A Global Partnership

Background

GSEE was conceived during the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Institute for Complex Matter [ICAM] at the University of Cambridge. This ICAM-initiated global science initiative is an experiment in science education—to see whether by sharing information and working together on major initiatives, a group of leading educational institutions, scientific societies, science museums, corporations, and individuals can accomplish far more than they can by working separately. Its goals are to inspire more working scientists to become engaged in informal science education at every stage in their careers, and to give them the tools and guidance to do so effectively.

During the past year, the number of GSEE Founding Partners has expanded significantly, with the AAAS, the American Association of Physics Teachers, American Institute of Physics, Argonne National Laboratory, the National Academy of Sciences, the Field Museum, the Koshland Museum, Northwestern University, MIT, and Fermilab joining ICAM and seventeen ICAM branches in becoming Founding Partners.

A current list of its Founding Partners and a brief description of its initial activities are given below.

In 2013, GSEE is convening two national Founding Summits, GSEE/Chicago and GSEE/Kyoto, to review progress on local and national scalable experiments in engagement, develop local and regional consortia of engaged scientists, explore potential synergies and connections with national scientific organizations, plan exploratory workshops on Experiments in Engagement, discuss the creation of an on-line scholarly journal, “Experiments in Engagement” and develop venues for making the best practices of its GSEE partners readily available to the global educational community.

GSEE Strategy and Plans

GSEE seeks to enhance the effectiveness and number of engaged scientists through:

Community building—work individually and collectively to identify and coalesce the community of scientists for whom outreach and public engagement are significant parts of their professional activity

Culture change—use our own influence and encourage our colleagues and the institutions and organizations of which we are part to join us in changing the academic culture so that outreach and engagement become valued and respected activities for faculty, and by extension, for post docs, grad students, and undergrads

Collaboration—continuing to identify, develop, and communicate effective ways to work with teachers and informal science educators

Convening power—use the convening power of our individual institutions, groups and networks to enhance community building and culture change and to improve and increase our collaborative activities

It will focus on scalable concepts and practices and realistic assessment protocols, while helping engaged scientists communicate and collaborate with formal and informal science educators across traditional boundaries; it will form local and regional consortia to further these goals, acting locally, but thinking globally

Founding Partners

Building on a base of ICAM branches, with ICAM playing a catalytic role, GSEE is in the process of expanding the group of Founding Partners listed below to include other major universities, honorary and professional societies, leading science museums, media leaders, corporations, citizen-science organizations, and other “grassroots” groups.

• The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM)
• American Association of the Advancement of Science
• American Association of Physics Teachers
• American Physical Society
• Argonne National Laboratory
• FermiLab
• Field Museum
• IntelBioMat
• Koshland Museum
• Kyoto University
• LabRats Science Education Program
• MIT
• National Academy of Sciences
• National High Magnetic Field Laboratory/FSU
• Northwestern University
• Paris ICAM Consortium [Triangle de Paris]
• Rutgers University
• Sabanci University (Istanbul)
• Santa Fe Institute
• UK Consortium (Cambridge University, the Scottish University Physics Alliance)
• University of Buenos Aires
• University of California, Davis
• University of California, San Diego
• University of Chicago
• University of Colorado, Boulder
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Utrecht
• Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center
• Zhejiang University (ZJU), Hangzhou

Founding Summits

The University of Chicago, the National Academy of Sciences, ArgonneNational Laboratory, and the American Institute of Physics have joined ICAM in playing a lead role in organizing a US GSEE Founding Summit, GSEE/Chicago. Co-chaired by David Pines and Tom Rosenbaum, it will take place from May 9-11, 2013, on the Chicago campus.

It will be followed by GSEE/Kyoto, an Asian GSEE Founding Summit that will be held on the Kyoto University campus from October 20-23, 2013 and is co-chaired by Prof. Kazuo Nishimura, Kyoto University and David Pines, and supported by Kyoto University, ICAM, and the NAS; Prof. Akito Arima, President-Emeritus of the University of Tokyo and a former Japanese Minister of Education, chairs an illustrious Board of Advisors for GSEE/Kyoto that includes two Nobel Laureates, the leaders of Riken and the Japan Science and Technology Agency, and two former Presidents of Kyoto University.