caise

Perhaps the most intriguing question of the second day of the CAISE Summit came from Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy, Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White . He asked: If the ISE field collectively wrote a letter to President Obama, what would we say?

I suggest that our collective letter might make the case for ISE as the leader and most influential source of STEM understanding for the American public. This is likely to be a bold and unexpected assertion to people not in our field, and it is likely to be met with more than a little skepticism. The CAISE Inquiry Group on Informal Science Education Infrastructure is taking a new approach to making this case that could be adopted for this purpose and break through the skepticism. Rather than summing up the evidence for the value of ISE according to its various nodes (the impact of science centers, media programs, libraries, citizen science, etc., in their silos), they are going out and asking people how they learn about STEM topics.

It is not a huge leap to imagine that a given individual will describe learning about science from multiple sources, perhaps trusted internet sites, books, museums, television programs, radio, newspaper, and so on. In effect, this combination of sources might just provide the description of the Lifelong Learning Ecosystem that Dave Ucko, Acting Director of the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings at NSF, suggested is an important next step for ISE. Importantly, formal education might turn out to play a relatively small role in any individual’s learning about STEM, as well as those topics that are important to the President’s stated priorities as part of the Educate to Innovate  initiative. These data could send a powerful message about our central role in the STEM education of the American public.

So what’s next? Contribute to the data collection effort to make this case by downloading guidelines for conducting interviews and the interview guide as part of the work of this Inquiry group. Conduct some interviews yourself, and help make the case.

Or make a different case here: If we could write a collective letter to the President, what should it say?

The views represented here are those of the author as a member of the Informal Science Education community, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Smithsonian Institution or the National Museum of Natural History.