Visions of Science (VoS)
Dr. Eugenia Duodu The first of the two women who visited us was Eugenia Duodu, Chief Executive Officer of VoS. Eugenia started working at VoS as a volunteer while earning her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Toronto, and after graduation ended up taking over the whole organization. | Hamna Awan The second woman was Hamna Awan, Program & Communications Coordinator. Hamna also started at VoS as a volunteer in 2014, and she holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Education from the University of Toronto. |
Eugenia explained that the key to increasing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) engagement among students requires three things: Start early, Foster interest, and Enhance awareness. But when it comes to students from low-income areas, they face a lot of barriers. These barriers include:
-Negative perceptions of students from low-income areas
-Limited financial capacity
-Limited access to opportunities
Taken together, these barriers result in persistent underachievement and underrepresentation of youth from low-income areas in STEM.
Making changes in formal learning environments (i.e., schools) to increase STEM opportunities for low-income students can be difficult since that requires changes on a provincial or federal level to the school curriculum. Thus, Visions of Science works to create informal learning opportunities for low-income students in three ways.
Community STEM clubs
From October to April each year, VoS runs weekly STEM get-togethers in each Toronto-based community where they’ve established a club. Club activities involve curriculum and experiments VoS developed, and these activities change year-to-year as VoS develops new ideas and club members voice opinions on what topics they wish to learn more about.
These clubs are for students grades 3 to 8. However, Eugenia said that many of their students wanted to stay involved after reaching high school, so VoS started its second informal learning opportunity: STEM Community Leaders.
STEM Community Leaders
STEM Community Leaders are students grades 8 to 12, who have aged out of the VoS club program but still want to stay involved. Instead of doing the curriculum and experiments, the students are now the ones running the curriculum and experiments! The STEM Community Leaders officially started in summer 2017, and Eugenia says it is a great help for VoS since there are only nine full-time staff at VoS and the community STEM clubs rely on volunteers to run them. Having students who went through the club take over the club activities not only ensures the clubs will continue, but it strengthens each club’s kinship since the community members themselves are the ones driven to keep the club alive.
Summer Learning Camps
Last summer, VoS held their first 7-week summer term with 19 students from nine of their communities. Eugenia said the experience was crazy but amazing, since VoS was creating the curriculum as they went, depending on which of their community partners were willing to host events (like the Ripley Aquarium giving the students a behind-the-scenes tour).
One of the most fortuitous happenings during the summer was when the University of Toronto discovered they had leftover funding from the Da Vinci Engineering Enrichment Program (DEEP). DEEP is a summer opportunity for high school students to take courses in a variety of engineering, technology, business and science disciplines. However, because of its price, usually only high-income students can participate. But since the University had leftover funding, they hosted the VoS students for free, and even held a banquet for the VoS students’ families at the end of the course!
While these are the current informal learning opportunities that VoS offers, Eugenia and Hamna said they are working toward a fourth opportunity: In-School Enrichment.
In-School Enrichment
Since a lot of the VoS-developed experiments complement curriculum taught in local schools, Eugenia said VoS hopes to work with teachers to incorporate the activities as supplemental material in the classrooms. So far, VoS has only worked with one teacher to see how such a program might perform, and discovered it will require a lot more planning than they anticipated. As such, they are not currently able to work with any more teachers, but Eugenia said VoS hopes to begin rolling out this initiative in the next few years.
Funding a nonprofit How does VoS fund all these opportunities? Three words: grants, grants, and more grants. But luckily for VoS, Eugenia has a lot of experience with grant writing. When Eugenia was 18, she worked with the Toronto Arts Review to help them review grants, and ever since then she’s been reviewing and writing grants in different capacities. As a PhD student, she would write the grants for funding her lab, and for extra money she would help small nonprofits write grants as well. While she was still a PhD student, Eugenia got VoS the status of ‘charitable,’ which means they could now apply for nonprofit grants. | Eugenia talks about her experiences writing and reviewing grant applications during our lecture March 26. |
One rule Eugenia makes very clear with any funding organization or partner is that the VoS students will not be used as token minorities in any public communication campaigns. Not only are the students low-income, but many of them are from racial and ethnic minority groups, and Eugenia said that funding these informal STEM opportunities cannot come at the cost of the students being used in “Look, we funded disadvantaged kids!” campaigns that many organizations (in)advertently promote their image as social do-gooders. In class, Eugenia showed us two promotional videos VoS created that demonstrate the work they do while avoiding tokenism:
Eugenia talked about one time they went to work with a group of students only to discover half of the kids did not get breakfast that morning. Before starting, the VoS staff had to run to the local store for some cookies, so the kids would have energy to focus on the STEM activities. People who are not from these low-income communities do not appreciate just how steep the climb is to tackle all the challenges preventing students from accessing STEM opportunities, Eugenia explained. Even she, who came from a low-income community, was shocked by some of the communities they’ve worked in, since it showed her that the community she came from wasn’t representative of just how challenged a low-income community can be. But Eugenia hopes that the more they work with these communities, the more they will learn about how to tackle these challenges, and the better STEM opportunities they will be able to offer.
Understanding the delivery of a Canadian-based after-school STEM program: a case study
After I finish my last few papers for the semester, I’ll share them with you on here. In other news, only 20 days until I leave for Switzerland to start my internship at CERN! 😊