Virtual Science Festival: Creating a Community Through a Borderless Digital World

• In Event: Roundtable Session 1
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Enabling inclusion: evidences, experiences and explorations

Proposal

The Science United Festival provides an inclusive online science fair where, despite the existence of borders, students experiencing displacement and their teachers can engage in a virtual community to celebrate their science projects while receiving feedback from refugee scientist mentors. In the Spring of 2022, 160 displaced students from twelve classes in Greece and Jordan engaged in opportunities to learn new science concepts collaboratively, with each other, and cooperatively, from each other. Participants also receive encouragement and feedback from refugee scientist mentors to help foster a love for science, grow scientific literacy, and spark an interest in science as a potential future career.

Refugee and displaced students who experience interrupted education are often excluded from education in hosting countries and have few opportunities of attending science classes, leading them to lack incentive for learning science. There are many benefits to learning science in the refugee classroom. Experiential science education is essential for refugee students because it supports the students’ problem-solving skills, new language acquisition and practices socio-emotional skills. In addition, science education also supports socio-scientific decision making and problem-solving, and is important to support genuine scientific literacy for global citizenship. Science United Festival’s provides refugee/displaced students the opportunity to present their science project to a global community at the Festival website. The festival also gives student the ability to interact and learn from other student groups with similar experience from around the world through the use of the Festival website comments feature with support from their teacher.

Engaging in learning science provides an active learning environment where students engage in activities that are relevant to the real-world. There are many features of the active learning approach used in science. These features include relevance to real-world problems, authentic solving of real-world problems, application of prior knowledge and experience to solve new problems, collaboration with others, integration with other subjects, and engaging in self-directed learning. In addition, teachers have reported that students who engage in active learning are excited about science class and often look forward to participating in the activities. Positive dispositions can be especially engendered when the activities are made personally relevant to the child. In addition to making connections to students’ experiences, the activities should be teacher-guided and student-centered and not teacher directed. The Festival encourages teachers to learn with and guide their students learning of science topics by using their interest and prior experiences.

Another challenge is that refugee/displaced students have limited access to information about future careers and professions that may one day be available to them. Students often look up to their teachers as role models and source of inspiration, yet it is not often that displaced students have contact with role models they can relate to in terms of cultural background and/or life experience. Moreover, students need to come in contact with stories of individuals who have succeeded and who they themselves identify as displaced. For the first festival in Spring of 2022, participants had the opportunity to discover the possibility of a career in science by viewing four refugee mentors’ video-stories available in English and each mentors’ native language. In addition, the refugee mentors provided written feedback and encouragement on the student projects.

Author

• Erika S Gillette, College of Mount Saint Vincent