These are the big questions we are investigating through a new research-practice partnership between the Exploratorium, Lighthouse Community Charter School, and the University of Washington. The collaboration involves participants across three organizations that bring to the table a variety of educational perspectives and backgrounds: teachers, afterschool educators, school staff, program coordinators, activity designers, and researchers.

Working together, we want to understand the full range of learning outcomes – the dispositions, skills, interests, and concepts – that emerge through afterschool Tinkering programs and that are valued during the school day. In addition, we want to understand how the distinct social settings of afterschool – the playful, collaborative, and non-evaluative nature – and the particular features of Tinkering – involving creative, improvisational problem-solving – advance these outcomes.

This is how it works. The partnership is providing weekly Tinkering programs to students, co-led by Lighthouse educator Sarah Chung and Exploratorium Tinkering Studio activity designer and facilitator Lianna Kali (you can learn more about the tinkering activities they’ve designed here). Exploratorium researchers observe and videotape the program each week, zooming into student work, actions, and conversations. Then, the entire research-practice partnership team gets together over breakfast once a month to review selected video or field note excerpts and to discuss what’s going on:

• What kinds of learning do you see?
• What are indicators or evidence?
• How is this kind of learning valued/of value at the school?

The project is experimenting with how research-practice partnerships can provide supportive contexts for evidence-based reflection and professional learning. Through this process we aim to develop a cross-setting learning framework that will serve as the basis for classroom-based research scheduled to start next school year at Lighthouse, where we will begin to document how afterschool learning flows into, is recognized, and is leveraged in the classroom.

The co-investigation also addresses critical policy issues about what afterschool STEM should look like to support school STEM learning. Must it replicate or directly align with the school day curriculum? Or can more open-ended, creative, and exploratory approaches to STEM learning – undertaken during the student-centered social atmosphere of the afterschool setting – develop learning outcomes that have value in the STEM classroom? Read more about what we’re learning here, here, and here.

This collaboration is funded by the Overdeck Family Foundation and the National Science Foundation (Grant DUE-1238253).