Icon for: Donna Charlevoix

DONNA CHARLEVOIX

UNAVCO
Public Discussion

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  • Icon for: Donna Charlevoix

    Donna Charlevoix

    Lead Presenter
    Program Director
    May 15, 2017 | 08:32 a.m.

    We’re aiming to develop scalable, national model for creating pathways for students from underrepresented groups to careers in geosciences. We are linking local educators and community organizers with national resources. Our pilot project is not quite a year old and not surprisingly we’re finding successes as well as challenges. After you view our video we’re interested in your thoughts on a lot, but to start:

    1) What have you found the most effective ways to keep lines of continuous communication open with your project? Our project team is working with little dedicated resources and while we have quarterly telecoms and a team web workspace, it’s sometimes challenging to keep current.

    2) Anyone else working on both national and regional/local scales? We'd love for you to share your strategies for organizing local projects. Each national project team member is working with a regional group and the distance sometimes makes organizing action challenging. Any examples of successful remote engagement?

  • Kristi Fink

    Informal Educator
    May 20, 2017 | 12:02 p.m.

    Your efforts are OUTSTANDING and congruent with our smaller scale Organization's Mission.  This is Kristi Fink, Executive Director for Texas Educational Seismic Project (Non Profit, Public Charity, www.txesp.org).  I have (am) facing challenges initiating exciting engagements with public, private, primary and secondary schools.  In Texas, it one large hurdle is convincing Principals and Superintendents that hands on, inquiry-based instructional methods enable students' learning potential beyond rote memorization.  Students who inquire and investigate their world do learn the required concepts mandated by State and Federal Guidelines; however, implementing our Educational Seismic Project has proven difficult likely to (1) pressure on teachers' classroom performance, (2) lack of vision / Content Expertise, and most importantly (3) a foundation of trust that learning objectives will be not only be achieved, but far exceeded.  we are very interested in collaborating with your Organization to help us connect more within Texas communities!  

    Lastly, we have successfully engaged with students in remote areas such as Seeley Lake, MT.  We have brought STEM to the forefront by leveraging video teleconferences for Career Day discussions, TXESP curriculum activities' discussion, and connecting their school to other Professionals.  The remote schools, in particular, suffer the most as they have limited community opportunities to observe, work, and connect with STEM Professionals beyond the "local" businesses.  

    We also leverage nation or state wide events for community outreach opportunities - aiding us by building name recognition and credibility of our Organization's dedication  We have used "Connect2Texas" for video conferencing, but have also used Skpe when necessary,  As part of the "March For Science" recent movement, women in STEM have connected with educators and now engage local Girl Scout troops learning about differing college and career pathways.  Another example is searching for Event volunteer requests thru Professional Organizations,  or Sponsoring Universities and Businesses.  We will be presenting at STEM Texas in October as one example (organized in part by the University of Houston).

     
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    Donna Charlevoix
  • Icon for: Donna Charlevoix

    Donna Charlevoix

    Lead Presenter
    Program Director
    May 22, 2017 | 10:36 a.m.

    Hi Kristi - wow! What fantastic work you are doing! It sounds like we have a lot of common goals and may be able to connect on several levels. Let' connect and discuss further (donnac -at- unavco.org). I love the teleconference Career Day! For our summer internship programs (community college aged students) we do brownbag carer lunches and they are the highlight of the program for students every year. We're trying to get more resources out there about careers in STEM (specifically geosciences) - you might be interested in our slowing growing video collection of Geoscience Career Spotlights.    

    I appreciate your challenge in getting the school administrators on board. Have you worked with or connected with Mike Odell (see below) from the Univ. Texas, Tyler? He's done a fantastic job of integrating PBL into multiple charter schools. 

    Our project is in the pilot phase and I'm anticipating once we are a bit further along we will encounter similar challenges and will be looking to groups like yours to help us work toward solutions. 

  • Icon for: Tami LaFleur

    Tami LaFleur

    Facilitator
    K-12 STEM Coordinator
    May 15, 2017 | 08:55 a.m.

    Hi Donna-

    I work in the K-12 public education field. Your project has me thinking that we do very little with specific areas of engineering. We are in the Northeast and not far from the coastline- We should be having students study the erosion factor that occurs continuously- or maybe renewable energy? Watching your video, I am wondering how you linked your organization to schools. How did you ensure that you were working with underrepresented groups? I appreciate the authentic nature of your work- an area of science that applies to anyone in any region of the world.

