Outreach and attractiveness – a never ending story or a new approach?

Due to lack of engineers and scientists in the Western world, outreach and attractiveness have been on the societal agenda since the 1980s. During the 1980s, a new international network was established, Gender and Science and Technology (GASAT) organised around both international and European conferences (Alting, van Vonderen, and Weyers 1992; Banerjee and Mehta 1996; Granstam and Frostfeldt 1990). At that time the dominating approach was to recruit women to engineering education, which was strongly criticised by feminist researchers for not being critical towards engineering. By recruiting to engineering, it was more women and men who should adjust to existing values and thinking and not engineering that should change (Blosser 2015; Du and Kolmos 2009). The activities undertaken were at all levels in the school system – especially focused on gender issues in math and physics at the school level and making women engineers and scientists visible as role models. The funding situation was sporadic and dominated by periodic projects sponsored sometimes from institutions and sometimes national governments programmes.

Characteristic of many of these initiatives were that they were initiated and driven by engaged persons and/or associations that are not part of the university organisation. Universities saw these activities as add-on activities – both in the sense of the activity itself, but also financially. This means that universities considered these outreach activities as something nice to have – especially as most of the initiatives were sponsored by government funds, or by other kind of external financing.

During the 1980s science centres were established all over the world. It started out in the US where several science centres were established. Compared to the GASAT movement, these centres were mostly government sponsored and targeting young school pupils as well as adult population – although most activities addressed the school level or public. The purpose was to spread the science and technology thinking and the science centres were seen as a general education at the societal level.

During the 1990s, the discourse changed from ‘recruitment’ to ‘attractiveness’ with a signal that engineering and science should reflect on own values and cultures and reach out to new student groups. Reflecting values and cultures were also included to a higher degree in order to make the programme attractive for young people (Becker 2010; Kolmos et al. 2013). During that period, several new engineering programmes were established with focus on attracting both women and men into engineering or parallel programmes were established with new pedagogy to attract new student groups.

Universities also start to establish more permanent organisations responsible for outreach activities. Vetenskapens Hus in Stockholm is one of such initiatives offering technology and science classes complementary to the school curriculum. This activity has been a well-established organisation for nearly 20 years and is one of the initiatives presented later in this issue. In this special issue, we focus on the initiatives funded and run by the universities. We were keen to figure out in which way universities have developed outreach strategies? What is the effect of institutional commitment or lack of institutional commitment? What kind of social responsibilities are discussed in the institutional strategies and concrete activities? What do engineering universities do to create technology literacy in the community and increase interest in science and technology?

These questions will not be fully answered in this issue. It turned out that not very many institutions do run permanent outreach activities. It seem to us that most institutions are still involved in periodical projects on attracting young people to their institutions, but they do not invest in a more permanent and structured approach by helping out science and technology teaching at the school level with the agenda of attracting young people.

We also wanted to figure out what research results on these initiatives would show? The economic situation at the universities worldwide will put institutional outreach activities at risk. Therefore, the effectiveness of such initiatives would be very important to study. However, our intentions also here turned out to be too ambitious – and even if there are many initiatives going on, there is very little research on these – not even documentation.

We were aware already when we made the call that the amount of research and documentation might not be overwhelming. We had an idea that at many places evaluation reports are made, but not brought to a journal level. So in the call we wanted to have research papers and allowed also for well-documented cases on university strategies and/or documentation for outreach activities and attractiveness and evaluation of the effectiveness/impact. We wanted the cases to address at least:

• the objectives for the initiative

• target group

• theoretical framework

• the specific activity and the organisation of it

• the economic part

• the effect/impact

• the learning perspectives

We received a lot of case descriptions – however the documentation of the effect or impact was very low. So after a review process where most case descriptions were turned down, we decided to use this fact as a starting point for a more structured research on outreach and attractiveness – and with this special issue create a milestone for research activities on institutional outreach activities.

