 The Innovation Collaborative has begun the process of creating a robust library of K-12 lessons for educators to use in 2025.
This curated collection of lessons will address learners from Early Childhood through grade 12. It will be easily searchable. While the Collaborative has excellent STEAM lessons from its national research, it also is inviting K-12 educators to submit their lesson for consideration in this collection. Helping lead this initiative are the Collaborative’s K-12 Innovation Fellows, top STEAM teachers and administrators from across the US who were chosen for their excellence in teaching and promoting STEAM. To make the STEAM lesson submission process easy, the Fellows will hold a series of webinars that will feature noteworthy STEAM guest speakers and topics to inspire participants. There also will be PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) to walk educators through creating a STEAM experience or adapting an already existing lesson to STEAM. To facilitate creating a STEAM experience, Fellows will take participants through the Collaborative’s STEAM Lesson Template, designed to help educators bring their instruction to life. In this process, invested educators also will learn more about STEAM and how to assess it using the Collaborative’s research-validated rubrics. These webinars and PLCs will take place in 2025. Join us in this process! To do so, please email [email protected]
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 The Innovation Collaborative, in partnership with Texas Southern University (TSU), hosted a national STEAM Out-of-School-Time conference at TSU in Houston in July, 2024.
This conference is a vital part of their two-year National Science Foundation-funded STEAM working conference project, running from September, 2023, to September, 2025. Instead of the typical two-day gathering, this project allows participants to collaborate and meet the project’s goals before, during, and after the in-person conference. The project’s goals are: 1) Integrate research and practice to determine where the STEAM Informal STEM Learning (ISL) field is in relation to equity, well-being, and belonging today and where it should head going forward; and 2) develop an effective model for a STEAM working conference project. To address these goals, participants organized into seven cohorts to address the topics that the group determined were the most important to address first. These cohorts are: 1) belonging and identity; 2) equity; 3) increasing professional capacity for informal educators; 4) integrating the arts with STEM to promote STEM engagement, learning, and thinking; 5) intersections for formal and informal learning; 6) STEAM creative/innovative thinking and equity; 7) well-being. The cohorts are made up of 23 in-person participants who attended the conference in Houston. They were joined by 26 virtual participants who also work on the project and attended the conference via Zoom. Polled participants give valuable feedback during the project through surveys. All of these participants are highly recognized STEAM researchers and practitioners representing well-known universities and Out-of-School-Time museums and other venues across the US. The Houston in-person conference was preceded by a Museum Day at which the Children’s Museum Houston and the Houston Museum of Natural Science offered participants behind-the-scenes and other engaging learning experiences. Facilitating the conference was Judy Koke, Grant Advisor and Senior Fellow and former Deputy Director at the Institute for Learning Innovation. She was joined by grant Principal Investigator Lillian Poats, EdD, TSU Professor, Department of Educational Administration and Foundations, College of Education; and Co-Principal Investigators Dr. Dwalah Fisher, EdD, TSU Professor, Health, Kinesiology, and Sport Studies, Assistant Athletic Director; and Senior Woman’s Administrator; and Lucinda Presley, Innovation Collaborative Executive Director. On the conference’s first day, a keynote panel engaged participants in hands-on experiences across the arts-science intersections and how these relationships impact well-being. Panelists were John Falk, Founder and CEO, Institute for Learning Innovation; Noel Merriam, Artistic Director, National Hispanic Cultural Museum; and Nicole Temple, VP of Education, Houston Museum of Natural Science. Following the panel were presentations by each cohort where they shared their group’s findings to date and the status of the ISL field in relation to their topic, STEAM, and equity. After these presentations, there was a reflection on what was heard in these presentations and what voices might have been missing.Then, there was discussion in small groups about what success for this project could look like to make a difference in the ISE field. Highlighting the first day were two additional impactful events. In the morning, the participants enjoyed a visit to Texas Southern University’s University Museum to interact with museum staff and the exhibited art by TSU students. In the evening, in partnership with Houston’s Collective Action for Youth, the conference offered an opportunity for participants to learn from and interact with diverse Houston youth around their experiences with STEAM: their aspirations, their learning, and their frustrations. On the conference’s second day, participants first reflected on what they learned from the previous day’s museum visit and the interactions with the Houston youth in the evening. They used these experiences to further inform their work on this project. The full group then discussed next steps, including what the cohorts will do to demonstrate how their topic relates to the current ISL field, STEAM, and equity and what work is yet to be done. After a collaborative dialogue, it was decided that each cohort will develop a PowerPoint and a written paper about their findings, with the group deciding in 2025 what the end product(s) will look like and the products’ dissemination strategies. The Collaborative is very grateful to TSU for their invaluable partnership in this project. The participants loved being at TSU, which was an outstanding host for the conference, devoting countless preparation hours to assure its success.  The Innovation Collaborative, in partnership with Texas Southern University (TSU), hosted a national STEAM Out-of-School-Time conference at TSU in Houston in July, 2024.
