Association of Science and Technologies Centers
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What first steps can you take to welcome Communities of Color to your exhibits and programs? How do you sustain these commitments during budget cuts? Educators from the Saint Louis Science Center (Missouri), the Detroit Zoo (Michigan), and GrowingGreat (Los Angeles, California)—all at different points in their careers—discuss how their organizations work to build relationships with community partners in their cities. Please email questions you would like us to discuss to Jennifer Jovanovic of GrowingGreat.

Webinar participants received our new science, garden and nutrition Reading Club Videos with Recommended Book List featuring Communities of Color, and our series of 20 Hands-on Science Activities and Videos, in Spanish and English.

All presenters are members of the GrowingGreat Veggies & Fruits national STEM education program, sponsored by Del Monte Foods, Inc. This is a first in a series of three webinars.

Webinar Recording
About the Presenters

Lauren Patrick, Science Educator, Saint Louis Science Center. Lauren Patrick serves as a Senior Educator for the Saint Louis Science Center; she supervises the Youth Exploring Science (YES) Agribusiness component, manages the Summertime Science Program, and facilitates multiple community programs and staff trainings. She has dedicated her career to teaching and empowering children from diverse backgrounds. In addition to being a senior educator, Lauren is also a certified chemistry teacher for Parkway School District. Lauren holds a B.A. in chemistry (honors), a minor degree in mathematics (honors), and a M.Ed. in secondary education from UMSL. Lauren has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to diversity in STEM.

Claire Lannoye-Hall, Curator of Education, Detroit Zoo. Claire builds and facilitates partnerships with local school districts and helps thousands of students and teachers connect their classrooms to real-world learning experiences.  She also works with teachers through carefully planned and implemented professional development workshops to take their science curriculum a step further. Claire is an advocate for making science accessible: she has developed camps, early learner programs, afterschool programming, and teen volunteer opportunities that do just that.

Diane Miller, Chief Program Officer, Detroit Zoo. Diane is responsible for leadership, strategy development, management, and oversight of the Education Division. She has devoted her career to developing and implementing programs that impact issues of diversity and inclusion. Before her move to Detroit in 2013, she was the Chief Education Outreach Officer at the Saint Louis Science Center where she founded the YES (Youth Exploring Science) Teen Program, and prior to that, the Director of Community Outreach at the California Science Center where she was a leader in the national YouthALIVE! Program.

Jennifer Jovanovic, Executive Director, GrowingGreat. Before coming to GrowingGreat—a Los Angeles nonprofit with the mission to empower children to make healthy food choices—in 2014, Jennifer spent seven years as the Saint Louis Science Center’s Director of Science Beyond the Boundaries, a network in which 249 science centers and museums share best practices in hands-on education with their colleagues around the world. She is the former Executive Director of the Children’s Museum at La Habra where, under her leadership, they won the national Association of Children’s Museums’ Promising Practice Award.

Maxwell Watson, STEM Educator, GrowingGreat. Maxwell’s love of cooking and enthusiasm for supporting nonprofits brought him to GrowingGreat in 2019. He has assisted in teaching the GrowingGreat Chefs cooking and nutrition education program for teens and garden/nutrition classes at Maple Primary Center, as well as at KIPP Empower Academy’s after-school program. As a result of distance learning, Maxwell has put his filmmaking and editing skills to good use by weaving comedy and special effects into GrowingGreat’s STEM lessons and recipe demonstrations and is a beloved contributor to GrowingGreat’s PenPal Club.

The next webinar in this series will be held Wednesday, March 31 at 1:00 p.m. ET. Veggie and Fruit Activities for Early Childhood: Eat Your Experiments! will feature Robin Magnum, Marbles Kids Museum; Madden Purcell, Discovery Center at Murfree Spring; and Mariah Romaninsky, Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University.

Date:
February 23, 2021
1:00 pm — 2:30 pm ET

Price: Free

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