The outcome of this is the first article: ‘Outreach Initiatives Operated by Universities for Increasing Interest in Science and Technology’ with Lena Gumaelius as lead author. This article compares eight of the cases that were we received for this special issue. By comparing these eight cases, this article has become the first more comprehensive study of European institutional outreach activities. By this, the article sets a stick in the ground and the article is highly relevant for both involved institutions for further inspiration on what can be done, but also as a baseline for further research in the area. The article point at two main types of institutional outreach strategies: (1) existing university activities reaching out and (2) specially designed activities for visiting pupils. The activities are analysed according to purpose, content, organisation, economy and documented impact. Each of the cases is interesting and the article has conducted a rich variation of activities.

The second article highlights how outreach programmes can be run by students and what kind of training of the students will be necessary. The students have a core role in running an engineering outreach programme designed to increase the interest of underrepresented youth in engineering and to disseminate pre- engineering design challenge materials to K-12 educators and volunteers. The students are the facilitators and in this piece of research, a two-year design experiment was conducted to study the impact of the programme including training of the students and the effect. The results show that the participating students reported a gain in efficacy to lead pre-engineering activities and in that sense there is a double gain by improving the outreach activities and at the same as students learn from the activities.

The last article reports and show research results across European countries. Mobile science exhibitions is a new variation of general outreach activities that gives pupils opportunities to hands-on experiences. The authors have analysed attitudes, motivation and learning during a science exhibition visit, their relations to gender and future educational plans in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Belgium. Performance tests show that the pupils improved after the visit at a significant level at many different variables. This is a quite important piece of research indicating that it actually matters to give training – even if it is some kind of co-curricular activities at the school level.

Even though this special issue has ended up having a few articles, it will serve as a valuable input to the further development of outreach activities, and these outreach activities should not only be assessed as being present in order to attract young people to engineering and science, but also to educate the broader population in science and technology (bildung). Both tasks will require mobilising stakeholders in society (government, companies, employer organisations, schools, universities) to cooperate and establishing a broad range of open access activities. None of the stakeholders will be able to do this by themselves. Only by networking across sectors, countries, disciplines and institutions, there will be a chance for providing the competences and resources it takes to do outreach activities at a serious level.

This will be challenging – but we need to have both the broad and the deep perspective if we should manage to create innovative, sustainable and entrepreneurial societies. And we hope that this journal issue can be used as a kick off for more research collaboration in this field, and new collaborative initiatives.

Notes on contributor

Professor Anette Kolmos is the Director for the Aalborg Centre for Problem-Based Learning in Engineering Science and Sustainability. Her other portfolios include Guest Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Guest Professor at UTM University Technology Malaysia, Associate Editor for the European Journal of Engineering Education and was Associated Editor for Journal of Engineering Education (ASEE) and President of the European Society for Engineering Education. She was awarded the IFEES Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education in 2013. Over the last 20 years, Professor Kolmos has researched on development and evaluation of project based and problem based curriculum, change from traditional to project organized and problem based curriculum, development of transferable skills in PBL and project work, and methods for staff development. She has supervised 13 PhD projects and published over 200 articles.

Dr Lena Gumaelius is Head of the Department of Learning at the School of Education and Communication in Engineering Sciences (ECE), KTH, Lena has a Master of Science in chemistry and a PhD in Environmental Microbiology. Lena has a background as a researcher in Biotechnology. In parallel with her research, she worked for several years with development of experiments for highschool-students at Vetenskapens Hus, centre that aims at increasing interest in science and technology among young. In 2006 Lena became the director of Vetenskapens Hus, which she remained until 2012. Since 2011 Lena is head of the new Department of Learning at ECE, KTH. In this position Lena is, among other issues, responsible for establishing a strong research environment in technology- and engineering education, K-12 to university level. Lena has her own research interests in the field of outreach and attractiveness.

ORCID

Anette Kolmos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0186-2839