Are you interested in supporting middle-school girls’ dreams of becoming scientists? Do you want to incorporate inclusive and engaging science lesions into your curriculum? Rising Stargirls (RS) works with formal and informal educators to provide resources to make a difference.
RS is an educational organization with the mission of encouraging girls to learn, explore, and discover the universe. Geared towards middle-school girls (grades 6-8) from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences, we engage girls of all colors and backgrounds in interactive astronomy workshops using theater, writing, and visual art to address each girl as a whole. With our five years of experience working with girls across the US, we have created a training webinar for educators across the world!
As part of our current National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, we embraced the goal of bringing RS to a global platform. Encouraging educators from around the world to incorporate RS activities into their curriculums is a big part of that goal. We held our most recent Educator Webinar on July 29th, 2021 after running our first ever online RS Workshop for girls across the US (link blog post for the Workshop). The goal of this webinar was not only to train participants on RS activities, but also to give them an idea of what an online workshop can look like.
Imagine that you are going to facilitate your own workshop. How does that feel for you? How are you preparing for the workshop? Who is on your team? RS has published an activity handbook in English and Spanish filled with more than 10 days worth of activities that engage students in learning about astronomy and creating art, as well as an activity handbook adapted for an online setting. Two other resources for lesson planning that were discussed in the Educator Webinar are the Underrepresentation Curriculum Project (URC) and APS STEP UP. Here you can find lesson plans on representation, stereotype threat, systemic racism, physicists and careers in physics, and so much more. Recently, the URC has released a note to instructors about “Anti-Critical Race Theory” bills and how to continue incorporating URC lessons into their curriculum.
Given the technology to hold educational workshops fully online, it is important to consider how you can adapt to create the largest impact for your community. Do you have the physical space to hold a workshop? Would you rather serve your local community or work with girls from all over the world? Does your target audience have access to resources necessary for an online workshop? Do you have technical support? To make sure that all of the girls could fully participate in our online RS Astronomy Workshop, we assembled and mailed art boxes, funded by NSF. These contained pastels, markers, pencils, magazine pages for collaging, glue, snacks, a mirror with “This is what a scientist looks like” written on it, and more!
During the webinar, we went through an example RS activity about constellations and constellation stories. We discussed questions like: Which constellations do you know? Are all stars in one constellation the same distance from earth? What makes stars shine? And we discussed the importance of encouraging girls' thought processes while answering these questions rather than praising the correct answers.
The RS team is so grateful that we had the opportunity to connect with educators leading positive impact initiatives across the country. We look forward to collaborating with you and we hope you will keep in contact with us about how you are using RS activities and what results you are seeing. If you were not able to attend past Educator Webinars, please sign up for our mailing list to receive notifications when we plan our next one.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 1753373.