Curiosity Creates STEM Connections -- Adventures in Learning with Brad Herring

How can we harness curiosity to engage learners in STEM and in the world around them? Swift Creek Media CEO Brad Herring shares thoughts on storytelling, building STEM connections, and approaching the world from a new perspective. Plus, learn about the NISENetwork and its many STEM resources.

While Brad’s career began by serving overseas in Panama with the United States Peace Corps, his passion for filmmaking began with the birth of his daughter. What started as a hobby, quickly grew into his job and eventually led him to start his own production company, Swift Creek Media. He has over 17 years of experience in project management, creating and producing over 150 videos for one of the largest science museum networks in the United States. Brad previously worked at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC and led NISE Network online workshops while serving as NISENet's Earth & Space project-based professional learning community leader and as the Southeast regional hub leader. 

I first met Brad when we were both deeply ensconced in the museum world. Through our collaboration together, I learned how to tap into STEM resources and community professionals to enhance the wow factor of the STEAM Night programs I developed for the children's museum where I was working at the time. I also gained access to the creative collaborative energy of a nationwide network of informal educators seeking to get the public excited about science and hands-on learning. 

[00:40] Wonder, curiosity, connection  -- building engaging STEM/STEAM programs

[5:13] The challenges of grabbing and keeping attention when building engaging programs.

[10:06] What is NISE Network (National Informal STEM Education Network) and how can it help build engaged learning? 

[14:17] Taking Curiosity On The Road: Brad shares details about his recent summer trip of a lifetime and the perspective it gave him.

[21:25] How do we tell the stories? Filmmaking as storytelling through  Swift Creek Media

[27:25] Strategies for connecting storytelling and engaged STEM/STEAM learning? Horton Senses Something Small,   Breakfast Moon, Moonbear’s Shadow, Hide and Seek Moon,  Frankenstein

[33:17] What Brings You Hope? 

It (camping) really gave me hope that there are good people out there and we just need to get outside of our own walls and travel more and experience more and live more and experience new cultures, new foods, try new things, be curious about our world, and just restore that sense of wonder that we were all born with.

Transcript

[00:01] Dr. Diane: Wonder, curiosity, connection. Where will your adventures take you? I'm Dr. Diane, and thank you for joining me on today's episode of Adventures In Learning. So, welcome to the Adventures In Learning podcast us. I'm your host, Dr. Diane, and I am so excited to welcome Brad Herring to the podcast today. We first met when we were both in the museum world. He was in Durham, and I was in Winchester and we bonded over a love of STEM and finding ways to bring hands on activities into the hands of museum goers. So, Brad, welcome to the show.

[00:38] Brad: Thank you for having me.

[00:40] Dr. Diane: So when I met you, I was really inspired by the things that you all were doing in Durham. And I know you're not there any longer, but you were there for a very long time. Can you share some of the things that drove the STEM programs for you in the museum world?

[00:56] Brad: Yeah. So I started at the Museum of Life and Science 17 years ago, working as a youth educator. Kind of worked my way up to run the youth program and was asked at one point when the youth program fell apart, that, well, actually fell apart. We didn't have any more funding to keep it going, you know, what the difference was between teaching adults and children. And that was a really tough question for me to think about, but one I really hadn't thought about. I was given this opportunity to kind of switch from teaching young children, youth at the museum, and going towards more of the adult programming with this new project that we had around Nanotechnology. It was also new to me at the time. I was trying to look at graduate school and getting into graduate school, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and not really knowing much about museums. But everything that I had experienced in that first year and a half working with youth just really inspired me. I've done a little bit of youth development work prior to the museum, and I kind of found a lot of the joys in kind of bringing this kind of sense of wonder and excitement to children and to adults. And something that I say, adults like museums. Typically, you think about, like, engaging young children, and this was a problem for us. How do we engage more than just young children? How do we engage adults or teenagers at museums? As you know, teenagers are an audience that we struggle with a lot. And this project that we started back in 2005 with the NISENetwork was something around Nanotechnology where little kids aren't really going to understand what Nano is or how do we talk to them about what this is. So we try to look at that. This is an opportunity to kind of engage a little bit older audiences than we typically did.

