The Co-Created Public Engagement with Science (CC-PES) project, an Innovations in Development project, supported by NSF’s Advancing Informal Science Learning Program, built capacity among informal science education (ISE) institutions with respect to developing, evaluating, and implementing co-created public engagement with science (CC-PES) activities in partnership with civic, community, and scientist partners. The project was led by the Museum of Science, Boston (MOS). Public Engagement with Science (PES) is defined in this context as ISE activities that facilitate multi-directional learning among community, research, and civic partners. The primary focus for this project was the co-created nature of the development of dialogue-based programs to address socio-scientific issues: participation of public and civic representatives along with scientists and informal educators in each stage of the CC-PES process, including topic selection, decision-making, and taking action. The project developed, tested, refined, and disseminated a model for CC-PES that was based upon three fundamental elements of public participation drawn from the public engagement literature: agenda-setting, decision-making, and policy-forming/taking action.

Intellectual Merit:

The project was designed to have a strategic impact on the way that ISE institutions choose topics for engagement and implement PES programming. In the first two phases of the project, the CC-PES model, materials, and methods were piloted in three US communities (Boston, MA, Portland, OR, and Durham, NC) with civic, community and research partners. the local ISE institutions. Community representatives, civic officials and scientists worked with ISE partners at each site to first select issues for engagement and then worked to identify socio-scientific questions for deliberation. The co-creation teams in Boston (comprised of partners from the City of Boston, the Museum of Science, and Urban College of Boston) and Durham (comprised of the Museum of Life and Science, Families Moving Forward, and the city of Durham) chose to address equitable housing as their PES topic. The co-creation team in Portland, OR, which was collaboratively developed by youth at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, the Metro Regional Government, and Momentum Alliance, selected the issue of corporate responsibility for addressing climate change.

Evaluation mentors from the Museum of Science worked with each of the co-creation teams, supporting the ISE educators and their community, civic, and scientist partners as they collected data to improve the materials and adapted and refine the CC-PES model in ways that met their team’s objectives. Each of the project teams each had to pivot from their original plans for PES formats in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but all of the teams hosted multiple in-person and virtual events that comprised the agenda-setting, decision-making, and action phases of the CC-PES framework.

The third phase of the project supported a cohort of nine previously unengaged institutions from around the United States who each adapted the CC-PES model with partners in their own communities. The co-created topics included food security, gun violence, air quality, local economic development, screening for colon cancer, climate resilience, equitable STEM education access, and community land use. Each team designed unique PES activities for the topic selection, decision-making, and action steps, refining their activities based upon formative evaluation findings. A Co-Created PES Summit event in June 2023 brought together the members of this national cohort model to share their learning points with one another and to inform products to inform future co-creation work in the field.

Summative evaluation assessed changes in knowledge, awareness, skills, and capacity among ISE partners and awareness, interest, and impacts on civic, and scientist partners with regard to participation in these co-created PES activities. These findings were used to inform dissemination efforts for the ISE field.

Broader Impacts:

The culminating project year disseminated learning from these project activities to the broader ISE field, and subsequently applied the CC-PES framework to its yearlong institutional spotlight for 2024, the Year of the Earthshot, including a forum co-created with the US Department of Energy. The project team members are now applying the learning from these efforts to MOS’s Public Science Common initiative, a strategic direction that focuses future current science programming around community-generated priorities and works to amplify the content from co-created PES across MOS’s educational channels to engage millions.

The outcomes from the CC-PES project have been shared through national-scale PES organizations including the Association of Science and Technology Centers, the National Informal STEM Education Network, and the American Advancement for the Advancement of Science. The project has advanced knowledge in the ISE field by creating, testing and refining a model for co-creation that has be applied in varied ISE settings to respond to priorities of community concern. This has worked to position ISE institutions as community hubs that can be instrumental in civic problem-solving. Broader implementation of CC-PES, and future innovations in this realm, will help members of the public discover ways to engage with scientists and civic partners and thereby enrich socio-scientific decision-making.

Last Modified: 12/09/2024
Modified by: David Sittenfeld