This conference is a vital part of their two-year National Science Foundation-funded STEAM working conference project, running from September, 2023, to September, 2025. Instead of the typical two-day gathering, this project allows participants to collaborate and meet the project’s goals before, during, and after the in-person conference. The Innovation Collaborative, in partnership with the National Science Foundation and Texas Southern University (TSU), hosted a national STEAM Out-of-School-Time conference at TSU in Houston, in July. Given the dynamic nature of this important conference, the Collaborative wanted to get real-time reflections from some of the key attendees. Towards that, midway through the in-person convening, we did a series of short video interviews with several attendees, asking them to share their perspective on the conference and STEAM education in general. You can access those videos via the Collaborative’s YouTube channel here.
During our first week in the course, we made paper by hand and used that as a “track” that led us to organic chemistry and hydrogen bonding. Next, we discussed historical pigments, paint-making, and crushed cochineal to make genuine carmine, which is the bright red or purplish-red dye that comes from the cochineal insect. That opened a “track” to explore Aztec codices, history, and culture with my colleague, Dr. Cate DiCesare from CSA’s Art History Department and then we moved into materials science.
We had a dynamic and lively presentation session with the highly respected Temple Grandin as we discussed her most recent book, Visual Thinking, and her commitment to developing essential engineering skills through learning that comes from drawing and sewing and other arts. Next, we looked at quilting and the Gee's Bend quilters as an intersection with history and community-building. Associate Professor Dr. Jesse Wilson joined us for the intersection between painting, optics, and how pigments are being used in Biomedical Engineering. From there, we dove into the direct and powerful intersections between the work done by Josef Albers, detailed in his classic text, Interaction of Color, which gave us a “track” to the Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach, which opened a direct link with the Principle of Uncertainty by physicist Werner Heisenberg. During the last five weeks of the course, the students will each present a unique intersection of what they’ve explored, and begin also exploring intersections among photography, neuroscience, animal behavior, fiber arts, and more. I'm deeply grateful to the CSU School of Liberal Arts and the Green and Gold Initiative, managed by Dan Beachy-Quick, for supporting this course. What started with a focus on practical exploration across a variety of disciplines has become a deeper dive into questions such as: "How do we think?" "Where do ideas come from?" and "How can we create fuel for creative ideas and intersections? The class sessions have proven to be great fun. As a teacher, I can't think of anything more rewarding than students exclaiming that they've been surprised by an idea or an intersection, and that's happening every single session. Even better is seeing them develop the confidence that can fuel their own creative explorations and intersections. Genesis Motor America sponsors STEAM programs at Georgia Boys & Girls Clubs
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Tennessee October STEAM festival features 300 events statewide
Innovation Collaborative Fellow featured in 'Smithsonian Magazine'
 The Innovation Collaborative is launching a subscription campaign for all in- and out-of-school-time educators (preK-16) interested in STEAM education and research-based curriculum resources.