     
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    Michael Kolodziej
  • Icon for: Donna Charlevoix

    Donna Charlevoix

    Lead Presenter
    Program Director
    May 15, 2017 | 01:33 p.m.

    Great questions! We are in the pilot phase right now and working in three regional pilot areas (Atlanta, Oklahoma, San Bernardino). In each of the three regions we are working to connect our university partners with both local educators and community activists. This has largely been done through personal, networked connections. In all three cases, we designed the community topic of investigation to be one either focused in a URM area or a topic that directly impacts URM groups. It's very much a work in progress. We've found that having a lot of conversations with community groups already working on these issues is helping to lay the foundation for engaging the students. Our focus is to bring "geoscience" to help address the issue challenging the community. Many of the groups are aware of the local issues but have not used science/geoscience to help frame the solution.     

  • Icon for: Tami LaFleur

    Tami LaFleur

    Facilitator
    K-12 STEM Coordinator
    May 15, 2017 | 08:19 p.m.

    Good tip- Start "conversations with community groups already working on the issue." I am going to use this tip. I look forward to hearing the progress on the impact of your projects on these 3 communities. How often do you update progress?

     
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    Michael Kolodziej
  • Icon for: Donna Charlevoix

    Donna Charlevoix

    Lead Presenter
    Program Director
    May 16, 2017 | 12:32 p.m.

    Hi Tami. We have quarterly check-ins as a team and update our internal pages. Your question prompts me to think about the frequency with which we update our externally facing pages. I think we should aim to do these updates quarterly as well.  

  • Icon for: Tami LaFleur

    Tami LaFleur

    Facilitator
    K-12 STEM Coordinator
    May 16, 2017 | 08:13 p.m.

    :) I think people will be interested in your progress and advances.

  • Icon for: Dale McCreedy

    Dale McCreedy

    Facilitator
    Vice President of Audience & Community Engagement
    May 15, 2017 | 10:14 p.m.

    Donna - This looks like a great project. It sounds like you are doing really well for the first year! I love the diversity of site issues and populations. I am wondering what your mutually reinforcing activities are and if there are ways that they tie you all together? I hear a common agenda but not sure what other components are common across sites? I have been involved in multiple nationally projects and communication and building a community when not colocated is often hard. In many initiatives with similar challenges, there are monthly calls that include updates, but also conversations about challenges, new approaches, etc. While participants from the sites will, hopefully, eventually be able to take over, this is a great job for the backbone organization at the start - scheduling, structuring and insuring supportive and productive calls. I was intrigued to hear that geosciences lags behind most other sciences in terms of underrepresented audiences. What is your experiences so far with respect to gender? to students from rural backgrounds? 

  • Icon for: Donna Charlevoix

    Donna Charlevoix

    Lead Presenter
    Program Director
    May 16, 2017 | 01:04 p.m.

    Hi Dale! Thanks for your interest and questions. Your question about mutually reinforcing activities is a good one. We haven't identified those clearly yet, in part because the three regional alliances are at different stages of formation. 

    We anticipated that communication and community building were going to be challenging and we've certainly confirmed that! This being said, within the regional alliances (which include individuals co-located in the same city/area *and* at least one person from the national team) the communication as been relatively good. We need to better put in place mechanisms to share information between regional alliances and are headed in a good direction there.

    Geosciences is not doing too bad with respect to gender. Geosciences is generally considered oceanography, atmospheric sciences, and geology. With respect to BS degrees conferred, in oceanography we've got parity, geology is close to parity, and atmospheric sciences lags pretty far behind. There is a retention challenge with females post-early career. I don't know that I've seen statistics for rural vs. urban. 

  • Icon for: Cindy Zhang

    Cindy Zhang

    Undergraduate Student
    May 15, 2017 | 11:24 p.m.

    Hi Donna My name Cindy, I am an undergraduate with disability and studying geoscience I wonder what kind of job are there for people like myself.

     
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    Michael Kolodziej
  • Icon for: Donna Charlevoix

    Donna Charlevoix

    Lead Presenter
    Program Director
    May 16, 2017 | 01:11 p.m.

