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NASA EXPLORER INSTITUTE FOCUS GROUP

Brad McLain

"NASA Listens to the Four Corners" Responding to a request from NASA's Informal Education Group, the Space Science Institute proposed for and won an award to assess the needs and challenges of informal educators in the 4-Corners region of the United States as they relate to NASA’s informal education efforts. The 4-Corners region includes rural and under served areas of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah and includes significant Native American and Latino communities. As such, it presents an excellent opportunity for NASA to investigate the special needs of smaller museums and the educators they work with in culturally diverse and rural communities. The results of this focus group apply to the 4-Corners region specifically, but will serve to inform efforts in other similar regions across the nation. We focused on three groups who interact closely in their educational efforts: museums, formal educators, and leaders of informal community and after school groups. From experience, we asserted that any informal programming must recognize and acknowledge how these groups interact in order to be effective, relevant, and successful. This is especially true for small, under funded, rural communities where such groups often need to share resources and opportunities in order to provide quality educational experiences for their young people. This project was comprised of a 3-phase plan: A pre-assessment of informal and formal educators in the 4-Corners to reveal existing ideas, attitudes, challenges, and experiences with NASA programming A focus group workshop in Albuquerque to include 4-Corners museum educators and 4-Corners K-12 formal educators, to address key questions and generate specific recommendations and guidelines for NASA informal programming An on-line survey of the informal community and after school groups in the 4-Corners with which the workshop participants work  Our plan was also to initiate a mutually respectful 2-way dialogue between NASA and the 4-Corners communities in order to establish a true collaborative interaction which will hopefully continue beyond this activity.  To this end, we created an on-going networked community of focus group attendees with which NASA and SSI can readily interact. The results and final report for this project will be included with those of other focus groups around the country and debut in New York City in March 2005.