The Collaborative, a nonprofit organization, serves as a national forum to foster creativity, innovation, and lifelong learning. It identifies and disseminates information about the many ways that effective integration of the arts, sciences, humanities, engineering, and the use of technology reinforce teaching and incorporate learning in both in-school (formal) and out-of-school-time (informal) settings. This campaign is offering free access to all Innovation Collaborative resources through December 31, 2024, to new subscribers. Click HERE to register. Among the Collaborative’s current web-based resources are:
Beginning in January 2025, there will be a modest annual fee to subscribers. In the coming months, the Innovation Collaborative will be developing and adding new content, including lesson plans, additional rubrics, and professional development programs for both educators and administrators. A virtual STEAM Summit is being planned for fall, 2024. To learn more about the organization’s work, visit www.innovationcollaborative.org. The importance of failure: |
 Sandra Chapman, PhD, Collaborative Research Thought Leader | Note: Our current series focusing on the importance of failure highlights the Collaborative’s esteemed Research Thought Leaders’ perceptions on this topic. These Thought Leaders are each nationally and internationally known experts in their respective fields. In this article, Sandra Bond Chapman, PhD, points out the importance of embracing failure. Dr. Chapman is Chief Director, Center for BrainHealth, and Dee Wyly Distinguished University Professor, The University of Texas at Dallas. You can find out more about this work at centerforbrainhealth.org; thebrainhealthproject.org. |
“In this year to come, make mistakes, because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself and changing the world.” — Novelist Neil Gaima
The greater the problem, the worse the crisis, the more likely we are to make mistakes. These mistakes can make us more resilient, or they can break us. They can strengthen or weaken our brain’s operating systems.
One of the most perplexing mysteries of our brain is why and how the same event triggers diametrically opposite actions in each of us. When we have no script to follow nor know the best response, our brain veers toward one of these paths after failure—it’s our choice:
As mentors, we have the responsibility to inspire and create a learning context that rewards students, educators, and ourselves to recognize, recover, and rebound from failures with small steps forward. Embracing the risks of failure is the best way to optimize brain growth and development. Without failure, we never tap into the brain’s greatest potential—the ability to generate new ideas and solutions, i.e., to be creative. The faster we recognize failures, the faster we make progress toward our bold goals. The only real failure is when we fail to rescue ourselves from our mistakes. Rescue from failure is one of the most effective thinking strategies to strengthen the brain’s executive function to increase our innovative thinking.
Apollo 13 is a classic example of a situation where “failure is not an option.” Racing against time, NASA engineers devised an ingenious solution to the rupture of an oxygen tank, using only the materials at hand in the spaceship when the astronauts were stranded on their way to the moon in 1970.
We each have the raw talent to kick our brain’s capabilities into gear by regularly acknowledging failed attempts and seeking new and better solutions to improve our work, our relationships, our communities, and the world around us. This is ingenuity. It is a brain skill that is rarely taught and may be the most important brain capacity to optimize the upward potential of brain and cognitive development across the lifespan. The bi-directional benefit of practicing possibility thinking skills in the context of failures not only increases the neural connectivity of the brain’s goal-directed stability network and the updating agility frontal brain network, but it also increases confidence in tackling day-to-day challenges with an open, action-oriented mind, where realizing and embracing failure is the starting point.
(Some content modified from Design Your Brain: 24 Extraordinary Ways to Fuel and Inspire Life, Chapman and Mau, in press)
One of the most perplexing mysteries of our brain is why and how the same event triggers diametrically opposite actions in each of us. When we have no script to follow nor know the best response, our brain veers toward one of these paths after failure—it’s our choice:
- Brain Drain. We experience a humiliating embarrassment, negative and demeaning self-talk that hijacks our thinking or a fear response that paralyzes our actions/behaviors and increases our anxiety and stress. This path acts much like an emergency brake that halts forward progress and keeps us fearful and wallowing in our failures as a stuck mindset.
- Brain Gain. Alternatively, when we openly embrace failure by quickly identifying rather than dismissing mistakes, we build grit. Only then can we adeptly begin to create alternative proactive responses to self-correct. By doing so, we strengthen our brain’s frontal networks—our brain’s CEO that guides clarity and discernment. When we go into problem solving mode to correct mistakes– we override our immobilizing negative self-talk. This ‘embrace the mistake’ path acts like an accelerator to run toward further learning from failures to seek alternate solutions and develop better ways to respond– much like a first responder to a fire.