[02:56] Dr. Diane: So you just talked about wonder and engagement, and those, I think, are some of the critical elements of any kind of hands on programming for STEM or STEAM. What are some of the other things that, as you're building a program, you would want to consider?

[03:11] Brad: I think curiosity is another word that we were taught at the museum, something that we strive to kind of get kids to think about, to be curious about their world, to ask questions about why things are the way they are. Don't just accept them for what they are. So whenever we created a program, we wanted to create this wow moment, this sense of wonder, or asking kids to think about things in a curious way. And it just made it maybe more fun and more engaging and a better learning environment for them. So I would say as we try to understand the world around us, be curious and also kind of think back to when you were a kid, like what made you wonder or what made you kind of think about things differently and be curious and ask the questions that you did. I think a lot of times kids ask a ton of questions and adults don't ask any questions. And I don't know why we lose that sense of curiosity or some of us tend to lose that sense of curiosity, but for me that's probably one of the bigger ones. In fact, I love that word so much that we actually homeschool our daughter. And so when we first started homeschooling 15 years ago, the state required us to come up with a name for our school, and so we named our school Curiosity Labs. Just kind of going off that key word that really meant so much to me. And I think that's kind of parlayed into what I am about now and being curious about our world. I want to explore it. I want to see things firsthand. I want to turn over that leaf and that rock and go out with my flashlight at night and look and see what's out there and just still be curious because I think that's what makes us human and it makes us enjoy the world a little bit better.

[05:13] Dr. Diane: So what would be one of the big burning questions you're asking today?

[05:19] Brad: Well, I think well, there's so much going on right now in our world both outside and on our screens that we're so attached to. And one of the struggles that I'm having right now is how to keep engagement going, to keep prolong engagement going when a 15 second clip on Instagram is really the length of our imagination or our kids’ ability to kind of stay focused. When I started making films, which is kind of what I do now, it was like, we’ve got to make something under five minutes, and then it was under three minutes, and then it was under a minute, and now it's like 15 seconds to 30 seconds. And that's frustrating. How do you get a message across in 15 to 30 seconds? And if you don't like, you've already lost somebody. And so I think one of our biggest problems is that engagement. And you see it in the museum world, like, even with parents who are on their cell phones while their kids are learning, how do you engage somebody and keep them interested? And that time, it just keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. Museum programs, we have five minutes on the floor, maybe sometimes just a minute to hook someone if you're doing a live program, right? And so I think about that a little bit in my movies or things that like, what's that first 15 seconds of my film? Like, for that first 30 seconds of that first image, I’ve got to capture. And once I've captured your imagination, I can start to pull you in a little bit more and show you, help you learn or show you what I want to show you.

[07:06] Dr. Diane: And I think that's a challenge for teachers in the classroom as well, is you really do have to hook the students. And you're right, that time for building that wow moment, for building that engagement has condensed more and more. And so you don't have five minutes to do it. You really have to have that very cool demonstration activity that's going to get their attention. And once you have it, then you can build those connections and help them to see the connections to the books, the connections to the real world. But it's sort of how do you get their attention in the first place?

[07:39] Brad: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's that hook. What is that hook? And when you deliver that hook and how do you deliver that hook and who's the messenger and the tone that there is, all these things. And teachers have an incredible task at hand at trying to kind of combat all those real world things that are being thrown at us so fast and really kind of tone that down and bring it all back together. And now we've got an hour or whatever that time is, to really engage them and keep them engaged.

[08:16] Dr. Diane: Well, this is a great place for us to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to continue exploring Adventures In Learning with our guest Brad Herring. And we're going to look at resources that are available for teachers, libraries, museums, and families to be able to really build those connections to STEM and STEAM.

[8:45] SPONSOR AD: 

[9:45] Dr. Diane: Welcome back to the Adventures In Learning podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Diane, and we're speaking with Swift Creek Media CEO Brad Herring. Let's learn a little bit more about the National Informal STEM Education Network. You referenced the NISENetwork. Can you talk a little bit more about that for those who may not know what that is?

