Rural disaster preparedness through informal stem learning: community-identified risk & resilience

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation, Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings

Program: STEM Education (CFDA 47.076)

Award Amount: $149,549

Award Date: October 1, 2025

Performance Period: October 1, 2025 – September 30, 2026

UL Research Institutes, in partnership with Arizona Science Center and Viney Jones Library, will conduct a community-focused planning and partnership development project to enhance rural disaster preparedness through informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning. The project will identify disaster-related community risks and resilience opportunities in rural Arizona by facilitating workshops that engage organizations and community participants in identifying priority topics, conducting community mapping, and planning future collaborations. Libraries will serve as central spaces for connection and resource sharing, leveraging their role as agents of community knowledge transmission.

The project team will develop place-based, contextualized learning resources grounded in STEM thinking and safety across multiple disciplines, including ecosystems, physics, civil engineering, and land management. Utilizing a multi-level, community-driven approach, the initiative builds on existing expertise in rural STEM identity development and learning ecosystem activation while moving beyond traditional disaster protocols to emphasize mutual learning and community expertise exchange. All project activities remain flexible to prioritize STEM topics identified directly by participating community members relative to their specific disaster preparedness and resilience needs.

Abstract

Disaster risk reduction and community risk reduction are systemic ways to mitigate and manage events, such as the catastrophic natural disasters that have occurred across the US in recent years. This partnership development and planning project builds on connections and expertise among the office of research experiences & education at UL research institutes, arizona science center, and viney jones library. Together, the team will lead a community-focused planning process that identifies risk and resilience opportunities and challenges in rural areas of arizona. This approach looks beyond disaster protocols to focus on mutual learning and community transmission of knowledge and expertise through understanding the roles of informal stem learning (ISL) and ISL organizations in disaster preparedness. Several workshops will support organizations and community participants in identifying and developing priority topics, community mapping, and planning for future collaborations. Libraries will serve as spaces for, and agents of, connection and resource sharing. The project team is prepared to focus on any area of stem identified by project participants with respect to disaster-related community risks and resilience. Disaster preparedness is interdisciplinary and built on stem thinking and safety, including knowledge of ecosystems, physics, civil engineering, and land management. This approach is rooted in the office of research experiences & education's practice of building relationships with individuals and communities to create place-based, contextualized learning resources and programs for safety and sustainability. IT is also shaped by arizona science center's work on the rural activation and innovation network (rain), which focuses on the role learning ecosystems play in rural stem identity and self-efficacy. Using westoby & lathouras' (2024) multi-level approach to practice, this project will include implicate-, micro-, mezzo-, and macro-level work to describe how a constellation of actors, settings, and resources interact around informal stem learning in rural areas. This approach will both generate knowledge with respect to informal stem learning in rural areas and prepare the region for future collaborative work with respect to disaster preparedness. As such, the project has the potential to contribute a deeper understanding of the phenomenology of stem learning ecologies. In total, the project is designed to surface and value the range of interests and expertise among organizations and individuals. Through community participatory approaches, this project will call attention to the importance of community-determined priorities and definitions related disaster resilience and risks, as opposed to priorities set by external entities. The project will invite all members of a given community and geographic area to participate in the workshops. The network sampling strategy and participatory community approach will also strengthen relationships between community members, community organizations, agencies, industry, and other actors around disaster preparedness. This partnership development and planning project is funded by the advancing informal stem learning (aisl) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of stem learning in informal environments. This includes providing everyone multiple pathways for accessing and engaging in stem learning experiences. The project is also supported by the directorate for stem education (EDU) stem postdoctoral research fellowships (stem ED PRF) program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.- subawards are planned for this award.