My Home, My Health: Place-Based Public Health Resources for Rural Educators

Project Description

My Home, My Health: Place-Based Public Health Resources for Rural Educators, will address future bioscience workforce needs by engaging rural underserved youth, improving the teaching skills of informal educators, and leveraging the expertise and research of Montana’s NIH- supported scientists. Montana State University in partnership with three tribal colleges — Salish Kootenai College, Blackfeet Community College, and Chief Dull Knife College — and researchers of the Montana IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), will build a model for how INBRE networks can train their researchers to create outreach kits with the communities they serve in order to reach underserved youth. Additionally, the project will draw upon the expertise and community contacts of the NIH-funded American Indian / Alaska Native Clinical & Translational Research Program (AI/AN CTRP). My Home, My Health will create a series of hands-on, place-based activity kits that will focus on a broad definition of disease ecology encompassing multidimensional picture of the interplay of abiotic conditions with multiple pathogens and hosts interacting within a whole ecosystem. The project addresses the NIH goal to “foster a better understanding of biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research and its implications” by engaging communities to create regionally relevant hands-on activities that will help to attract underserved audiences to STEM, give youth the opportunity to gain and practice STEM skills relevant to bioscience professions, and enhance educator professional development. The project team will be searching for exemplary practices to improve STEM learning outcomes that can be measured, replicated and disseminated. The project includes INBRE tribal college researchers and afterschool program educators in three targeted communities: The Northern Cheyenne, Blackfeet and Flathead Reservations. My Home, My Health will train 30 INBRE researchers (undergrads, graduate students, and faculty) in science communication and outreach so they can help design and pilot the kits with youth. The project team will also train 50 informal educators from around Montana in how to use the project’s lessons, which will improve the educators’ content knowledge of disease ecology. In total, the project will impact 2,260 youth, 50 educators and 30 early-career and established researchers. After the SEPA grant is completed, the project model will ultimately become part of Montana INBRE’s future training and outreach with 50 INBRE researchers participating each summer. INBRE will use and lend out the kits to educators around the state and continue to create new kits. The project team includes two PIs that are women of color and there are six Native Americans from five tribes acting as staff and/or advisors.

Abstract

My Home, My Health: Place-Based Public Health Resources for Rural Educators, will address future bioscience workforce needs by engaging rural underserved youth, improving the teaching skills of informal educators, and leveraging the expertise and research of Montana’s NIH- supported scientists. Montana State University in partnership with three tribal colleges — Salish Kootenai College, Blackfeet Community College, and Chief Dull Knife College — and researchers of the Montana IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), will build a model for how INBRE networks can train their researchers to create outreach kits with the communities they serve in order to reach underserved youth. Additionally, the project will draw upon the expertise and community contacts of the NIH-funded American Indian / Alaska Native Clinical & Translational Research Program (AI/AN CTRP). My Home, My Health will create a series of hands-on, place-based activity kits that will focus on a broad definition of disease ecology encompassing multi-dimensional picture of the interplay of abiotic conditions with multiple pathogens and hosts interacting within a whole ecosystem. The project addresses the NIH goal to “foster a better understanding of biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research and its implications” by engaging communities to create regionally relevant hands-on activities that will help to attract underserved audiences to STEM, give youth the opportunity to gain and practice STEM skills relevant to bioscience professions, and enhance educator professional development. The project team will be searching for exemplary practices to improve STEM learning outcomes that can be measured, replicated and disseminated. The project includes INBRE tribal college researchers and afterschool program educators in three targeted communities: The Northern Cheyenne, Blackfeet and Flathead Reservations. My Home, My Health will train 30 INBRE researchers (undergrads, graduate students, and faculty) in science communication and outreach so they can help design and pilot the kits with youth. The project team will also train 50 informal educators from around Montana in how to use the project’s lessons, which will improve the educators’ content knowledge of disease ecology. In total, the project will impact 2,260 youth, 50 educators and 30 early-career and established researchers. After the SEPA grant is completed, the project model will ultimately become part of Montana INBRE’s future training and outreach with 50 INBRE researchers participating each summer. INBRE will use and lend out the kits to educators around the state and continue to create new kits. The project team includes two PIs that are women of color and there are six Native Americans from five tribes acting as staff and/or advisors.

Dissemination Strategies

My Home, My Health’s newly created educational resources as well as findings from research, lessons learned, methods used, and challenges encountered along the way will all be communicated to a broad range of STEM education researchers and practitioners. The project team’s goal will be to find ways that newly discovered exemplary practices can be most efficiently disseminated, incorporated into formal and informal educational pedagogic workflows, and then assessed for additional opportunities for improvement. The project team will use the Center for Advancing Discovery Research in Education dissemination toolkit (http://cadrek12.org/dissemination-toolkit) to ensure the most effective dissemination strategies are being used. The toolkit outlines resources on accessibility, analytics,
messaging, publishing, social media, and more.

Special care will be taken to disseminate results among groups underrepresented in STEM through communications and presentations with groups such as the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), Society for the
advancement of Chicanos/as and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), National Indian Education Association (NIEA), National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), American Indian Research Opportunities (AIRO), the Montana Girls STEM Collaborative and others.

The project plan includes the creation of a dedicated website for My Home, My Health, therefore providing access to all of the projects’ educational resources to formal and informal educators, as well as the public. Any multimedia assets created for this project, such as video clips, animations and interactive applications, offer almost limitless possibilities for broad dissemination, including YouTube, Flickr, iTunesU, Facebook and other sharing sites. Afterschool professionals and informal educators will receive information and access to project materials via the Montana Office of Public Instruction and Montana Afterschool Alliance newsletters, listservs and websites.

Resulting exemplary practices and program outcomes will be disseminated via national conferences to scientists, informal educators, afterschool providers, middle school science teachers and counselors. Presentation possibilities include conferences for the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, the National Science Teachers Association, the Association of Children’s Museums, and the International Public Science Events. In Montana, project results and materials will be shared via the Montana Office of Public Instruction, the Montana Science Teachers Association, Montana
Library Association and the Montana Afterschool Alliance.