This looks like an incredibly successful project—how many students participated? How many experiences (and how long) would a typical participant have?

Very cool. I like it that the kids are handling these fairly fragile organisms very gently— they are learning to really pay attention. Is there a way we can find out a bit more about the “public events” part of your project?
You mention the kids’ getting interested or committed to preserving habitat – do you do much with them in different habitats around the area?

It is interesting to see your commitment to getting students outdoors and handling wildlife amidst a number of other projects that are prioritizing screen-based learning (e.g. Guppy Guppy Evolution or Zoombinins). What do you see as the advantages or disadvantages of these two approaches to broadening participation in STEM?

Also how difficult are the logistics for implementing a program like this. What lessons have you learned?

1) I think that both approaches (e-learning and learning in an authentic physical situation) have advantages and disadvantages. E-learning can obviously reach so many more young people. But, learning to do science is quite different from learning science content. The out-of-doors is challenging. You can’t tell how deep black water is, you slip and slide into ephemeral pools, snakes bite you if you handle them and toads and frogs urinate on you. While our students are sometimes leery at first they come to embrace and enjoy the challenges of fieldwork. When our students leave our program we feel that they know how to do science. So, the biggest disadvantage to me is that students learn about science from many e-learning experiences but in our program they learn to do science.
2) The logistics can be daunting. We wanted a residential program but we didn’t want to teach & provide custodial care when we weren’t teaching…so we offered our programs at established “camps”. We had to transport students, we had to travel to their homes, we had to meet with them and their parents, we had to provide gear that students and their families didn’t have, we had to speak several languages or find someone who did (Spanish, sign language, Urdu, etc.). We had to work carefully with our students who had had field experiences and our students who had not spent much time at all outside. These are just some of the things we learned to do. We are still learning.

Thank you for your interesting and important work. I am also interested in Vivian’s question about impact on students through their words. We have been interested in having students create media about their STEM studies (creators rather than consumers of media) and also acting as role models for others.

It was successful, not only in science knowledge gain, but in promoting increased participation in science and self-recognition of new science identities, as well as participants being recognized by us as group leaders and by their peers as able to participate in science equitably. We served about 215 high school age students over 4 years of the NSF grant directly at week-long residential herpetological research experiences (HRE’s) at month-long courses as part of a summer college prep program for first-generation college applicants, as well as at weekend follow-up days for herpetological fieldwork throughout the school year.

This is what having fun while learning looks like.

I love how your project interweaves personal and social growth into hands on learning about the natural environment through the scientific process.I am interested to know more about your reference to partnering with existing “camps”. Can you elaborate on the types of programs with which you collaborated and the extent to which they were academic, social, etc.? Thanks so much

One of our residential programs is housed at a private university and is offered as a part of a broader college access program. This program is limited to students who live in the same county where the college is located. Two of our residential programs were housed in traditional church camps. It took a lot of negotiation with camp personnel to make sure that purposes for our project were clear to everyone – scientific endeavors with no religious affiliation. For our residential programs we needed facilities where custodial care was offered during times when we were not offering herpetology (after 10 PM, meal times and afternoons). This worked out great for both our programs and the church camps although it took a lot of personal contact time to make it work well. We also ran some day programs and partnered with local natural history museums and an arboretum.