[10:06] Brad: Yes, so the NISENetwork started around 17 years ago, a federally funded project from the National Science Foundation. So essentially, what we are or I say we, I don't work with them anymore. I don't work for them. I still get the chance to work with them, which is great. But the NISENet is essentially just a group of scientists and informal educators and others in the museum and informal world who are dedicated to STEM and STEM learning and lifelong learning. And so we have a variety of projects that are federally funded. Some are private funded, and each of those projects have different outcomes and different deliverables. But for the most part, we develop hands on programming and professional development, and then we share those widely throughout the museum world, informal institutions like libraries, science museums, children's museums. Again, I keep saying we.

[11:05] Dr. Diane: You never leave it.

[11:08] Brad: That's right. You're in that same boat as well. You're always a partner. We have a variety of partners all across the US that receive our materials, whether it's a physical material or an online material, something that you can just download a lesson plan and then you might have to go out and buy some materials. But we create all these hands on programming around STEAM topics. So we've done biology, chemistry, nanotechnology, Earth and Space, and we've dived into topics around like Frankenstein, a couple of other various sustainability, a few others in there. But we have an incredible wealth of resources on our website, https://www.nisenet.org, which everything on there is under a Creative Commons license. So we encourage teachers and educators all across the US to go and download these programs, look at them. We have educational materials for the educator. We have materials for the participant. We have training materials, training videos, PDFs, and resources for you to learn more about the topic.

[12:18] Dr. Diane: And I'll include that in the show notes. I know as a museum educator, I used these all the time. We brought these out into the community as part of the STEAM nights that we were taking to schools. We used them on the floor of the museum. But they’re such great resources for families, for teachers, for librarians. So I'll make sure that you've got the links to that in show notes.

[12:39] Brad: Yes. And one of the other things I'll just add about that is that we take a year to create any one program, and that's a long time to create a five minute program. But we do this through a three step process. First, we kind of sit around and brainstorm ideas, topics. And obviously we have a grant project that says you're going to do this, but we have to figure out how to do that in an informal setting. So we toss around ideas. We take ideas out on the floor, we test them, we bring them back. We share ideas with our peers. Our peers give us feedback. We make those changes. So we do this whole round of peer feedback. We then take what we think is a good program. We take it out onto the floor and we test it with visitors. We have them fill out surveys. We ask them questions. What did you like? What did you learn? How could we do this better? And we take all that feedback and we incorporate it. And then finally, when we think we have a finished product, we give that to a scientist in that field who reads that program and says, this is accurate, or you might want to change this or this, or this might be set differently. And then we have a polished program that's gone through these three steps. And so when we send those out, whether we send those out physically or you download those materials, you know that those are really high quality tested materials that you can take out immediately onto your floor and deliver without a lot of pressure.

[14:05] Dr. Diane: Absolutely. And they have the guided script that tells you what to say. As a teacher looking for that wow moment, you’re going to find some gold in there.

[14:14] Brad: Yeah. I'm glad you found some good use in them.

[14:17] Dr. Diane: I really did. So Brad, you have been taking curiosity on the road. I've been following your journeys all summer on Instagram. Can you tell people a little bit about the trip you just finished up?

[14:29] Brad: Yeah. So let me start off telling a little bit about kind of my childhood. So when I was eleven years old, my mother, who was a single mother at the time, she packed up my brother and I, and we went on a two week drive out west and I said I was eleven years old. It was a really impactful time for me. I'd never been out west. I'd never seen Yellowstone or South Dakota or Montana or any of these western states. And it really made an impact on me. It broadened my horizons of outside of just Tennessee, where I was growing up. I'd never kind of left that area. And so seeing that, it really inspired me. And I had always kind of had this love for nature and love for being outside, but that really just solidified it. And I knew over the last ten years when my daughter was growing up, I kept saying to my wife, we have to do a summer trip. We have to do a summer trip with our daughter and go out west because you can't really understand what the west is about unless you see it and you see these incredible places in national parks, until you see them first hand. And so we've been kind of planning this and planning this and there was never really a good time and I hate that because if you keep waiting for the good time it's never going to happen. But it did kind of happen a little bit when I left my job at the museum to start my new company. This was a great time to, kind of between the two jobs, take a trip out west. So we actually took two months off between July and August and we just got in the car and we drove and we planned very little. The whole idea was to just plan one week long campsite in each of the seven states that we were going and just be there and every day we would wake up and find something new to do. And that was great for the first half, but the second half of the trip a lot of the places that we chose didn't have service, so we couldn't really figure out what we wanted to do. We couldn't sit around camp at night and think about what we wanted to do or we hadn't met people yet to kind of figure out what's good out here, what should we go and see? But the idea was to just kind of get away, drop our phones. Obviously we wanted a little bit of service to be able to find some places to go and see, but we really just wanted to go and experience and see what happens, see where we are. And we camped on private lands and the first camp site in New Mexico was probably by far our favorite. We were, I don't know what the figure is, 100,000 square miles it seemed like from the nearest person.

