How can our informal education sites and programs include everyone? It’s a question we all wrestle with. Remember how last week’s guest, Elise McFarland, described teaching about California’s Spanish missions to young visitors who might have roots in Mexican, European, Native, African, Asian, and Catholic communities...
Most people who study learning these days generally take an approach that could be described as constructivist. That is, knowledge isn’t just transferred from teacher to learner passively; the learner must actively fit new knowledge into their existing mental frameworks through a building process. Constructivism,...
Volunteers are essential to the missions of many informal education organizations. But unlike relatively-unskilled volunteer positions – think repairing trails or passing out food at a soup kitchen – the volunteer educator has one of the most demanding job descriptions there is: teaching. Training volunteers to be...
On this week’s podcast, I meet Brittany Sabol, the training director at Environmental Volunteers. EV is an organization that turns everyday folks into extraordinary informal educators who go into classrooms to provide science enrichments. Working with volunteers is a huge part of many informal education sites – they...
How do you talk with your learners? Such a basic question – and yet as an informal educator I was never trained in it. Unfortunately, that means I started out my teaching career reproducing what I had experienced myself: lecture-style tours with a few minutes for questions at the end. But there is another way:...
In our first podcast, educator Kady Yeomans described her work leading groups of kids on the floor of a large science museum. And the main sense I got from Kady was that she is always thinking about her audience – there are facts to deliver, sure, but there’s no lecture. Here’s how she put it, speaking from her...