    Hi Cindy! I'm so glad you wrote! There are a lot of opportunities, regardless of ability. 

    Are you familiar with the International Association for Geoscience Diversity (IAGD)? They have multiple resources that are worth exploring. http://www.theiagd.org/

    A lot of the geosciences relies on scientific data. We need individuals to do a lot of computer based work with the data (QA/QC, archiving, processing, modeling). This of course does not require going out into the field. I'd encourage you to check out the job postings on the IAGD website.

    IAGD also has a video here in the Video Hall. Look for "Designing accessible field-based learning in the Geosciences".

     
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    Michael Kolodziej
  • Icon for: Dale McCreedy

    Dale McCreedy

    Facilitator
    Vice President of Audience & Community Engagement
    May 16, 2017 | 10:14 p.m.

    Cindy - Be sure you check out the video by Christopher Atchison - the project is specifically designed to support and recruit people into the geosciences - and the related field work - who may have a variety of challenges that have historically been barriers to participation.

    http://videohall.com/p/920

     
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    Michael Kolodziej
    Donna Charlevoix
  • Icon for: Michael Odell

    Michael Odell

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 17, 2017 | 08:41 a.m.

    Hi Donna, looks like a great program. Not sure if you remember,  I oversee 3 Charter Schools and a Children's Museum. The Charter Schools are lab schools and are 100% PBL. Sounds like your initiative would be a great fit. How would we get involved? Here is the link to our school (click on the about tab).  http://www.uttia.org/

     

  • Icon for: Donna Charlevoix

    Donna Charlevoix

    Lead Presenter
    Program Director
    May 17, 2017 | 10:57 a.m.

    Hi Mike - thanks for the reminder. I do remember that now.

    We are running three pilots right now and ultimately looking to scale up. I think there is a strong potential for synergy with your programs. Let me do a little more brainstorming and check in with others on the leadership team and I'll follow up offline with more detail.

    Is Tyler classified as 'rural'? 

  • Icon for: Michael Kolodziej

    Michael Kolodziej

    Facilitator
    Associate Vice President
    May 17, 2017 | 03:07 p.m.

    All,

    What a great project, and how wonderful that we have evolved beyond the memorization of science facts and into the practice of mentoring students to "use science to make a difference", which is a superior goal on many levels.  It strikes me how much opportunity there is to integrate formal learning into real world research at the lower grade levels, and simultaneously the difficulty of organizing and facilitating the efforts. I wonder what role technology might play in helping to pair opportunities and needs in terms of students and research projects that matter in the local community?  Can any parts of the matching be automated so that it doesn't put undue strain on the limited resources?


    Thanks in advance for your reply. 

  • Icon for: Michael Odell

    Michael Odell

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 17, 2017 | 05:06 p.m.

    Tyler is not rural, BUT our Palestine Texas campus is rural. 

  • Icon for: Dale McCreedy

    Dale McCreedy

    Facilitator
    Vice President of Audience & Community Engagement
    May 17, 2017 | 11:14 p.m.

    Mike - not sure if this will fit the bill but the National Girls Collaborative Project is an example of a use of a technology-based network that provides links between resources (a group of co-located girls interested in sTEM for example) and needs (I have a project I want to pilot). If not specifically what you are talking about, perhaps a model that you can go get funding to do :-)!  https://ngcproject.org

  • Icon for: Donna Charlevoix

    Donna Charlevoix

    Lead Presenter
    Program Director
    May 18, 2017 | 11:06 a.m.

    Dale - I agree, NGCP is a great organization! I served on the Colorado Leadership Board for the Colorado branch of NGCP and there is huge potential for partnering organizations. The biggest success was the professional development for leaders in various organizations. The Colorado Collaborative's challenge was getting groups to (1) register in the NGCP database and then (2) search for partners in the database. We found that there was reluctance to create yet another password and profile.  

  • Icon for: Michael Odell

    Michael Odell

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 17, 2017 | 11:31 p.m.

    Thanks for the tip. I will check it out. 

     
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    Donna Charlevoix
  • Icon for: Dale McCreedy

    Dale McCreedy

    Facilitator
    Vice President of Audience & Community Engagement
    May 19, 2017 | 12:24 p.m.

    I look forward to following this project!

     
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    Donna Charlevoix
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