By Jamie Bell
The Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) is grateful to everyone who engaged so enthusiastically with the interactive timeline of the history of the science museum and science center field at the ASTC 2023 Annual Conference in Charlotte this past October! In my last blog post on ASTC’s 50th anniversary activities, I shared some reflections on the eve of that conference about how attending field-wide convenings often sparks career-long connections and inspiration. The timeline activity at the 2023 conference provided a unique opportunity for attendees to realize this potential in a site-specific and collaborative way—around an expansive physical timeline of the field’s history from the 1600s to the present, and beyond.
With input from colleagues at ASTC and the science center and museum community writ large, we co-designed a template populated with selected milestones and themes that drew on existing knowledge and literature about the field’s rich history. Conference attendees contributed hundreds of sticky notes with their votes for important dates and moments, took photos with their colleagues, and engaged in lively conversations about the institutions, people, and events that have been influential in their own learning and career journeys. The range of organizations represented—from those with deep roots back to the 1800s to new ones that have opened in the past year-reflects a landscape of science centers and museums that are continually reinventing themselves and sharing new approaches to engaging with audiences, communities, and each other.
The timeline “stickies” revealed the high value that conference attendees put on the collaborations and networks in which they and their organizations have participated. Initiatives like YouthALIVE! and the Noyce Leadership Institute were long term investments in professional development that have had lasting results and impact on participants and their organizations. Partnerships like the Traveling and Environmental exhibit collaboratives have nurtured the culture of cooperation that defines our field. Attendees’ contributions to the timeline also reflected the importance that our field increasingly places on how organizations and individuals are responding to underrepresentation, systemic racism, colonialism, and social justice issues. Long-running initiatives like ASTC’s Diversity and Leadership Development Fellowship Program (reimagined in 2023 as the ASTC New Leaders Fellowship Program), as well as more recent coalitions like #MuseumsRespondToFerguson were among the efforts that attendees identified as contributing to the awareness, knowledge, and actions needed for creating more welcoming and inclusive environments and experiences for professionals and the communities that they serve.
Perhaps the most generative aspects of the timeline were the memories that it evoked and conversations that it catalyzed. For some, the timeline prompted individuals to reflect on of how they got started at their home institution, or of their initiation into the larger field, while for others it surfaced a museum or science center experience that sparked their interest in STEM in the first place. Evaluator and researcher Elsa Bailey recalled driving five hours from the Miami Museum of Science (now the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science) to Orlando and sleeping on the floor of a colleague’s hotel room to participate in her first ASTC conference in 1990. Sciencenter founding director Charlie Trautmann shared the memory of his elementary school band playing at the 1964 World’s Fair that launched the New York Hall of Science, where the Probability Curve exhibit in the Mathematica exhibition was the beginning of his fascination with the “M” in STEM.
In the area adjacent to the timeline, I curated a collection of ASTC publications from over the years, along with forward-looking volumes such as Amplifying Informal Science Learning: Rethinking Research, Design and Engagement and recently appointed MIT Museum director Michael John Gorman’s Idea Colliders: The Future of Science Museums. This physical “bibliography” provided more food for reflection and thought about how the field has been evolving, how it has been documented, how knowledge is and will be shared in the future.
The timeline, along with the other ASTC50 activities to which members have contributed have provided a rich collection of stories, data, and milestones that help make the case for the importance of our field in the larger STEM education and engagement ecosystems. We look forward to sharing how these will inform future documentation and advocacy efforts, and how you can continue to be involved in telling the rich stories of our field’s impact. If you have photos that you took of the timeline and/or yourself and your colleagues around it, please send them to us at astc50@astc.org.