As mentors, we have the responsibility to inspire and create a learning context that rewards students, educators, and ourselves to recognize, recover, and rebound from failures with small steps forward. Embracing the risks of failure is the best way to optimize brain growth and development. Without failure, we never tap into the brain’s greatest potential—the ability to generate new ideas and solutions, i.e., to be creative. The faster we recognize failures, the faster we make progress toward our bold goals. The only real failure is when we fail to rescue ourselves from our mistakes. Rescue from failure is one of the most effective thinking strategies to strengthen the brain’s executive function to increase our innovative thinking.
Apollo 13 is a classic example of a situation where “failure is not an option.” Racing against time, NASA engineers devised an ingenious solution to the rupture of an oxygen tank, using only the materials at hand in the spaceship when the astronauts were stranded on their way to the moon in 1970.
We each have the raw talent to kick our brain’s capabilities into gear by regularly acknowledging failed attempts and seeking new and better solutions to improve our work, our relationships, our communities, and the world around us. This is ingenuity. It is a brain skill that is rarely taught and may be the most important brain capacity to optimize the upward potential of brain and cognitive development across the lifespan. The bi-directional benefit of practicing possibility thinking skills in the context of failures not only increases the neural connectivity of the brain’s goal-directed stability network and the updating agility frontal brain network, but it also increases confidence in tackling day-to-day challenges with an open, action-oriented mind, where realizing and embracing failure is the starting point.
(Some content modified from Design Your Brain: 24 Extraordinary Ways to Fuel and Inspire Life, Chapman and Mau, in press)
The Collaborative’s Innovation Fellows are top STEAM teachers and administrators who are chosen nationally, based on their excellence in moving the STEAM field forward. Kimberly Olson is the Art Specialist at Centre School in Hampson, NH. Kathleen Sweet is a Computer Science Teacher in Starmont Community School District, IA. Kristin Taylor, EdD, is an Associate Professor of Art Education at California State, Northridge.
collaborative Rubrics Impact Whole Child Learning
 Kimberly Olson | Beyond my ever-evolving STEAM-based learning rooted in problem solving, collaboration, and persistence, I have realized the deep connections, overlaps, and prevalence of culturally responsive and social emotional learning throughout STEAM, the National Visual Arts Standards, and other applicable standards I employ. Through my work as a Teacher Leader with the National Art Education Association’s (NAEA) Connected Arts Network (CAN) I have been able to leverage these connections, developing impactful learning experiences for my students that engage them through their own schema and identity and that develop self and social awareness. |
Most recently, I have been refining a collaborative lesson I co-authored with my CAN colleagues combining student identity and a unit of study based in architecture. (The Innovation Collaborative rubrics have been an invaluable resource in identifying transdisciplinary thinking and learning in this lesson.) Through this unit, students first explore aspects of themselves and their identity (I am…) that cannot be seen physically, such as musical inclinations, interest in sports, dance, baking, theatre, etc. They then apply these aspects to creating a self-reflective building, based on our recent study of a vast (and culturally inclusive) survey of architecture around the world and through time and place. Students envision themselves as a building, plan and sketch their use of architectural elements, materials, colors, and ultimately develop their ideas into a tactile and textural collage. They complete their thinking with a written artist statement which includes explanation and reasoning that prompted each of their I am-inspired choices and where they would want to be built, creating lots of opportunities for synthesis, transformation and bisociation.
Through this lesson students pushed the boundaries of engineering and math in their designed spaces, utilizing shapes and capabilities reflecting aspects of their original I am list. Many of my students serendipitously experimented with dimension in collage constructions, developing three dimensional aspects which added another level of ingenuity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. In response to this emergent aspect of this lesson, I shared the work of Congolese sculptor Bodys Isek Kingelez and Caine’s Arcade as motivation.
