Exploratorium
Through our Cambio year, we experienced the value of coming together in community with other science institutions—to support each other, reassert our values, and share the joy of STEM learning with the public.
Exploratorium
Annual operating budget: $20+ million
Total number of employees: 365
Annual visitorship: 794,000
**Numbers reported in 2019
About Cambio’s first cohort
Cambio’s first cohort included Children’s Discovery Museum (CDM), Exploratorium, and Explora, each of which had a longstanding commitment to community engagement, as well as strong ties and experience co-creating with their local Latinx communities. These organizations were asked to pilot and help co-develop the first version of the Cambio curriculum and a modified version of the program model. Developing a new cohort experience in partnership with these three museums reflected two important aspects of the Cambio model—that of experiential learning and co-creation.
2020: Cambio’s Pilot Year
Cambio’s first cohort year unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Museums were closed to the public while juggling local health mandates (and, eventually, operational requirements for reopening), remote work, lay-offs, and financial strain. The nation also grappled with George Floyd’s murder, as individuals and institutions navigated their commitment to and communication about diversity, inclusion, and equity.
Exploratorium had evolved decades of signature events for its Latinx community before Cambio began in 2020. It had also hosted GENIAL (Generating Engagement and New Initiatives for All Latinos)–a summit dedicated to identifying needs and opportunities for Latinx communities in informal science learning settings. The summit produced actionable insights for the field (which later served as the basis for the Cambio spokes) and spurred the co-creation of Cambio.
The Cambio impact: Community with a common purpose
Cambio provided dedicated time, space, and support for conversations about STEM within a context of racial equity, diversity, and inclusion, as well as guidance on how to embrace different viewpoints, values, and ways of knowing. This was more than just professional development— seeing how our Cambio experience evolved gave us ideas for how we can create other learning experiences within our museum that are richer and go deeper.
Cambio’s cohort model provided a constant sounding board of other museum professionals who were all trying to do similar things within quite different contexts. Local context matters—even terminology changes from place to place—and we wouldn’t have had that exposure otherwise. Being in a community with a common purpose, implementing projects we designed together, taking risks and getting feedback, and having an entire year to iterate and troubleshoot was a gift to our museum team. The friendships we developed in our cohort and within our institutions as a result of our Cambio work were and continue to be very valuable.
Our projects: Exploring STEM identity through culture
Our participation in Cambio was critical to the development of our ¡Plantásticas! exhibition about the science and cultural meanings of plants, which was geared toward our local Latinx and Indigenous audiences. Development coincided with our Cambio year during the worst of the pandemic. Everything needed to be done virtually, with no opportunity to work with our communities face to face. Cambio provided specific tools for us to use that helped us better understand the diversity of the groups we were working with and the terminology they used to describe themselves.
During the exhibit development process, we held virtual meetings focused on issues of cultural and STEM identities that helped guide us as we tried, in partnership with our communities, to recontextualize dominant and non-dominant STEM practices within different cultures. Together, we investigated the positive and negative historical impacts of science; which scientific practices are “mainstream” and which feel natural and experiential to us; and how we, as a museum, could offer more entry points into what it means to be a scientist and to value STEM learning. Insights from these conversations hugely influenced our focus and design principles for the final exhibition, which manifested in many ways.
¡Plantásticas! offered a fully bilingual (Spanish and English) and partially trilingual (Spanish, English, and Chochenyo, a language of one of the Bay Area’s Indigenous communities) experience. Exhibition elements included a scent interactive that used a molcajete (traditional mortar and pestle) to evoke regional plant smells and memories; immersive garden vignettes by partnering community activist and artist Andi Xoch, inspired by her Los Angeles neighborhood; and exhibit elements and programming around the science of corn, oak acorn, and other native staples in Indigenous and global contexts.
Our takeaways: More powerful together
Through our Cambio year, we experienced the value of coming together in community with other science institutions—to support each other, reassert our values, and share the joy of STEM learning with the public. We’ve learned:
- our cultural experience influences our understanding and practice of STEM
- culturally specific programming serves all visitors, not just Latinx audiences
- institutional commitment to this work means evolving one-off programs to everyday practice by everyone, not just Latinx staff
We will take our Cambio experience with us into the years to come, as we continue to nurture and sustain our relationships with community partners to better serve our Latinx audiences and broader Bay Area community.
To read other museums’ stories of change, visit our Cambio Stories page.
