Resource Roundup: Wallace Foundation Video on Building Afterschool Systems, Noyce Report on STEM Education, Creative Youth Cultures & the Nature of Creativity

1. From the Wallace Foundation: 

What happens when teams from 57 cities building afterschool systems gather to discuss two key system responsibilities – improving afterschool programs and using data for informed decision-making? Lots of rich discussion. This video outlines key points taken from the report that covers a national afterschool conference held in February 2013. That report details what mayors, program providers, system leaders, researchers and others had to say on matters ranging from how to measure afterschool performance to how to boost program quality.

 

2. From The After-School Corporation (TASC): 

While many cities have great educators and community and cultural institutions providing science, technology, engineering, and math education (STEM), many of these individual stakeholders are not connecting with one another, leading to missed opportunities. This report looks at 15 examples of educators, families, institutions like museums and others collaborating to build strong “STEM Learning Ecosystems.”

This paper was commissioned by the Noyce Foundation and co-authored by Kathleen Traphagen and Saskia Traill, Vice President for Policy and Research at TASC. 

 

3. From DML Central: 

In this post I want to compare two European research projects that investigated creative production by young people in informal, out-of-school and, to a great extent, self organised contexts. Around the world scholars are very interested in the development of any kind of learning community and especially those seemingly stimulated by or reliant on forms of digital technology. 

Virtually all of the scholarship is interested in the types of different relationships such cultures have with formal schooling both to see how they might serve as templates for educational reform or as critiques of schooling. However, here I want to show how our interest in ‘practices’ and ‘knowledge’ – that is the way such groups organise themselves and communicate as well an attention to the kinds of knowledge(s) which are valued in such communities – may actually be missing the point: what counts, I suspect, is the identity work that we can observe across these examples. Read the whole article here

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