Currently, my students are all working to develop mini 3D models of their identity buildings. Their choice, manipulation, and application of materials—as well as design thinking—to demonstrate their original vision has been inspiring to witness! Lots of design thinking, persistence, and revising is happening as students rework their ideas to realize their vision. Reflecting on the success of this lesson has prompted me to access my summer training with Chibitronics and to add a paper circuit element for students that will allow them to illuminate part of their design. Incorporating a broad expanse of the myriad viable overlaps of standards and Thinking Skills has elevated my STEAM-based curriculum to new heights, encompassing the whole child and thinking so important to our 21st-century students.
Through this lesson students pushed the boundaries of engineering and math in their designed spaces, utilizing shapes and capabilities reflecting aspects of their original I am list. Many of my students serendipitously experimented with dimension in collage constructions, developing three dimensional aspects which added another level of ingenuity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. In response to this emergent aspect of this lesson, I shared the work of Congolese sculptor Bodys Isek Kingelez and Caine’s Arcade as motivation.
Currently, my students are all working to develop mini 3D models of their identity buildings. Their choice, manipulation, and application of materials—as well as design thinking—to demonstrate their original vision has been inspiring to witness! Lots of design thinking, persistence, and revising is happening as students rework their ideas to realize their vision. Reflecting on the success of this lesson has prompted me to access my summer training with Chibitronics and to add a paper circuit element for students that will allow them to illuminate part of their design. Incorporating a broad expanse of the myriad viable overlaps of standards and Thinking Skills has elevated my STEAM-based curriculum to new heights, encompassing the whole child and thinking so important to our 21st-century students.
new Makerspace Inspires myriad designs
 Kathleen Sweet  The April 8, 2024, solar eclipse | I have been teaching for 27 years, 9 years in Colorado and 18 in Iowa. Most of my career has been in K-5 visual arts education, however, in the last two years I have transitioned to a 2nd-5th grade computer science teacher. Since participating as an Innovation Collaborative Fellow, I have received a $30,000 STEM BEST grant and created a Makerspace for my K-12 district. (We converted an old science room into this space. All the furniture is modular and has options for flexible seating.) All students have access to this room and rotate through the Makerspace with a teacher guiding creative and innovative projects, 3D printing, robots, circuits, and many more critical thinking activities. I provided professional development for our district teachers to engage in the Makerspace, so that they would understand the learning that happens when students are in the space. Teachers are now sending whole classrooms to participate. Teachers also come to me for STEAM lesson ideas to incorporate as extensions in their classrooms. Overall, our district is moving forward and embracing STEAM as part of everyday learning. During the recent eclipse, I took my computer science students outside to view the eclipse. Unfortunately, in Iowa, we did not see the totality of it. But I did create a pinhole viewing projector out of a cereal box, as well as having glasses to view with. The students were more interested in the box I made than looking through their glasses. Sometimes simplicity is best. |
Student STEAM Projects: A Visual Tour
 Ashley Lupfer | I recently was tasked to teach an innovation and design class. Among other things, I conducted a light painting lesson with students using coding and Sphero, teamed with our music teacher to create Tono scopes that visualize sound, and used Tinkercad to design playgrounds. Sometimes photos explain lessons best—check them out. |
 | 5th Grade Innovation and Design students collaboratively created stop motion animation films that teach a fraction concept. They paid close attention to the FPS, or frames per second, and edited their work in iMovie by adding sound and text to further express their ideas. |
 5th Grade Innovation and Design students reviewed the concept of matter and experimented with paint rockets! Students combined a liquid (water and paint) and a solid (aka-seltzer) to create a gas. This gas built up pressure in our film canisters and created a fun “explosion” of paint which was documented with these awesome paintings (right). |  |
  | Our 5th grade students started off the year with a 3D modeling unit designing playground structures for our school. We used the Design Thinking Process, TinkerCad, Augmented Reality, and some top-notch photo editing skills to present our ideas to scale. Our proposals were an exciting way to envision how we could improve our school community while considering elements of design, safety, and overall impact. |
