"It isn’t so much how NSF thinks about innovation. Innovation is deeply embedded in the scientific process, and NSF is a scientific foundation designed to support this process."
"We need leadership that is willing to take risks. Innovation requires doing something that hasn't been proven, practiced, accepted, or perhaps even acknowledged before."
"The way I see it, NSF proposal development is right at the intersection of research and practice. Innovative informal science projects are seeded with a question and then project development takes a systematic approach to thinking about it, analyzing it, and understanding how you're going to address it."
Interview by Catherine Eberbach :: Winter 2008
Eberbach: You've successfully coached many organizations through the development of innovative, national-level projects. This provides a rare perspective of the informal learning community. Given that perspective and the knowledge base that you have, what do you think about the themes in the current (2006) Informal Science Education (ISE) guidelines from NSF? In particular, innovation seems to be an important idea.
Marcussen: Innovation should spark creativity, inspiration, and change. In our field of informal learning, innovation is key to engaging the public in science and technology in new ways, with deeper experiences and more meaningful outcomes above and beyond our previous efforts. I’m reminded of Kathy McLean’s observation that real innovation comes only sporadically and in very small doses. One key message that I’d want to convey is that innovation does not have to be a tall order. Our field is still so new and still developing. There are so many challenges and opportunities that any step you make toward improving practice, no matter how small an increment, will contribute to advancing the field.
Eberbach: So, how do these little steps add up to a bigger leap forward?
Marcussen: To strategically impact the field, we have to share and disseminate the outcomes of innovative efforts so that all who are interested can learn from what we're doing. This will probably mean using more electronic media and creating new formats so that the questions, methods, and results of projects are more easily accessible.
Other steps include addressing a particular gap in the field, which you should demonstrate through a review of existing research, and identifying a subset of the field that are potential users and consumers of your ideas. And of course, you should play to your institutional strengths and those of the project partners. Be as creative and free-thinking as you want to be, but do it within a scope of what's really achievable for you.
Eberbach: What do you think NSF thinks about innovation?
Marcussen: They're waiting for good ideas! There is no right way or wrong way to propose innovative ideas to NSF. There are no templates or rules. When you think about it, the criteria in the current (2006) ISE guidelines are quite broad and flexible. I especially give the ISE program credit for addressing the issue of risk right in the guidelines, as risk is a factor in any innovative endeavor. A creative principal investigator (PI) can say to their administration, "See, the federal government will pay for innovation. They're telling us to take risks. It's right here in the guidelines!" And sometimes that's what PIs have to do. If an administrator is worried about how they're going to pay staff on Friday, taking risks with a new innovative project is not on their agenda. But you must take risks and be innovative in order to attract an audience, to serve that audience better, and to position yourself within the national arena of meaningful informal science education. And that brings in more dollars!
I think we should be somewhat cautious, however, about laying so much responsibility for innovation on the ISE guidelines. It isn’t so much how NSF thinks about innovation. Innovation is deeply embedded in the scientific process, and NSF is a scientific foundation designed to support this process. What we must also remember is that our proposals to NSF are judged by our peers—the staff of museums, science centers, media companies, universities, community groups, and other institutions. In order for innovative proposals to be funded by NSF, our peers must embrace the notion of innovation, recognize it when it appears, and acknowledge the risks associated with these endeavors.
Eberbach: I imagine that you have a lot of knowledge about the proposal reviews that come back. What do you think the review panelists see as innovation?
Marcussen: I think review panelists really struggle with two things. On the one hand, panelists must deliver a safe and solid investment of public funds. It's smart for panelists to prioritize this aspect, because that's really their charge. However, another responsibility is to look at the risk takers, the true innovators, as risk is a natural part of the scientific process which NSF supports. For the first time in ISE history, risk is a proposal criterion that is actually stated in the guidelines. However, in other scientific arenas, researchers address risks more assertively than we are accustomed to in the ISE field. For example, if the linear accelerator breaks down, how will a nuclear scientist continue her research? Scientists regularly anticipate risks with staffing, methodology, instrumentation, results, and many other variables. Our field of informal learning doesn't yet look at risks in this way. But what if we have misinterpreted audience needs and interests? What if a promised deliverable fails to deliver? And what if we get a different outcome than expected? What we do with this information, and how we make course corrections in order to achieve our dual mission of impacting public science literacy and advancing the informal science education field will be the real added value of taking greater risks.
