HR: 16:30h
AN: ED24A-03    [Abstracts]
TI: Meeting at the Museum: Sustained Research Education Partnerships Start in Your Own Back Yard
AU: Morin, P J
EM: lpaul@umn.edu
AF: Dept of Geology and Geophysics, University of Minnesota 310 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0219, United States
AU: Hamilton, P
EM: hamilton@smm.org
AF: Science Museum of Minnesota, 120 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul, MN 55102, United States
AU: * Campbell, K M
EM: kmc@umn.edu
AF: National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics, St. Anthony Falls Laboratory 2 Third Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414, United States
AB: The Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) and the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED) have been formal partners since 2002, when we jointly secured NSF center-level funding. We began in our local community by together creating our own "Big Back Yard", a 1.75 acre outdoor park in which museum visitors, teachers and students explore natural and engineered river systems through miniature golf and interactive exhibits. We went on to jointly design "Earthscapes" programming for students, teachers and graduate students, related directly or indirectly to the park. From there, our partnership led to a major new exhibition that begins touring nationally and around the world in late 2007. A current effort seeks to bring NCED and SMM together with five other geo-science-oriented, NSF-supported Science and Technology Centers (STCs) from around the United States to develop collaborative means by which the research and science of all six STCs can reach larger informal science education audiences. We have learned a lot along the way about how museums can help individual and teams of researchers most effectively reach formal and informal audiences. Successful partnerships require significant joint commitment and funding, dedicated staff, and meaningful formative and summative evaluation. For a research center or an individual researcher, partnering with a museum provides experience, expertise, infrastructure, collegial relationships and community visibility that significantly enhance that of the academy. For a museum, one successful and highly visible research collaboration opens many new doors in the research community, providing new opportunities to broaden and deepen the scientific content of exhibits and programming.
DE: 0744 Rivers (0483, 1856)
DE: 0800 EDUCATION
DE: 0805 Elementary and secondary education
DE: 0815 Informal education
DE: 1824 Geomorphology: general (1625)
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting