CU Boulder Receives Nearly $2 Million NSF Grant for Climate Communication Geared Towards Kids”
Can the common barn swallow help promote awareness of climate change while encouraging greater diversity in STEM?
A group of University of Colorado Boulder faculty believes so—and they recently won a five-year grant worth nearly $2 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund their endeavor.
Their project aims to recruit high school students from Denver area schools to create small, touring art-science exhibits centered around humanity’s relationship with birds. A primary goal is to instill a deeper connection with the natural worldin today’s youth.
Through hands-on exploration, students will better understand of how bird biology intersects with changing local environments and a shifting climate, the group notes.
Securing the competitive NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) grant was rewarding for the team, “especially given that this was our first submission to this highly competitive funding program,” says Rebecca Safran, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and environmental studies whose lab studies barn swallows.
“Once we got word that we received funding, our mood was very celebratory,” she adds. “We are all very passionate about this project and ready to get started on the work.”
Fortunately for the CU team, they had advantages in the grant-selection process. One was that team members had already been successfully overseeing the Side by Side art-science program in Boulder for local high school students for the past three years. That program—which was previously funded by local sources including the CU Research and Innovation Office, the Center for Humanities and the Arts, and supplements to Safran’s existing NSF grant—is a template for the NSF-funded endeavor.
A second factor is the corresponding expertise of those CU team members, which also includes Beth Osnes, professor of theater and environmental studies; Chelsea Hackett, educational theater researcher, facilitator and professor; and Shawhin Roudbari, associate professor of environmental design. Moreover, former PhD student Molly McDermott and honors student Avani Fachon collaborated with the team by collecting data and designing material and visuals for the project, many of which were included in the grant document.
“We all have our areas of expertise,” Hackett explains. “Beth and I often publish in education and theater journals, Becca is our expert in evolutionary biology and has been teaching a class in science communication for the past 14 years, and Shawhin is an expert in environmental
design.”
The four faculty members are comfortable working across disciplines. Osnes and Safran are two of the founders of Inside the Greenhouse, which uses film, fine art and performance art to address climate change; and Roudbari, Safran and Osnes all assisted in founding the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change (C3BC). Additionally, Hackett and Osnes co-founded SPEAK, a nonprofit supporting young women in self and civic advocacy.
Building on Side by Side’s Success
In the program, high school students from historically under-represented communities in the Denver metro area will participate in 10-day summer-intensive programs at CU Boulder. Under the guidance of undergraduate near-peer mentors from the Miramontes Arts and Science Program (MASP), as well as a small group of graduate students and scientists, the participants will delve into the world of migratory birds, particularly barn swallows, which have nesting grounds around campus. Barn swallows are notable because they make their homes in human-built structures, so their fate is tied with that of humans, Safran says.
During the summer program, high school students will learn through art-science observation of wild bird populations, data collection and focus group discussions. The program will partner with Garth Spellman, curator of birds at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the education team at the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.
With that STEM-focused knowledge, they will create Migratory Micro-Exhibits (MMEs) that feature materials including wearable bird costumes, art-science explorations of bird biology and bilingual (English/Spanish) interactive components designed to engage audiences about the changing climate.
Under Roudbari’s guidance, program participants will design and build the exhibits as migrating trunks, which will be shared with K-4th graders in partnership with Growing Scientists, a collaboration between Denver art and science organizations including the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies and the Denver Botanic Gardens.
From there, the trunks will be distributed widely through partnerships with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the Environment for the Americas. Program organizers anticipate that the trunks will travel across the Americas, from Canada to Central and South America.
Given how extensively the trunks are expected to travel, it’s vital that they be sturdy and yet look like they belong in professional settings, according to Osnes.
“That’s a big task for Shawhin and his students: How do we construct these so they can survive trips across the Americas? And how do we design them so that they can take the spirit this project embodies and make it accessible to an end user who is seeing it in a museum or a botanic garden or a professional art and exhibit space?” she says.
Safran says the traveling exhibits will be designed to help both the youth creators and the young audiences perceive how changing local habitats are part of larger, global phenomena like migration and climate change.