I think this is what panelists wrestle with: Do we go the safe route or do we fund a risk-taking venture? I would hope that panelists are more likely to look at the risk takers, the innovators, and the explorers. So you must anticipate the same risks they may be concerned about and assure them that you have developed ideas about how you are going to mitigate and address those risks. At the same time, recognize that there are risks that you cannot anticipate, such as the need to suddenly replace a major project partner, or to address unexpected changes to exhibition design that were identified as a result of prototyping. Some important discoveries in the history of science have been made from unexpected outcomes of an experiment. In my opinion, we should embrace the risks rather than falsely reduce them.
When developing an NSF-ISE proposal, it's important to dare to step out of your comfort zone, look for opportunities, seize new ideas and run with them, but do so in a measured way—one small step at a time. I would encourage everyone to dare to take risk, yet meticulously plan your proposal so that you have a good chance of succeeding. If any readers have examples of how they have mitigated a specific risk, I urge them to post them here so that others can learn from their experience. I also challenge any previous panel reviewers reading this interview to give some more insight into how they balance fiscal responsibility with risk-taking. I think this would be of extreme interest to the field.
Eberbach: Where do you think innovation is coming from in our field?
Marcussen: It's coming from smart, creative, dedicated people that have nuggets of genius and they need to be allowed to freely experiment with their ideas. We need to entice more creative people into the field. I sense that our field may not be known for creativity to the degree that it can be, and we need more creative people. First, in order to do that, we must create an infrastructure in which innovation can occur and thrive. We need leadership that is willing to take risks. Innovation requires doing something that hasn't been proven, practiced, accepted, or perhaps even acknowledged before. And right now the museum community avoids risk because of worries about finances, staffing, and institutional identity. Look at the innovators, look at Silicon Valley and to other cultures of innovation to inspire how you could do that in your own institution. A more open and conversational culture is a necessity for innovation to occur.
Collaboration is another aspect of the project development that can foster innovation. It's challenging to think about collaboration because we are all intrinsically competitive. We are all competing for NSF funding and you have to know what the competition is. At the same time, our field demands cooperation. You may be a content expert, someone else a design expert, and still someone else an audience expert. None of us are expert in all areas so you need to cooperate. Most importantly, you need key partners with a vested interest and mutual—though not necessarily the same—goals. Together you can develop a project with potential impacts that either partner could not achieve alone. Identify collaborators so that your project has a chance of succeeding because you've put all the right expertise in place. This lays a solid foundation for innovation to grow.
I recognize that collaborations are inherently difficult, primarily because they ofteninvolve the merging of different institutional cultures. However, there are models to look at and a lot of tough lessons that have been learned the hard way. I personally found Beverly Sheppard’s “Meaningful Collaboration” to have been highly valuable to my thinking about collaboration. I think the NSF-funded TEAMS Exhibit Collaborative is also an excellent model, especially because the authors are extremely forthcoming about how their process worked and why. They drilled down into the key aspects of leadership, communication, and evaluation that can influence success or failure in a museum collaborative.
Eberbach: Can you give a few examples of NSF-funded projects that successfully demonstrate innovation from your perspective?
Marcussen: Well, there are a lot of exemplary projects out there, and I encourage people to peruse the searchable NSF Awards Database. One project is Maya Skies—a full dome planetarium show on Maya archaeoastronomy being developed by Chabot Space & Science Center, Lodestar Astronomy Center, and the Institute for Learning Innovation. The show will be the first of its kind to integrate fisheye immersion film techniques and 3D laser scanning with unparalleled accuracy and realism. Evaluation will look at how inserting the learner into this virtual, but highly realistic environment will encourage personal relevance and thereby, in theory, foster learning. So, the innovation here is the creative use of emerging technologies to enhance science learning.
Cosmic Serpent is a project that demonstrates innovation on multiple scales. This collaboration among the U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory and the Indigenous Education Institute is designed to increase the capacity of museum practitioners to bridge native and western science in their exhibitions and programs. The project will explore commonalities between the two worldviews and how each informs the practice of science. Project evaluation is innovative as well. The evaluation plan designed by the Institute for Learning Innovation and Shelly Valdez of Native Pathways incorporates a new approach toward evaluation that embraces joint development and analysis by team 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.
Eberbach: There are challenges in taking risks in an NSF project or in any new project. How do you build an argument for the potential funder while also building support for the agenda within your institution?
