4pm – 5pm (BST) 16 June 2021

Associate Professor Tamara Clegg, University of Maryland

Communitizing Science: Communities as Contexts for STEM Learning

In this talk, Tammy will highlight the potential of hyperlocal community settings – neighborhoods, community centers, after school programs – for promoting STEM learning in everyday life. Highlighting findings from two studies, Science Everywhere and Data Everyday, Clegg will illustrate ways STEM learning can be connected to issues and topics relevant to community members’ goals (e.g., cooking, sports). First, in Science Everywhere, with colleagues, Tammy has spent over six years designing, developing and situating a social media app, large community displays, and life-relevant science learning experiences for youth in two urban, resource-constrained neighborhood settings. From this project, she will highlight case studies of child and adult community members that illuminate the role of the Science Everywhere socio-technical system and hyperlocal context for influencing science disposition shifts in communities. Second, in the Data Everyday project, Clegg’s research team is seeking to understand the opportunities for data literacy development within NCAA Division I sports. Drawing on an interview study with Division I athletes and athletics staff members across sports, she will highlight key tensions that reveal opportunities and challenges for situating data literacy development in the context of community context of elite athletics.  Through these studies, Tammy will describe ways such community contexts can, over time, reshape community dispositions in ways that fuel dynamic new community-drive STEM learning experiences and broaden our conceptualizations of STEM learning.

Speaker’s Bio:

Tamara “Tammy” Clegg is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. She co-directs the Youth eXperience (YX) Lab at the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland. Tammy’s work focuses on designing technology (e.g., social media, mobile apps, e-textiles, community displays) to support life-relevant learning where learners, particularly those from underrepresented groups in science, engage in science in the context of achieving personally relevant goals. She seeks to understand ways such learning environments and technologies support scientific disposition development. Tammy’s work is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Studies, and Google.