  | 5th Grade Innovation and Design students enjoyed learning about autonomous vehicles and the complex programs that enable them to function. We discussed how these vehicles use Artificial Intelligence and asked Chat GPT to program our Sphero for us. We collaboratively analyzed why the JavaScript code did not work and used impressive problem-solving skills to help our robot roll and introduce itself! Next we programmed our Spheros to respond to different lux values, or levels of light created by flashlights in the classroom. Many students programmed them to spin, make sounds, or show an animation on the light matrix. Finally, we discussed the use of GPS, where students plotted different places in our community in the hallway, wrote partner directions, and then programmed our Sphero using these steps! This was challenging but super fun to run their programs with the paper “taxis” students designed. |
book chapter describes kinetic sculpture design
 Kristin Vanderslip Taylor I wanted to share that I have a chapter titled "How might we make this work? Using design thinking to engineer kinetic sculptures in the art room" in the newly-published book: STEAM Education: An Interdisciplinary Look at Art in the Curriculum. The chapter is about one of the STEAM visual art lessons that another Collaborative Innovation Fellow, Kerry Buchman, and I shared with the Innovation Collaborative and tested in multiple classrooms. |  |
 Bonnie Crammond, PhD, Collaborative Research Thought Leader | Bonnie Cramond, PhD, is one of the Collaborative’s highly-respected Research Thought Leaders, who help provide the strong research foundation upon which the Collaborative’s work rests. Dr. Cramond is Professor Emeritus in the University of Georgia Department of Educational Psychology and former Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development. |
Every spring the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia hosts a free online festival of ideas related to creativity. The brainchild of Dr. Anna Abraham, the Director of the Torrance Center, this cultural event was envisioned as a way for “creative and innovative professionals across fields of human enterprise (to) present their new exciting projects and innovative ideas to the general public” (2021, Torrance Festival of Ideas pamphlet).
The inaugural festival, held April 23-25, 2021, showcased 21 speakers presenting their expert views on themes relevant to creativity; imagination; visual art; digital art; music; humor; empathy; consciousness; well-being; mindfulness; childhood; aging; education; equality; identity; healing; health; crisis; curiosity; innovation; entrepreneurship; authenticity; political resistance;, and sociocultural change. The festival also highlighted local non-profit organizations in Athens, Georgia that serve the community in creative and crucial ways.
In 2022 and 2023, the global three-day festival again featured speakers on a variety of topics, but in 2022, an invitation was added for people of all ages and backgrounds to submit their creative contributions, which were displayed on the website in the categories of literary, musical, and visual creativity.
This year, the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Torrance Center, the theme was Creativity and Learning. There were 1,000 attendees from several countries around the world and 28 speakers. Scholars and educators steeped in creativity work will recognize many of the speakers and topics which address critical issues and practical implementations in creativity and learning.
Information about the festival, including descriptions of sessions and speakers, as well as links to recorded sessions and other resources, can be found at the Torrance Festival of Ideas website. The pamphlets from each year are linked and contain information about each year’s event. The 2022 pamphlet, which is linked on the festival website, includes the creative products submitted. A selected number of the 2023 talks can be viewed online. The recordings of all the 2024 sessions can be accessed via the festival website where they will remain for a couple of months before they are moved to the UGA College of Education YouTube channel. Links to the talks on YouTube will also be made accessible via the Torrance Festival of Ideas webpage.
Anyone can register for the festival for free, but registrations are limited. So, mark your calendars to look for the Torrance Festival of Ideas next spring. You are sure to learn and be reinvigorated through interaction with imaginative thinkers and creative practitioners as they share their visions and ideas in relatable ways.
The inaugural festival, held April 23-25, 2021, showcased 21 speakers presenting their expert views on themes relevant to creativity; imagination; visual art; digital art; music; humor; empathy; consciousness; well-being; mindfulness; childhood; aging; education; equality; identity; healing; health; crisis; curiosity; innovation; entrepreneurship; authenticity; political resistance;, and sociocultural change. The festival also highlighted local non-profit organizations in Athens, Georgia that serve the community in creative and crucial ways.
