The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop is thrilled to announce the recipients of the Families Learning Across Boundaries (FamLAB) Spark Grants, a program designed to identify, support, and promote innovative approaches to help children and youth ages 3-12 learn more deeply across home, community, and school settings. These four cross-sectoral teams represent a community of researchers, practitioners, and developers who are exploring ways to facilitate learning across boundaries, and these projects were selected for their potential to scale and to influence other partnerships in communities around the nation.

El Círculo Familiar is a partnership between the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, PBS SoCal, and the Critical Media Project at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. These organizations will collaboratively strengthen a family-school-community-university ecosystem to engage Latino families in early STEM education. El Círculo extends the in-school computer science engagement provided to first- and second-grade students in three neighborhood schools by USC Viterbi’s Building Opportunities with Teachers in Schools (BOTS), bringing their families into the STEM learning circle. PBS SoCal’s Early Education team will introduce these families to digital learning through bilingual Saturday playshops, donating tablets loaded with PBS’s educational apps so families can extend their growing media fluency at home. The Critical Media Project will use active techniques to empower families and students while countering some stereotypes that suggest only certain people have the knowledge and skills to become proficient in STEM, robotics, and computer science. And USC’s School of Engineering program, Viterbi Adopt-a-School Adopt-a-Teacher (VAST), creator of the BOTS program and other robotics engagements for elementary students, adds USC student volunteers and campus lab tours to further bolster the families’ identities as STEM learners and encourage the children to attend college.

Family Math is a collaboration between Zeno and Washington STEM that aims to establish a process to create messaging around the value of early math with low-income Latinx communities in Central and Eastern Washington state. By bringing together Washington STEM’s regional STEM networks and Zeno’s model for early math family engagement, the Family Math project will work with families and community leaders to to assess existing attitudes, beliefs, and resources around early math, and identify effective communications channels and community messengers in selected communities. The project team will develop tools to solicit authentic, meaningful feedback from the families in this program to co-create a core messaging framework that emphasizes families as a child’s first and most important math teachers and amplifies family voices as strong math advocates in their communities, and then outline a process for adapting the framework to other low-income communities of color.

Let Our Powers Combine— Idaho’s Early STEM Network Initiative focuses on developing a network of early STEM advocates to articulate the current deficiencies in early STEM education, identify best practices, and implement pilot programs to reach the many underserved populations throughout the state of Idaho. Led by the Idaho STEM Action Center (STEM AC), this network aims to provide early education professionals the tools and language needed to be facilitators of inquiry-based STEM education A summit will take place in October 2018 to convene representatives from government agencies, libraries, research institutions, and community-based organizations to discuss research focused on STEM in the early years, create relationships between potential partners, and deploy a coordinated implementation of early STEM education throughout Idaho. In addition, the summit will identify pilot programs that engage underserved and underrepresented populations that reach children ages 0 to 8. These pilot programs will be supported by research from Boise State University (BSU) as well as resources from Idaho Public Television (such as new PBS activities), library programs, Idaho Out-of-School Network programs, and the STEM AC. In the summer of 2019, the early STEM network will reconvene to evaluate the pilot programs, reflect on lessons learned and set new goals and an action plan for future activities.

Science in the Park is a partnership between the National Park Service and the National Writing Project that brings teachers and park rangers together to plan and implement programming that welcomes young people and their families into national parks to play and learn science together. The collaborations between individual national parks and Writing Project sites funded by this grant will invite both teachers and park rangers to imagine how connected learning opportunities could be fostered to reach a broader audience. Each collaboration will use a local park as a platform for place-based, hands-on science learning. All partnerships will involve active engagement with the park’s resources and writing and publishing, while individual activities develop locally in relationship to the parks’ resources and local families’ interests and needs. Robust professional development opportunities for educators will help them develop place-based curricula that make use of local environmental and science-rich resources. The resources will support both the sharing of youth work and the supports for educators working in and outside of school, with the explicit goal of opening the walls of the classroom and the boundaries of the park.

 

Congratulations to these four teams! We’re looking forward to working with this exciting network of innovators throughout the year and sharing the lessons learned and best practices they discover in the process.

 

 

Learn more about the Families Learning Across Boundaries (FamLAB) Project, which is generously supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Bezos Family Foundation, and Oath Foundation.

 

 

This summer, Oak Park Public librarians Anne Bensfield and Naomi Priddy hosted two workshops inspired by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Digital Play for Global Citizens guide.

As Multicultural Learning Librarian, Naomi manages the Multicultural Collection, a circulating collection of books and artifacts from around the world. Her goals are to create opportunities to explore different cultures, invite learners to reflect on their own identities and cultural lenses, and ultimately to build intercultural empathy.  Anne’s work as the Children’s Digital Learning Librarian includes initiatives that spark digital inclusion in the community and in the library. Naomi and Anne combined their expertise to highlight digital tools from the library’s collections in addition to the tools in the guide.

These family engagement workshops were designed for caregivers with kids between the ages of 7 and 12. The families who attended the workshops with their elementary school-aged children gave overwhelmingly positive feedback. Each digital resource we presented drew more and more attention and excitement. Families told us they planned to explore the tools at home—family members all had different favorites! It was great to hear them collaborating as well as sharing their background knowledge and experiences of the places they had “visited” virtually. After the first session, one of the attendees promoted the event on social media, saying “We are so lucky to have these awesome programs in our community.”

In addition to running this program again for families, we plan to offer the resources and information sessions to teachers in the elementary and middle school district. Students within the district have a 1:1 technology ratio with iPads and Chromebooks, and teachers are always looking for enriching materials to share with students.

We used the format below to organize our workshops, and offer these suggestions to other libraries or organizations that might want to run a similar program based on the guide.

• Open with an icebreaker to warm up geographic imagination. We started by asking families to locate a place on a physical map to which they would like to travel, or had enjoyed traveling to in the past. This got their geographic muscles warmed up, and gave us a great launching point for their next task: researching a specific place using our library databases.
• Structure the workshop so that activities build on each other. Digital Play for Global Citizens creates a natural narrative for skill-building, starting from identity development all the way out to analyzing global systems. We used this outline to structure our program.
• Set up hands on-learning with room for assistance. We limited the size of our workshops so that the two of us could provide personal support launching the different apps and websites. Each family had access to a device.
• Take time to highlight your library’s resources. In addition to sharing apps and websites from the publication, we took time to highlight library databases, our world languages collection, and artifacts from the Multicultural Collection.
• Collect and reflect. We asked attendees to complete a survey sharing their favorite tools. The biggest hits were: AtoZ World Cultures, Ayiti, Google Expeditions, Geoguessr, and Kids Listen. The families shared with us that they planned to use the new tools at home, even after completing the workshop.

Finally, this is a link to the library brochure that we created— it covers of a mix of digital media and is used regularly for digital advisory at the library to help families, especially when it comes to families looking for more cultural awareness and language development resources.

 

Learn more about Digital Play for Global Citizens.

 

 

Anne Bensfield is the Digital Learning Librarian at the Oak Park Public Library, where she sparks initiatives to support digital inclusion in the community and in the library. Her technology-focused professional development workshops on emerging technologies have been featured by the American Library Association, Illinois Library Association, and School Library Journal. She received her Masters of Library and Information Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Online in Digital Libraries and in Youth Services. Twitter: @annebensfield

Naomi Priddy is the Multicultural Learning Librarian at Oak Park Public Library, where she manages a collection of books and artifacts from around the world. She has worked as a classroom teacher and museum educator. She received her Masters of Information in Library Science and Archives and Records Management from University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Instagram: @mc_librarian