Photo: CEOAS grad students, partners and staff share clouds, minerals and boats with kids attending the College of Science’s Discovery Days in 2023.
In 2022, the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences formed an Outreach Community of Practice to bring together people around the college whose work included outreach and engagement, aiming to find alignment between projects and to highlight the importance of outreach overall.
Today, the community is going strong and attracts plenty of participants from outside the college as well.
“We have so much going on at the CEOAS level; the college hosts prospective students, runs the Salmon Bowl (a national ocean sciences quiz bowl for high schoolers), and we have a lot of interactions with K-12 schools and the community,” said Ryan Brown, the CEOAS outreach coordinator who was hired in 2020 and started the community of practice two years later. “Our individual PIs also have a ton of really interesting outreach and engagement happening through their grants. But what I found was that we didn’t really have a lot of cohesion between all those things.”
Brown established the group with the goal of approaching outreach and engagement in ways that prioritized the needs of the communities CEOAS serves to best share CEOAS science with the world.
“The need behind it was to build community around outreach and engagement so we could support each other, build partnerships, get a sense of what others were doing, troubleshoot and provide feedback and ideas,” she said. “The old model of outreach is, ‘I have something cool to share; here it is!’ But the new model is more of a two-way relationship where you find out what people are interested in, and you work with them as equal partners.”
The group defines “outreach and engagement” as any learning about CEOAS sciences that takes place outside of the traditional college classroom or laboratory environment. Brown often fields calls from K-12 educators who want to visit campus or have scientists come talk to their students, and CEOAS grad students frequently represent the college at science nights held at elementary and middle schools around the Willamette Valley.
CEOAS also works closely with OSU Precollege Programs, which aims to increase youth access to higher education through camps and activities that help them envision themselves on a college campus, particularly for students from historically marginalized communities.
Thanks to the college’s many partnerships, folks from Extension, Precollege Programs, the STEM Research Center and other OSU units have also joined the community of practice to brainstorm ways to improve engagement and outreach.
“At CEOAS, we have the activities and the scientists, though we might have limited capacity to build new programs,” Brown explained. “But we sure as heck have the ability to get out there with these community partnerships that are already established and strong.”
The community of practice gets together one Friday per month for unstructured meetings — always with coffee and donuts — that promote open discussions about whatever the group needs to address that day.
Outside of the monthly meetings, the group also offers professional development sessions on specific types of outreach and storytelling. Recordings of past sessions are available on their website, and anyone interested in future topics like scientific illustration and web accessibility in STEM can email Brown to join the listserv.
The group has no expectations for attendees to take on projects or complete specific tasks, Brown said.
“It’s just a really wonderful venue in which we can kind of air anything that needs to be talked about, related to outreach and engagement in our college and with our partners,” they said. “I think it’s really effective for building community. If other colleges have similar programs, we can get connected and build community on a bigger level.”
The Outreach Community of Practice’s next meeting is 9 a.m. Friday, Feb. 14, in the Wecoma room in the CEOAS Administration Building for anyone who wants to join.
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