Enhancing Diversity in the Geosciences Starting in Elementary School: An Afterschool Program at PRI's Museum of the Earth (Ithaca, NY)

Recruiting underrepresented minorities into geoscience careers is challenging if these demographic groups are already typically underrepresented in science classes in high school and college. Partnerships between community learning centers and science education organizations may, over time, help increase ethnic diversity through outside-of-school science programs that begin as early as elementary school. For the past three years, students from the Greater Ithaca Activities Center (GIAC, a community youth center with a demographically diverse population in Ithaca, NY) have been receiving programming from educators at the Museum of the Earth, the exhibits and education facility of the Paleontological Research Institution. The project was developed to provide regular exposure to geoscience activities and to a science environment in order to foster student awareness and understanding of the geosciences, and to help students envision themselves in science–related roles.

During each of the school years 2005-06 & 2006-07, a "Junior Geoscientist" program was hosted at the Museum of the Earth in which about a dozen 5th grade students attended the Museum twice weekly through most of the school year. Younger peers also received occasional programming. Since fall 2007, PRI educators have continued to visit GIAC twice monthly to build and maintain relationships with K-5 students. Meeting learning and relationship goals in afterschool contexts requires taking into account emotional and energy states of students at the end of school days, student interests, group social dynamics, irregular attendance or transience of a portion of afterschool populations, and variation in each of these factors through the school year. Examples of programming consistently engaging to students in this context included relatively open-ended social activities such as searching for fossils, science art activities using museum exhibits and fossils, educational games, and student focus-group style evaluations of new museum activities and exhibits. This work has been supported by NSF grant GEO-0503583.