[17:23] Dr. Diane: Wow.

[17:24] Brad: We heard coyotes every night and there were just critters all around us and we really were the only people. And after spending 17 years at this job and really kind of behind the desk a lot, I did travel but I didn't get out a lot. It just really felt good to get out. And I've done a lot of these trips out west, but it felt even better to be on the end of having my daughter experiencing them and watch her as she saw the Grand Canyon for the first time or witnessed Yellowstone or some of these experiences or just kind of camping with no amenities and that was part of it.

[18:08] Dr. Diane: What were some of the most joyful experiences from that time?

[18:15] Brad: I would say probably the biggest memory I'll have is driving home from South Dakota. We were all kind of sad and anxious to get home, but also not wanting to get home. And my daughter is 15 years old, and I turned to her and said, Would you do it again? And she said, I don't even want to go home. I could live on the road. I love this so much. And so that meant the world to me, because at 15 years old, most daughters or sons or kids at that age would just be ready to get back to their friends. That really meant to me that we did it right. We had fun. We're good together. The three of us have a lot of fun. And I didn't ruin it for her. Yeah. And I hope that she has that same kind of experience going forward. And my wife had never been out west either, or kind of seen the big sky. So that was probably the first one. The second one, I think what was really cool for me, and I kind of mentioned this to my daughter and wife before we left. Like here on the East Coast, there's a lot of trees, and as I look out my window, I can only see 50 yards out. But out west, you see forever, and it's the big sky. And we sat every afternoon and watched, and we were out there for a lot of the monsoons. We watched these rainstorms come in. And just sitting in a chair in our camper, watching these storms come in was probably one of the coolest things ever, because they're big storms. You can see the clouds, how they're moving, where they're going, the lightning, how they're forming. And that was really cool.

[20:05] Dr. Diane: Sounds like a life changing experience.

[20:08] Brad: I hope so. I hope it was for her. It definitely was for me, too.

[20:12] Dr. Diane: When we return after the break, we'll learn all about Brad's new Adventures In Learning with his new company, Swift Creek Media. 

[20:25] SPONSOR AD

[21:25} Dr. Diane: Welcome back to the Adventures In Learning podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Diane, and our guest today is Brad Herring, the CEO of Swift Creek Media. So your newest adventure, tell us what you're doing now that you're back from your travels.

[21:47] Brad: Yeah, so I have started my own film production company. So for the past 17 or 15 years, I have been playing around with a camera. I first started playing around with a camera when my daughter was born and this was right around the time, it was 2008, right around the time that YouTube first started. And so I would make these fun videos and post them on YouTube. And I started making, not just turning the camera on, but actually editing and making short stories about my daughter. And I remember showing my boss at the museum one day one of my videos, and he turned to me and said, you should be making videos for the museum. And I said, let's make that happen. So we did. I was able to kind of take some of that time, those early years, to learn how to edit, how to film. And I started making short films for the museum that turned into making films for the NISENetwork. I made all the training videos. And then I really just kind of as I started progressing and making more and more films for the network and the museum, I really felt that's where my passion really was. That's what got me out of bed in the morning. I got to work on a new film project or it allowed me to express creativity in a way that I had never done before in my life, never thought of myself as a real creative person in that way. And I found real enjoyment in that. So I think, as we all kind of did in the pandemic, we started second guessing, like, why are we doing what we do and what gets me out of bed every morning and why do I want to show up at work? And so I decided to make the jump and I started my own film production company. And as I said, I still get to work with the NISENet. I still get to do training videos for them. And I'm working with the museum on several projects. And then I get to kind of explore and I can make corporate videos and those will pay my house note and put food on the table, but those types of videos don't also get me out of bed in the morning. And I think having this new free time as a freelance artist allows me this opportunity to kind of explore new avenues. And one of the genres that I'm really attracted to is documentary. And so I'm toying with ideas around creating my own documentaries. Now, I love to cook. I'm kind of playing around with cooking and filming and trying to marry those two passions as just kind of excitement, and who knows where that'll take me. I've started working on a little documentary now, but that's kind of for down the road and really cranks up next year. But I think that's where I am right now. So I'm making films. I'm a producer and an editor, so I have a whole crew that I can call on for a variety of different projects. And staying connected to the museum world is great because also that STEAM and that passion of creating content that helps inspire the next generation is something that I've always been passionate about. So getting to kind of do fun stuff, it's not really a job. Right?