In 2022 and 2023, the global three-day festival again featured speakers on a variety of topics, but in 2022, an invitation was added for people of all ages and backgrounds to submit their creative contributions, which were displayed on the website in the categories of literary, musical, and visual creativity.
This year, the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Torrance Center, the theme was Creativity and Learning. There were 1,000 attendees from several countries around the world and 28 speakers. Scholars and educators steeped in creativity work will recognize many of the speakers and topics which address critical issues and practical implementations in creativity and learning.
Information about the festival, including descriptions of sessions and speakers, as well as links to recorded sessions and other resources, can be found at the Torrance Festival of Ideas website. The pamphlets from each year are linked and contain information about each year’s event. The 2022 pamphlet, which is linked on the festival website, includes the creative products submitted. A selected number of the 2023 talks can be viewed online. The recordings of all the 2024 sessions can be accessed via the festival website where they will remain for a couple of months before they are moved to the UGA College of Education YouTube channel. Links to the talks on YouTube will also be made accessible via the Torrance Festival of Ideas webpage.
Anyone can register for the festival for free, but registrations are limited. So, mark your calendars to look for the Torrance Festival of Ideas next spring. You are sure to learn and be reinvigorated through interaction with imaginative thinkers and creative practitioners as they share their visions and ideas in relatable ways.
 Merrie Koester, PhD, Innovation Collaborative Advisory Board Member | Merrie Koester, PhD, Innovation Collaborative Advisory Board member, is the Science Literacy and Communication Specialist at the University of South Carolina Center for Science Education, an Adjunct Professor, College of Charleston School of Education, and Fellow, Near Center for Climate Studies, The Citadel.  |
For several years, the dangerous socio-scientific situations created by global warming, sea level rise, and an ever-increasing number of extreme weather events like hurricanes have demanded better community preparedness for such disasters. Students ages 11-18 are often being left out of community-based disaster preparedness programs. Even though there is considerable literature documenting that most preparedness decisions are made with or influenced by others such as family members, friends, coworkers, or neighbors, few of these papers explicitly include youth as important community disaster risk mitigation assets. For the last eight years, as a professional STEAM Teacher Educator, I have been developing and field testing a program called Kids Teaching Flood Resilience (KTFR) in highly flood prone Title 1 schools in Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1996, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine established the following conceptualization of Scientific Literacy:
Such literacy becomes meaningful knowledge when learners are afforded opportunities to develop and expressively communicate what they know. Arguably, being able to communicate with authority and creative agency is why having science knowledge matters and can save lives.
Towards that end, the work I’ve done in KTFR emphasizes the importance of becoming “Place-Wise” and leans into the fact that our historically marginalized, low-income communities of color disproportionately bear situational flood hazard risks, especially during a hurricane event. Much of this program draws from the powerful work of scholars like urban science educator Christopher Emdin (Urban Science for the Hip Hop Generation: Essential Skills for the Urban Science Educator and Researcher, 2010).
Following Emdin’s lead, throughout the KTFR curriculum, cause and effect relationships have been explored and expressed through poetry and rap. Here some examples of my students’ work:
In 1996, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine established the following conceptualization of Scientific Literacy:
- Scientific literacy means that a person can ASK, FIND, or DETERMINE answers to questions derived from CURIOSITY about everyday experiences.
- It means that a person has the ability to DESCRIBE, PREDICT, AND EXPLAIN natural phenomena.
Such literacy becomes meaningful knowledge when learners are afforded opportunities to develop and expressively communicate what they know. Arguably, being able to communicate with authority and creative agency is why having science knowledge matters and can save lives.
Towards that end, the work I’ve done in KTFR emphasizes the importance of becoming “Place-Wise” and leans into the fact that our historically marginalized, low-income communities of color disproportionately bear situational flood hazard risks, especially during a hurricane event. Much of this program draws from the powerful work of scholars like urban science educator Christopher Emdin (Urban Science for the Hip Hop Generation: Essential Skills for the Urban Science Educator and Researcher, 2010).
