Challenges and triumphs of taking a research-informed approach toward improving community responsiveness across a community-based science club program

ABSTRACT

This article details the learning experiences emerging from a research collaboration between a university-based research team and an informal education provider (the STEM Academy). The aim was to enhance the community responsiveness of a series of science clubs for children living in low-income communities in a metropolitan area of Canada. The study examined a new afterschool science club that ran for seven months, serving 20 children aged 8-11. Data sources included focus groups and individual interviews with children attending the club, semi-structured interviews with club staffers and school-based educators associated with the children, and detailed field notes made by a researcher-volunteer after every club session. Data was analyzed using a constant comparative approach which revealed four key lessons that the STEM Academy gained from this experimental club space: (i) Community responsiveness requires power sharing in multiple dimensions; (ii) Enjoying informal science learning can support formal science learning; (iii) The informal club context attends to children's needs and interests beyond science; and (iv) Territorial lines are blurred in community-responsive ventures. The experimental club allowed us to identify and recommend certain approaches for other informal education providers seeking to become more locally relevant (even those operating at multiple sites).

KEYWORDS:

• Informal science education
• community-responsive programs
• community-based research
• science clubs
• low-income communities
• elementary school education

Acknowledgements

The authors extend warm thanks to the STEM Academy organization, the children, teachers and other Prairie Lane community members who participated in the study, and our enthusiastic team of researchers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The government of Canada uses an earnings-based metric to assign an income status to each neighborhood.

2 All children and parents were invited for interview, but it was not surprising that busy parents (and some of the children) in a socioeconomically disadvantaged community did not to agree formal interviews. In a health research context, Bonevski et al. (2014) stated that members of such communities tend to be cautious about social science researchers and research. Nevertheless, all parents provided consent for ongoing, non-intrusive data collection to occur throughout the club, resulting in copious field notes and anecdotal accounts of the perspectives of community members, including children and parents, documented by the researcher–volunteer.

Additional information

Funding

The research contributing to this paper was conducted with the financial support of a research grant from the Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE).