"There's not one way to do science. Each of us have our own strength, our own approaches. We could get to the same answer, or we could actually come up with different answers, and maybe that's what's exciting. ... Museums need to be that place where society can come together and create things together."
Dr. Carol Tang, executive director of the Children's Creativity Museum of San Francisco, joined KnowAtom CEO Francis Vigeant via webinar to talk about her own journey from exploring museums as a child to directing one; the overlap between classroom and museum education; and the advantages and challenges of doing "stealth education." What follows is a transcript of their conversation on Jan. 29, 2016.
In this interview, you'll read about:
- Her childhood in Buffalo and how visits to museums shaped her love of science and her eventual career path
- The idea of co-creating content in classrooms and museums versus delivering it
- Higher order thinking
- How the museum environment is uniquely suited for explorative thinking and play
- How the Next Generation Science Standards complement museum education
- Additional resources for teachers seeking to recreate museum activities in their classrooms
Francis Vigeant: Thank you for joining us for this look at the past STEM innovation. I'm Francis Vigeant, CEO here at KnowAtom. At KnowAtom we're really interested not only in curriculum and classroom development but also the stuff of innovation, specifically the purpose of STEM, higher order thinking and the relationship between scientific knowledge and engineered solutions to everyday issues. I'm pleased to have with us today our special guest, Dr. Carol Tang, who is a paleontologist and the executive director of the Children's Creativity Museum in San Francisco.
Carol has been an active and celebrated member of the American Association of University Women. She has literally written the book on the Jurassic period for Encyclopedia Britannica. She has helped design exhibits for the California Academy of Scientists and even deployed science programs in Golden Gate Park to help the broader community understand the impact of climate change on California.
Among her many accolades, Carol was named one of California's top leading women in STEM by the California STEM Learning Network. We're honored to have her here with us to discuss her path to innovation. Carol, thanks for joining us.
Dr. Carol Tang: Thank you so much.
Vigeant: I would love to know first and foremost a little bit about your background in terms of how you have come from being a paleontologist and a scientist to a director of the Children's Creativity Museum, in terms of really what nudged your curiosity into STEM and helped set you on this path.
Dr. Tang: Paleontology, I think for good reason, is one of the most popular science topics. I think there's just a natural curiosity about fossils and old things and deep time and what was the Earth like before, and we see that in young kids as well, so I think that there's a lot of paleontologists like me who ended up doing a lot of public education, because even at Thanksgiving dinner or at dinner parties, but also in classrooms around the country, paleontologist scientists are going and talking about their work. Even when I first started in graduate in school, I was going to elementary schools and talking to teachers about what it means to be a paleontologist, the lessons that we can apply to our world today but also the context of science and wanting to become a scientist.
If you see here, I've actually worked for NASA astrobiology, looking for how we would go about thinking about life on other planet. The way to do it as a paleontologist is to look here on Earth. I think my science has always been a very accessible touchpoint with the general public, and I love talking about the field in my work with the general public. I don't think it was a really tough switch to go into the museum world.
I think that after having been on university professor for several years, I realized that in order to really inspire a larger number of people, we need to start at a younger age, and your audience certainly knows that. It really is important when kids are young, and they are influenced by so many different factors, that we provide a good role model and good inspiration for STEM.
I left the university, a tenure track position to start working at a Natural History Museum in San Francisco, as you said, and since then, a couple other museum settings and positions, but it always comes back to how much I gain as a scientist, my love of science and using that as inspiration to how do we then help the next generation find that same passion in themselves.
For example, in this project with the Clinton Global Initiative was a project where we look at how to make creative writing and science become this natural pairing. That is a really nice segue to my position. Now it's a Children’s Creativity Museum, because, for me, there's nothing different between being a creative artist, performer or writer and a creative scientist, creative engineer or even a creative teacher.
There are so many underlying mindsets and practices and attitudes. The way that you think about problems and you think about people that are really common to not just different group has but just the people in general and it's often kids. I guess my path from really loving the science to realizing that the science is a great way to inspire kids and to really change the world and tackle those problems of society and how to improve our world and our society and that's where I see the link with museum being a place where we can really influence large number of kids and teachers.
Vigeant: As you're thinking to your own elementary or middle school days, where did this passion for questioning, curiosity and inspiring others to engage in curiosity and questioning? Was there a particular experience or event that you can think of that got that started, or perhaps a teacher?
Dr. Tang: I had really great teachers who gave me projects and spent time with me outside of the classroom in elementary, middle school, and high school. Maybe the reason I am at the museum now is when I think back to my childhood, and what my parents say, probably some of the greatest influences were museum and out-of-school time experiences, and because I grew up in Buffalo, New York.
I went to elementary school for five years in Buffalo, through the blizzard, and what my parents and I remember is, we spent our weekends going to the aquarium, the Natural History Museum, the Art Museum. That was just a part of my life. So I think that's why I'm so committed to museums as a partner for what happens in school.
I think it's important for kids to see that learning is everywhere, that's not confined to the classroom. Everything you see on TV, or when you go into a museum, or do an after-school program or a hike with your parents, you can be inspired and learn, where you engage your senses and you think about the big picture, the big questions, the things that you're interested and tap into your own interest.
I'd have to say that I've been very really lucky to have good teachers, but it's probably the out-of-school museum experiences that really opened up the world to me and made me see the world as a learning laboratory everywhere I go.
Vigeant: It's interesting that the out of school time extension of the classroom and those experiences kicked off your curiosity in, perhaps, an exposure to a world that wasn't the part of your everyday experience and a first form to engage in something science- or engineering-related and sparked curiosity.
Did you always know you wanted to be a geologist, or were there a couple of steps before that? When did you make that decision? How did you come about it?
Dr. Tang: The interesting thing is really I surprised my family, I surprised myself, when I became a geologist. My family is an immigrant family and we valued science, but for me, everybody always thought I was going to become a TV journalist because I'm just a talkative Asian girl, and Asian women role models in America, especially when I was growing up in the '80s, were really the anchors and journalists.
So everyone thought that's what I was going to do, and I thought I was going to do that. I was the editor of my high school newspaper. I was the editor of my college literary magazine. I even won the Asian American Journalist Association Award in college. I really thought that's what I was going to do because I didn't have any other expectations or role models.
But I love science. I talked to myself into thinking I was going to be a science journalist. I majored in paleontology as an undergrad but I still thought I was going to be a journalist. I even went to graduate school and I still kept deluding myself and my family that I was going to be a journalist. What really changed my mind was when I got to graduate school, I started doing research and started teaching as a teaching assistant. It clicked for me and I finally realized, I'm actually a scientist. Why am I denying this part of me and pretending I'm going to do something else? I still love journalism. I love communication, but my heart is in the science. There's a reason why I stuck to it and why I went to graduate school in science, not in journalism.
I think it's been a long path and that I've always been interested, but I don't think I ever thought of myself as a scientist or felt that was something that I could do and or would want to do. I think that it's that so many people have encouraged me along the way. If I had given up my study, then by the time I realized I want to be a scientist, I couldn't have done it, so if I hadn't taken calculus in high school, if I hadn't taken those classes in chemistry and sweated through my exams, I would have closed the door to finally finding my true identity. I'm very thankful along the way, but I'm just such a big believer that it does take all these other factors that allow you to finally find your passion and then really pursue what's you're interested in.
Vigeant: It's interesting how, in so many ways, after-school programs or out of school time programs play such an important role in extending that school experience, and you're bringing up an entirely different one, but also important: this idea of mentoring and inspiring the next generation as well with your story.
I know that you've been involved with FabFems as a role model and the importance of having role models. How do you see that playing especially as a woman who is a scientist? Is that something that we can do more of in some way and is important? Is it particularly important, do you think, for encouraging girls to become scientists?
Dr. Tang: I think that the studies have been showing that girls actually are taking the same amount of science prep classes and, in fact, having better grades than boys do in high school, especially in elementary school and so on. For some reason, they're not identifying themselves as scientists. They don't go into science. So I do think that seeing a role model and saying that there's not one mold of being a scientist. This is true for boys as well and so on, but this idea of really broadening the concept of what it means to be a scientist or how you need science in your life. You don't even need to be a scientist to still need to be science-literate in terms of your medical decisions, where you buy your house, whether you compost or buy plastic. All these things are science decisions.
I do think trying to broaden the identity of “what is a scientist, what is science and who can be the scientist” is really important. We've also been finding out that for a lot of girls and folks that are underrepresented in the sciences from any demographic is that they need to see that scientist can lead lives that are like theirs, so that if you have a hobby, you can still be a scientist and still have a hobby. You can still listen to hip-hop and still be a scientist. This idea of broadening does mean those of us who are role models need to be out there with our personal lives as well as our scientific and our intellectual lives. What we're seeing is that people who don't go into science, it’s not necessarily that they don't have the skills or even the interest, but there's again, this intangible about not seeing yourself fit into that mold. So we need to break the mold, I guess, and all of us together can break that mold.
Vigeant: What do you think, in terms of K-12 educators, the folks in the classroom, that they can do specifically to help break that mold?
Dr. Tang: I think that some really great projects that I remember from my childhood maybe seem so simple to the teachers that you know, but I don't know if they realized how effective they are so something has stick on my mind is in junior high school. We had a very classic example of a project where you go and collect 30 wildflowers and identify them. I was not a big nature person, I was a museum person but never spent a lot of time out in nature, because of my family really kept me protected in indoors, especially in Buffalo. But the idea, like, going out finding wildflowers, I had to craft the whole project like, “where would I go, how will I collect them? How would I preserve them? How would I identify them?”
That project sticks with me, and the reason that I mentioned that in the response to your answer is, I think that teachers can allow kids to approach projects in their own ways and that helps broaden this idea that there's not one way to do science. Each of us have our own strength, our own approaches. We could get to the same answer or we could actually come up with different answers and maybe that's what's exciting.
I think that teachers, even in setting up projects that are open-ended and that allow for different perspectives and approaches or learning styles and experiences to be valid in completing a project, I think those are really successful ways to reinforce the idea that every child has good thinking, can craft a good plan, can come up with ways to investigate questions and come up with right answers. That, I think, is something that maybe teachers don't realize how important that personal connection, that personal buy-in is, not only to the child's success, but in reinforcing this idea that there are different ways to be a scientist. There are different ways to be successful.
Vigeant: I couldn't agree with you more, and it seems like that's a natural tie-in with your work now at the Children's Creativity Museum, thinking about how this evolution or, perhaps synergy between the sciences and scientific-thinking creativity, and then public venues like museums, can help to tie that together.
Can you tell us maybe a little bit about the museum and specifically how the Children's Creativity Museum is really redefining what a museum is, or what you can expect from a museum in the 21st century?
Dr. Tang: Great. At the Children's Creativity Museum, our mission is to nurture creativity and collaboration in all children and families. What does that mean? What does it mean to nurture creativity? One, is we assume that there's creativity in everyone. Every child and every adult has creativity, and our job is to bring it out and help nurture and to help them express it. Sometimes it's through technology, sometimes it's through hands-on projects, sometimes it's from design challenges.
I think the 21st-century museum is that just like in education, instead of this passive, “We know everything, let's present it to you and you are going to absorb it all,” You think of the classic museums of the past few centuries is like, here's a pantheon to knowledge, and you come in and you absorb it.
What I think both in classrooms and in museums is this idea that actually that may not be the most effective way to do things and what we really need to do is have a dialogue so that our visitors are actually co-creating content that instead of becoming just a consumer of a museum exhibit, you're actually producing something. You're actually making meaning for your own life and expressing your own creative expression and your experience. Instead of exhibits, we sort of set down spaces where you can get into flow of things and you can make something. It's about this interactive, deep learning as everyone is talking about, rather than 30 seconds at many exhibits giving you little factoids. It's really about making your own sense.
Vigeant: Sure. I was really impressed when I had the opportunity to visit the museum a bit earlier and was impressed by the real diversity of opportunity for children of all ages to be able to create. I like the way that you said that it's participating and actually making the museum a museum. I had the opportunity to be there before any children had arrived and it appropriately felt empty. You didn't really feel like the museum was alive, and creativity is something that's very much driven by humans. The chairs, the computers, and so on aren't creative, but if you fill the museum with children, it really runs on their creativity.
I think about that in the context of a higher order of thinking. KnowAtom, we're so focused on science technology, engineering, and math in the K-12 classrooms specifically, and how, as you were saying, we engage students in that process and place aside that “pantheon vault of knowledge” approach and engage students in creating, evaluating, and analyzing simultaneously, rearranging the traditional Bloom's Taxonomy from a focus on lower order skills that are really fact-oriented to something that is much higher order and focused on bringing it to each other and to our communities.
I was wondering -- before we even look closer at the exhibits and the labs, because they really aren't exhibits, they are labs, and they do require children to participate to really bring the museum alive -- it feels like a pivot point to me, or a balance, in the sense where this creative analytical thinking skill crosses into many disciplines.
How does that have relevance as a scientist when you look at it, then thinking about that relationship between science, this questioning and generating knowledge, and engineers using that knowledge to develop technology solutions. How do you see that balance playing out, not only in scientific disciplines and as a scientist, but in more maybe fictional disciplines as an artist and so on?
Dr. Tang: First, I mean, it's been surprising to people that I would go from being a scientist in a research university, and then come to a children's museum. I just don't see any discrepancy between the two. I do feel like a good scientist, a creative scientist. The ones who are making the breakthroughs are inventors, engineers, artists and writers, who, as we mentioned earlier, have very similar processes. I think everybody look to the world around them, tries to understand something and then tries to figure out if they could answer questions about the world around them. Whether you're absorbing human nature or nature, I think creative people are asking the right questions, figuring out how to answer those questions and then trying it.
I like this look at this higher order of thinking because I think that's actually much more reflective of what scientists do. We have this idea that science does the scientific method and, in fact, when you ask scientists, then engineers, things gets scrambled. I think as a paleontologist. I've never been a big fan of the scientific method because of course, we don't have time machines. We can't go back and see how Jurassic animals behaved. Our science has always been a little bit different, and so I think evaluating and analyzing, and doing this concurrently or iteratively in order to create, is much more natural for any creative person, including scientists and engineers. Here at the museum, I think this is our approach, although now that you're assuring it, it could really help us define what we do.
We really want kids to be able to find their own way to get the solution, and there's not one solution, so this idea of taking information, experiences that you have and then really evaluating, analyzing, and then questioning yourself again: That didn't work, how would I do it better? What we have here at the museum are not only studios and labs, but we also have made sure that each of them are facilitated so that our educators are asking these prompting questions and having kids really look at what they've done, or helping them reflect on the process they use. What were you thinking when you did this? Why did you do this instead of this? How would you do it differently?
Helping kids understand that they have a process that they analyze and evaluated and created, helping them realize that they can do it, gives them confidence and the ability to do it again. I think we now know in education, the reflection and metacognition is really key to having something stick. That's where I think that the higher order of thinking is applied in our museum and then reinforced in different ways.
Vigeant: I can entirely understand and agree that “point A” to “point B” is rarely a direct route in any discipline. Yet thinking about science and engineering process: the idea that processes exist in STEM does not mean that science or engineering are linear. These are processes that are helpful to move problems toward solutions, and questions toward answers, through prototyping and experimentation. It's almost a logic for applying knowledge and skills through higher order thinking.
It seems like the next generation must combine them all. How is it that we can involve creative, evaluative and analytical thinking skills into the macro creative process of going from a question or a problem to some solution, but with the realization that it's like if you were saying it's iterative and it's not known. We can't go back and see the dinosaurs. There's no time machine. It's interesting, how does that play out in the different lab experiences that you have at the museum? I think I have here an example of the imagination lab.
Dr. Tang: Right. The imagination lab is really for our youngest visitors. But even here we know that even when you're 18 months old, you're trying to learn about the world around you, and so we have lots of building-type experiences and imagination labs with very difficult materials: magnets, and foam blocks and Lego pieces and so on. One of the things that we not only encourage is building, exploring of materials, but also playing with other kids who are in our society. It's possible some of these kids will never see each other in their social circles or in their schools, but museums need to be that place where society can come together and create things together. Isn't it a great idea to have kids feel like they can build something with other people who think differently, are from different areas of the world?
This idea of building collaboratively is important for young kids, as we know social and emotional learning is also very important, so we tried to build that and link those two together. This is a picture from our animation studio. It is one of our signature experiences, and what we do here is we really encourage kids to get their imagination and bring it to life. Kids have stories. They have worlds and characters in their head, but they're not able to express them, and even with crayons and paper and things like that, they're not really able to have the dexterity or the language skills to be able to set those down. But with clay and stop motion video, in just an hour you can tell your story with really interesting characters. You do fun things and go fun places.
This is again a signature experience of ours is that helping kids create video, instead of just watch video, and to acknowledge that they have great stories that they can share with their family and friends and the world. How do we help kids be empowered to think of their story? How to get it, put it together and how to communicate with other people?
Vigeant: In terms of the STEM connection, I know as we're going through these labs, here I think we're seeing definitely the use of T, the technology in STEM, and then in building and creating, especially at a problem-solving sense, we see the E. Is that an intentional process as you're going through here to try and bring different elements of STEM alive? For instance, in the community lab or in other labs as we're going through?
Dr. Tang: Yes. It ends up not only in my scientists and my education manager or as a middle school biology teacher, she's a credential teacher and some of our educators also come from science backgrounds, environmental scientists, for example. I don't think it's actually an accident. I think that we have acknowledged and realized that good creativity and STEM processes are very, very similar.
The other thing that we recognize is that the storytelling like the claymation video, it's content-agnostic. In other words, we work with teachers all the time who are teaching science content, for example, the water cycle or watersheds and the ecosystem and recycling and a lot of science and environmental science topics.
What they want to do is to be able to bring those science topics to life, and they come here and they have their kids' storyboard a video using water cycle as the content and using that as the inspiration, but letting the kids express the story of their own using the content. That's another way where we explicitly not just use the technologies of background but actually insert science content as part of the experience as well. There is technology that explicit, and it's about the T in STEM, and one of the other labs that you have a photo as the robot coding lab where we are explicit about teaching coding right here about using a computer language. We're able to program a robot to take on certain challenges.
The T can be explicit but also be just part of the storytelling process, and we find that science teachers especially are really excited to bring creativity in and bring a storytelling component that kids really are drawn to, but using scientific content. We do find that teachers say their students learn more about the content because they are forced to use it and apply it in the story. This robot coding exhibition is one that we just opened recently and a lot of us in STEM and in education know what coding is and the importance of computer science.
What we found out was that a lot of parents don't really know what coding is. It just sounds like some jargon and so we've actually spent a lot of time communicating. The coding is a computer language you could use to control computers and robots. Again, here is an example where we gave them a fun challenge like, “we can attach a pen to the robot.” They draw something, but then they have to use a language to tell the robot how to draw that, or in this case, you can see that they have like an obstacle course or a maze that they have to navigate.
The kids think of it as a problem or a challenge that they can succeed at, but in order to succeed at it, they have to learn how to code. So I think we can use real life and engage their natural desire to figure something out, and then learn some principles that they could use in career but also in an important logical thinking, and so on in curriculum.
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