Following Emdin’s lead, throughout the KTFR curriculum, cause and effect relationships have been explored and expressed through poetry and rap. Here some examples of my students’ work:
 | What’s The Story in the land? Did a creek once flow where buildings now stand? How does a saltmarsh give and give, creating habitat for animals to live? Fill in a marsh and soon you’ll see, flooding’s a problem for you and me. Water always wins if you tell it NO! Let Water teach us where it needs to go. |
 |  |
Backstory: Formerly thriving African-American coastal communities have experienced the destruction and paving over of the expansive salt marsh ecosystems that were central to their culture, religion, commerce, recreation, and nutritional sustenance. As a result, these communities have been placed at higher flood risk, even before sea level rise amplified that risk.
The KTFR research claim is as follows: When positioned, empowered, and legitimized as resources of knowledge and action, middle and high school youth have the energy and ability to assess hazardous flooding and extreme weather situations and create messaging for their families that advocates for risk reduction behaviors.
The Get Hurricane Smart curriculum features five domains of Power Knowledge: 1) Get Weather Smart, 2) Place-Wise, 3) Storm Surge Smart, and 4) Water Safe.
The KTFR research claim is as follows: When positioned, empowered, and legitimized as resources of knowledge and action, middle and high school youth have the energy and ability to assess hazardous flooding and extreme weather situations and create messaging for their families that advocates for risk reduction behaviors.
The Get Hurricane Smart curriculum features five domains of Power Knowledge: 1) Get Weather Smart, 2) Place-Wise, 3) Storm Surge Smart, and 4) Water Safe.
| KTFR methods center Place, Problem, and Project Based Learning (PBL). The empowering “STEAM PBL” learning progression is at once active and performative as the artful making of communication artifacts emerges. Full disclosure: We never know what’s going to happen until it does. Inviting uncertainty and vulnerability into the room is also to welcome Art Spirit and its “What if?” kinds of curiosity. Like a developing tropical cyclone system, we constantly look for ways to draw in energy and find steering currents to sustain and aesthetically transform the work. If the effort flops, we try again. When the experience feels like “creative weather”, we know we’re succeeding. |  |
To date, the KTFR Get Hurricane Smart Toolkit includes a Get Hurricane Smart Rap, a music video, a feature film, Never Say Whatever, Especially in a Hurricane!, a public service announcement, a Kahoot quiz, and a KTFR Sketchbook.
The KTFR program is strongly aligned with the higher order “Creative and Innovative Thinking Skills” described by the Innovation Collaborative. During Flood Resilience Friday sessions, the classroom becomes a performance space, where we make it a point to show the similarities between Art Studio Habits of Mind and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Science and Engineering Practices:
The KTFR program is strongly aligned with the higher order “Creative and Innovative Thinking Skills” described by the Innovation Collaborative. During Flood Resilience Friday sessions, the classroom becomes a performance space, where we make it a point to show the similarities between Art Studio Habits of Mind and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Science and Engineering Practices:
The NGSS “Cross Cutting Concepts” take the stage as “characters” in the emerging quest: Whatever “counts” as “hazard risk reduction communication” must be 1) grounded in scientific evidence and 2) show/teach cause and effect relationships, patterns in the data, and/or change over time in ways that make sense. Math matters a lot! All KTFR student “ambassadors” can explain the inverse relationship between Resilience Capacity and Disaster Risk:
In the fall of 2023, in collaboration with the SC Sea Grant Consortium, the Citadel STEM Center, and the Near Center for Climate Studies at the Citadel, we applied for and received a two-year grant from the NOAA National Disaster Preparedness Program so that KTFR might be scaled and sustained in historically underrepresented flood prone coastal communities. Expected deliverables include: A KTFR Field Guide for Teacher Leaders, a series of KTFR & You instructional videos, a board game called Situation, a model for creating your own family-based KTFR event, and a montage film showing what successful KTFR looks like in practice. We have not nearly reached the turning point in this story, and the 2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season promises to be a doozy. Stay tuned.