Marcussen: Developing a large national project must be designed with the freedom to innovate and with the support of institutional leadership. Complicating this process are institutional priorities, the funding scene at any particular institution, and the positioning of the institution within its community. Projects must be organic, in other words, mission-driven and based on your institutional strengths and priorities. Showing a funder that you have the capacity to take risks with an innovative project of national significance requires that you develop the project within these parameters. As long as your project falls within this safety net, funders will be more likely to invest in your risk-taking venture.
Eberbach: In your experience, what has been the reaction among informal science education practitioners to NSF's new emphasis on innovation and strategic impact?
Marcussen: We keep coming back to the ISE guidelines, but that's the world in which I live. It requires a significant investment of people, intellect, and other resources to develop large-scale national projects, and some people in our field frankly are wary of the NSF requirements.
The way I see it, the current guidelines anticipated a faster rate of change. In this case, I think NSF moved very abruptly, and many in the field were unprepared. We always had new ideas. We always did literature reviews. We always did state-of-the-art reviews of similar projects. And we always stated a vision for how the impacts of our project could potentially help others. But the current guidelines have pushed us to articulate these areas in a more substantive way. There’s a danger that some in the field may not come to the table because they perceive that they lack the resources or the background to fully participate at this accelerated pace.
However, we must change this mindset. ISE guidelines are not created in some vacuum, but in response to the continuing evolution of our field. For example, ISE has always invested in learning research and theory. However, only when the field had developed a sufficient body of this knowledge could the demand for further learning research become more pronounced. In fact, the program’s new position within the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings demonstrates a significant shift in direction. So, the more that projects fuel the fire and the more frequently we share and build on each other's knowledge and experiences, the more the field evolves. We answer some questions and challenges along the way, and others arise. The ISE guidelines evolve in direct response to how our field advances. And as projects become more innovative, NSF will continue to raise the bar, as it should.
Eberbach: That abruptness seems to have resulted in a period for figuring out how to manage these changes. What has helped the people that you've worked with to think and work through this?
Marcussen: First and foremost, NSF has funded several recent projects designed exactly to address this gap. The availability of project evaluation reports and a searchable literature base on www.InformalScience.org is a prime example. Proposers can now access this information in order to build innovation into their new projects. The response from the field is evident, for example, site usage goes way up in the months prior to NSF ISE proposal deadlines. This suggests that the field is more actively benchmarking their projects in order to demonstrate potential impact on public audiences and on the field. The newly funded Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) will advance and improve practice through professional development, a sharable knowledge base, and other forms of support. ExhibitFiles is another NSF-funded project that allows exhibition developers to share practices. I expect that a greater emphasis on proposers’ ability to access, glean from, and add to these and other resources will build our knowledge base, infrastructure, and capacity.
Eberbach: What other practical advice would you offer to those who are now thinking of developing a national project?
Marcussen: First, look closely at each of the three thematic areas of impact, innovation, and collaboration. Use a whiteboard, sit down with your team, and look at the questions you can ask for each area that support your proposed project. I am talking about lofty, drive-the-field questions that are innovative. For each question, do a complete review of the field: Where does the field stand on this issue? What does the literature demonstrate? What other similar projects have been developed, and what were the outcomes of those efforts? For example, one question might be: "What if we increased the confidence of museum practitioners in presenting astronomy programs to public audiences?" Imagine how different the museum experience might be for visiting families. But what do we know about practitioners and how comfortable they are presenting astronomy? What are the barriers, and what ideas do practitioners have for improving their practice? What do we know about how the public learns about astronomy? So, I break it down into a tree of bigger questions, followed by smaller, more tangible questions. Then I begin to work from the bottom to develop a larger overarching question that will drive the project. But is there enough innovation there to move forward? If you find gaps in that bottom-detail level, look back at the field and look for the vantage points, the dare-to-be-different ideas you run with because it’s important and hasn't been done before.
The way I see it, NSF proposal development is right at the intersection of research and practice. Innovative informal science projects are seeded with a question and then project development takes a systematic approach to thinking about it, analyzing it, and understanding how you're going to address it. So, use the existing knowledge base to look at prior work and the current state of the field. Then look at where you want to go. I think that the ISE guidelines are very instructional for guiding people in how to articulate where they want to go. Try to identify a leverage point whereby a project can transfer and apply previous research directly to the development of new ideas.