What is it?
NExUS-MS is a multi-dimensional community-based research and education project led by Dr. Maria Wallace dedicated to taking seriously the capacity of ‘in-between places’. Bringing together informal science educators, aspiring and current K12 teachers, youth, graduate students from diverse fields, alongside a community-engaged approach to evaluation and research---this group is collectively working to build a regional model for exploring the compounding power of intergenerational exchange to accomplish two cross-cutting objectives:
These objectives are further contextualized within the groups' efforts to strategically respond to pervasive, often deeply interconnected, issues of inequity in science education. By fusing research and practice together, NExUS-MS activities construct new theories and tools to examine how shifting away from schools to alternative cultural centers (e.g., Informal Science Institutions, ISIs), hold unique potential to render diverse interpretations of decolonizing work visible within science education
- Objective 1: Advance Mississippi postsecondary science education while strengthening Mississippi K12 pre-service teacher recruitment and education
- Objective 2: Study the diverse impacts of research-practice partnerships with informal science institutions (ISI) to develop a model University-ISI partnership.
These objectives are further contextualized within the groups' efforts to strategically respond to pervasive, often deeply interconnected, issues of inequity in science education. By fusing research and practice together, NExUS-MS activities construct new theories and tools to examine how shifting away from schools to alternative cultural centers (e.g., Informal Science Institutions, ISIs), hold unique potential to render diverse interpretations of decolonizing work visible within science education
Research Approach:
A Double(d) Science
Taking inspiration from Patti Lather's text, Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science, Dr. Wallace and her research community explore several different kinds of dilemmas that sit at the intersection of formal and informal science education. The questions that emerge in these in-between spaces are the place where regimes of power/knowledge manifest, thus are worthy of care-full attention.
- Applied Research: Practical investigation to address immediate challenges in science education.
- Theoretical Research: Developing new frameworks and models for understanding science education.
- Fundamental Research: Exploring basic principles and theories that (can) underpin science education.
When engaging topics, questions, and/or inquiry in the margins, our team believes it is especially important to know the dominant landscape contextualizing the possibilities for maneuvering otherwise. As such, NExUS-MS community members are encouraged to utilize and study a variety of techniques to explore complex questions shaping science education. NExUS-MS is a community of thinkers and doers driven by the underlying assumption that double(d) moves (Lather, 2009) are key to progress. We do the dominant narrative and we trouble it. We live in the both/ands.