Cosmic Serpent will serve 270 practitioners from 96 science centers/museums and tribal/cultural museums in the U.S. Southwest, West, and Northwest (eight states). Resulting museum programs will reach approximately one-half million Native and non-Native visitors during the four-year grant.
Evaluation conducted by the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI) and Native Pathways will track participant outcomes and the potential for broader sustainable impact on their institutions. The project incorporates a new approach toward evaluation, one that embraces joint interpretation of data by teams with different yet complementary evaluation approaches (informal science evaluation and indigenous evaluation), and that models the type of cross-cultural collaboration that the project itself is designed to support.
To achieve strategic impact, we will document the extent to which it is possible to present both worldviews for a balanced and two-way communication in an informal, local context (i.e., museum and native community). Results will be generalizable to other cultural bridging projects and should, through ongoing dissemination of the legacy document to museums nationally, have a meaningful impact on the way ISE providers engage minority populations to discover new ways of approaching STEM content.