Design Model from Head Start on Engineering (https://www.terc.edu/hse/), in the materials for reference. Engineering design process models are great at identifying the steps or phases that people use during a design cycle. As facilitators, we can help people connect these broad phases such as “imagine’ or ‘test” to their actions, ideas, and conversations at an exhibit.

The evidence- and theory-based C-PIECE Framework (Collaborative Practices at Interactive Engineering Challenge Exhibits) was developed by researchers and educators at OMSI to provide a nuanced lens of engineering design practices. The C-PIECE Framework is designed to measure, study, and improve the use of engineering design practices by visitor groups within an engineering exhibit context, and ultimately, to inform the development of informal engineering education experiences such as those in the Creatividad silvestre | Wild Creativity exhibit.

The C-PIECE framework is divided into two overarching engineering steps:

defining a problem, and
improving a design.

Each step has sets of practices and each practice is categorized as beginning, intermediate, or informed.

This tool focuses on specific engineering practices such as “identifies/assigns roles” or “optimizes design and materials”. Understanding and using this framework can support facilitators with conversations that connect the engineering practices people use in the exhibits to how they already use them in their daily lives

Now that you’ve had a chance to explore the C-PIECE Framework and  engineering practices, it’s your turn to make observations at your museum.

We created an Observation Form much like the one used in the evaluation of the Creatividad silvestre | Wild Creativity exhibit. Take some time to familiarize yourself with the Observation Form and the operational definitions of practices found in the C-PIECE Framework.

To simplify things, the Observation Form is organized around  ten topics ; some of these align directly with an engineering practice from the C-PIECE Framework while others may capture multiple practices. To begin with, pick two or three topics to focus your observation on. As you become more familiar with the form, you can observe more if you wish, or simply focus on those topics that are most relevant and interesting to the work you are doing.

If you don’t have engineering exhibits, demonstrations, or programs, you can also look for these same practices in any museum job, team meetings, at home, and during day to activities.

If you are doing this PD as a group, it can be helpful to make observations in pairs. Oftentimes, we might miss how a visitor uses a practice at an exhibit but someone else will catch it. Talk to your co-workers and observe together.

How might the sets of engineering practices used at exhibits, like in the C-PIECE Framework, change how you support guests?

In the next module, we will talk about conversations in which people make connections with their day to day lives. Which of the C-PIECE Framework practices do you imagine people engaging in as part of their daily lives?

Before proceeding with this module, please make sure that have the following materials available and ready for use

Module 1 and Module 2 of this PD focused on describing engineering and finding connections with engineering practices people use at exhibits. The activities in Module 3 bring those aspects together to explore how we talk and learn with visitors about engineering practices at exhibits.

Museums must continue working towards being culturally relevant and inclusive for our museum guests.  Many commonly used science narratives are rooted in dominant, white, western, culture. As museum professionals, how can we move away from being the people with the answer or the experts to a place of centering the visitor’s experience and knowledge with engineering practices?

Story sharing with conversation can be a facilitation approach that helps us and visitors relate content to personal lives. The power of stories is that they can shift the power balance in conversations away from education staff to our visitors by centering visitors’ lived experiences. Changing the ways engineering is talked about allows each of us to make our own meaning through the conversation.

To learn more about how story sharing can be useful to museum educators, OMSI hired four Storytelling Ambassadors to join the Museum’s research team. Over the course of a year, the Storytelling Ambassadors had three opportunities to create stories and share them in one-on-one conversations virtually hosted with parents and other caregivers (throughout this PD, we’ll use “caregivers” as a term that includes parents and other people who support children’s learning) from the San Diego area. We called these caregivers the “active audience” because we wanted them to do more than just listen. As we shared our short stories, we explicitly invited them to share their experiences with us. Each of our stories were about three minutes long and focused on one to two engineering practices seen at exhibits and used in personal or community level challenges. Watch this video to learn more about the process.

The Storyteller Ambassadors worked with OMSI’s Research Team to study how sharing stories as part of a conversation can help people make connections between engineering practices used at the Creatividad silvestre / Wild Creativity exhibits and their usefulness in our everyday lives.

In between rounds of conversations, we analyzed the feedback from the parents and caregivers and our own reflections. When we summarized our findings, we learned that for an active audience to gain insight, recognize familiar situations, feel empowered in engineering, and to share their own stories, our stories as facilitators needed to have certain elements. They needed to be personal, relatable, explicit about engineering in a social context, and have repetitive mentions of the engineering practice. If we wanted their stories to include how engineering practices connected to activities they do for their communities (however they chose to define community), then our conversation needed to include elements of our communities, too.

After the research ended, the OMSI Storytelling Ambassadors were filmed sharing one of their stories with caregivers at OMSI.  From those videos, we compiled small segments that highlight the use of the storytelling elements into a short video.

Now it’s time for you to create your own story using one of the engineering practices you observed at an exhibit during Module 2 to your daily life or in your support of community efforts.

If you don’t have engineering related exhibits or programs at your museum, think about meetings, demos, and/or activities you participate in. For an additional dimension, see if you can create a personal story that connects engineering practices to a challenge faced by a community you belong to. Remember, communities can include cultural groups, interest groups, religious communities, fellow museum professionals, online groups, book clubs, quilting clubs, gaming groups, etc.

 Use the Story Planner we developed to guide you through this process. You can have the C-PIECE Framework available to help you decide which engineering practice you want to highlight. Remember, try to choose practices in the informed or intermediate levels. Use your filled out story planner to help guide your story creation. Aim for a story that is no longer than three minutes.

Once you have written and edited your story, find a co-worker or friend with whom you can share your story. The goal of conversation is twofold: You are trying to get the person you are talking with to 1) share that they use the practice or a similar one and 2) give examples of how they already use the practice(s) or could in the future. How they use a practice(s) ideally reflects the usefulness of the engineering practice.

You might need to revise parts of your story several times before you are able to elicit connections from your audience. Remember, the goal is to share your own story in a way that allows others to create personal meanings. You’ll know your story has connected when guests share with you how they use engineering practices in their daily lives and with their communities.

For your reference, we included two full written stories from the OMSI Storytelling Ambassadors. The design and format of each story is unique to each person.