May 9-11, 2013

 

GSEE/Chicago is a GSEE Founding Regional Summit sponsored by ICAM, the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, the American Institute of Physics, and the National Academy of Sciences

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Action Agenda

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• Review progress on national and local experiments in engagement as part of an examination of the broader purpose of engagement with schools

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• Establish GSEE/Chicago and GSEE/Illinois as potential templates for local and regional GSEE consortia—groupings in which leading innovators develop collaborative efforts in outreach/public engagement/informal science education, and plan regional summits at which participants can share information on scalable “Experiments in Engagement” and consider forming a GSEE regional consortium

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• Discuss guidelines for a series of GSEE exploratory workshops, “Experiments in Engagement,” that focus on emerging initiatives that can change science education and increase the science-literate workforce

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• Explore potential connections and synergies with ongoing programs of the NAS, PCAST, ICAM,AIP, IOP, APS, AAPT, and other participating institutions and discuss ways of working together to enhance the number and effectiveness of scientists engaged in informal science education

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• Discuss steps that GSEE might take to create, in collaboration with the AIP, the IOP, and others, an on-line scholarly journal “Experiments in Engagement,” that that will enable engaged scientists to reach a global audience with peer-reviewed descriptions of their initiatives in science education.

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• As time permits, consider some of the following items in the long term GSEE Action Agenda

  1. Ways GSEE/Illinois might help insulate the leaky US STEM pipeline from start to finish, including a scaffold network of sorts to keep female students and students of color in science, and perhaps using informal program networks to provide remediation for students who fell out of science but want to resume studies

  2. developing a template that makes it easy for each GSEE partner to form a Committee on Science Engagementthat would have as its goals: creating an Engagement Registry that identifies and helps connect engaged scientists with local programs in science education; encouraging and finding support for new collaborations and collective initiatives; and enhancing the number of their engaged scientists.  Over time such a committee might evolve into a Center for Science Engagement and/or an Office of Science Engagement

  3. hosting a competition for seed funds or devising other ways to distribute funds to existing organizations with model engagement programs that plug various leaks in the STEM education pipeline; then certify and publicize these on the GSEE web site and elsewhere

  4. developing a GSEE science intern program that supports graduate students and postdocs who wish to devote a major fraction of their time to science education and who will work with mentors at one or more GSEE Founding Partners in doing so

  5. establishing travel awards for graduate students, postdocs, and faculty to help build collaborations and networks that expand the GSEE community

  6. joining with other institutions in helping create a global Engagement Assistant Program to bring undergraduates and graduate students directly into the classroom under the mentorship of STEM faculty

  7. supporting a national effort to develop a critique of existing K-8 school science texts and other materials as a first step toward developing partnerships to improve these

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