[25:11] Dr. Diane: So filmmaking is all about telling stories. What are some of the stories that are driving you or that you're hoping to be able to tell?

[25:20] Brad: Well, so most of the story, I haven't really gotten into some good storytelling yet. I think right now, a lot of the training videos that we do for the network are really about educating the educators, the facilitators on how to carry out the programs. And I think that storytelling is where I'm going to try to find the most enjoyment through the documentary or maybe do some other projects. But you're right. Storytelling is something like I think that's at its core, that's what a filmmaker is. So if you were to ask me what I do, of course I can say I'm a filmmaker. But I love that word, and I use that word on my website. I'm a storyteller. And I think that's important. And going back to what we started with at the very beginning, how do you tell that story? I'm still learning about the arc of storytelling and what makes a good story and how to start a story and how to end the story and how to bring the emotions out of characters. And that's something that I'll continue learning.

[26:25] Dr. Diane: That makes a lot of sense.

[26:27] Brad: Yeah. And I think directing people, too, and directing science is something I'm a little nervous about. There are the scientists. They're the expert. But as a layperson, if I can understand it, then I think others can understand it. And that's one of the things as a storyteller, I try to convey this meaning that we as scientists know, but we want to take that message and make it relatable and make it easy to understand. And that's kind of where I'm going to struggle with the most or have the most fun.

[27:03] Dr. Diane: Well, I think that gets back to what we talked about in the beginning, about engagement and that wow moment, or that hook, is if you can look at it from the layperson's point of view and get the science explained in a way that somebody can understand it, then it becomes something they can grab onto and apply to their lives. I think that's powerful storytelling, right?

[27:24] Brad: Yeah.

[27:25] Dr. Diane: So a question I like to ask everybody who comes to the podcast. Are there picture books that inspire you in your storytelling? Picture books that maybe connect back to STEM or STEAM that you've drawn on through the course of your career?

[27:39] Brad: That's a great question. I didn't read a lot as a kid, in fact, only up until I served in the Peace Corps, and that's when I really found what reading was. I don't have a lot of knowledge about picture books. As a kid, my wife read to my daughter every single day, every night. They would read hundreds of books throughout the years that we were raising our daughter. But I didn't, and I found that I didn't have that attraction to literature and books as I am starting to have now, as I get older and start to understand the power of books. I also had a form of Dyslexia where as a kid, I could not comprehend what I would read. And so I would always, that's why I kind of shied away from reading. And whenever I would have to read a book, I would have to take notes as I read, like characters and things. And so I think that's been a struggle for me. And something even when I started reading, I would revert back to taking notes on who people are because I can't recall as the chapters go on, what I've read prior. 

But in thinking about that, the NISENet has taken a couple of picture books and turned them into programs. So some you might have been familiar with, like Horton Hears a Who. So we changed that book, and we didn't change the book. We kept the book. We would have educators read the book, but then we created a program called Horton Senses Something Small. What we did is we took a familiar book where Horton Hears a Who. He hears something, but he can't see it. And so we related that to the nano world, right? So the nano world is something that you know exists, but you just can't see it. And so we developed a program around a children's book that was very familiar, that had a very familiar concept, but we kind of changed it a little bit. And we also did that with Alice in Wonderland. We wrote a book called Alice in NanoLand. And so again, kind of taking that familiar concept and bringing in the unfamiliar, which is the nano world, and bringing that in. So again, that's a long answer for kind of getting around the fact that I did not read a lot as a kid and don't have those experiences that I think a lot of your other listeners and viewers do well.

NOTE: Some additional NISENet connections that link STEM/STEAM experiences to picture books include: Breakfast Moon, Moonbear’s Shadow, Hide and Seek Moon, and Frankenstein.

[30:16] Dr. Diane: And that's an interesting point of view, though, to remember that there are students who don't engage with books the way that a passionate reader might. And so how can you create that experience in a way that it's open to them as well? And so that's where if you can connect a book to the hands on activities or to being able to move and use those gross motor skills, that might be another entree for people.

[30:39] Brad: Yeah. And I think the more I think about it, I think that it might not be that someone doesn't want to learn. It might be something else. And I think as educators and as teachers and as parents, we have to try to understand why someone isn't engaged. And so I'll give you a great example, one that hits very close to us. My daughter, I mentioned that we read to her. My wife read to her all the time, and she loved books. She devoured books, but only when they were read to her. We could never get her to read. And we later found out through making a long story short, we later found out that she also had this form of Dyslexia, and I'm going to step out of my bounds here. My wife knows more about this, but essentially, her eyes were not able to converge. And so both eyes were seeing separate things, and her brain couldn't converge the image into one. So it made reading very difficult for her. And so we put her in vision therapy for a year. And after vision therapy, with a lot of exercises to train her eyes to converge and do a lot of tests and all these things, it really changed. And she flourished. She started reading. She read every single day. A couple of years ago, we tried to read 50 books in a year. We both read 50 books in a year. It changed her life. It changed her reading. And I think as educators, we need to kind of tune in and try to understand a little bit deeper, like, what is it? And maybe that was a problem for me as a kid, I don't know. And maybe I would have taken to books more had I understood or had I kind of understood why my brain was the way it was or working the way it was. So by turning our attention to our daughter and understanding and trying to understand what the problem was, we were able to kind of correct it a little bit and fix it. And now she loves to read.

[32:44] Dr. Diane: That's exciting. And you make a really good point about the power of observation and reflection, that you didn't just simply accept things as they were. You paid attention to what was going on, and then were able to look for solutions.

[32:56] Brad: Well, credit to my wife. She really did all that. But she's also an educator. She's a teacher, a former teacher. And so I think that's just what makes good teachers. They listen and they try to understand, and they don't just force their opinions or just brush it off. And, well, you're not a learner. You don't care.

[33:17] Dr. Diane: So, last question for you for today. What is something that brings you hope as you look at the future?

[33:25] Brad: Something that brings me hope? Wow. That's a good question. I don't know. I think this summer road trip, I think brought a little hope to me. One of the things I've tried to do over the last couple of years is try to get off social media, and I'm on Instagram but only follow a select group of chefs. But I wanted to get off of Instagram or off of social media, away from the news, because I felt like I was just getting bogged down and the world is a terrible place. And then I went on the summer trip, and I realized that people aren't that bad and people are really good and people care. And I got to see people and meet people and be with people that I've never met before. And they all opened up their lands. As I said, we camped on private lands. We got to meet some of these people and whether they had different views than me, we were all just kind of coming around kind of this common, like, we're outside, we're in nature, and we're experiencing this world together. And so I think that if we can just, what gives me hope is if we all just kind of come together a little bit more and understand and be willing to listen to each other, and maybe that will change a little bit. That's cliche to say. We always hope this and we want this to happen. But it really gave me hope that there are good people out there and we just need to get outside of our own walls and travel more and experience more and live more and experience new cultures. New foods. Try new things. Be curious about our world and just restore that sense of wonder that we were all born with.

[35:24] Dr. Diane: Thank you so much for sharing that. That's a great place to stop. Brad, I appreciate you being on the Adventures In Learning podcast today. And we'll drop contact information for your new business in the how notes as well. You've been listening to the Adventures In Learning podcast with your host, Dr. Diane. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe and let us know what you think, and please tell a friend. If you want the full Show Notes and the pictures, please go to drdianeadventures.com. We look forward to you joining us on our next adventure.