ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

The HistoryMakers ® ScienceMakers DVD Toolkit
Media and Advocacy Guide
About Us and Goals of the ScienceMakers Project
The HistoryMakers is the single largest archival collection of its kind in the world. Our goal is to complete
5,000 interviews of both well-known and unsung African American HistoryMakers. In doing so, we want to
include the stories of individual African Americans along with those of African American organizations, events,
movements and periods of time that are signifi cant to the African American community. To date, our oldest
HistoryMaker is 105 years old and the youngest is 29 years old. We have done interviews in over 80 cities and
towns as well as in the Caribbean, Mexico and Norway. Our collection presently houses 7,000 hours of African
American testimony on videotape. The only prior methodic and wide-scale attempt to capture the testimonies
of African Americans occurred in the 1930s with the recording of former slaves as a project of the Works
Projects Administration (WPA). From 1936-1938, teams of writers/researchers were sent throughout the South
resulting in approximately 2,300 hand-recorded interviews and some audio taped interviews. The History-
Makers is the next methodic and wide-scale collection effort since the WPA Slave Narratives Project.
The Birth of the ScienceMakers
ScienceMakers is an innovative African American media and education initiative focused on capturing and
preserving the life and career stories of African Americans in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and
math) professions. It will also disseminate these stories broadly to youth, public and professional audiences
using the Internet, a unique digital video oral history archive, public programs, exhibits, radio, TV, print and
other new technologies. Over a three year period, ScienceMakers will become the largest collection of
interviews of African American scientists, resulting in an educational, career and media resource for
teachers, parents, students and the national community at large.
The Need for African American Scientists
The United States’ economy depends on a strong corps of scientists and engineers, but only a small percentage
of young people consider science a viable and interesting career choice. African Americans are especially
underrepresented in the STEM professions. While African Americans represent 13.4% of the U.S. population
(census, May 2006), they comprise only 6.9% of our nation’s STEM workforce according to the most recent
NSF’s Science Indicators Report (2006). In order to increase the number of African Americans, women and
other minorities in the STEM professions, it is important to highlight the contributions of African American
scientists as inspiring examples.
Encouraging Youth Participation in the Sciences
While more educational and career opportunities are open to African American youth than ever before, the most
current research shows that these youth are not as prepared to enter the STEM workforce as are youth from
other ethnic groups. African Americans show lower high school graduation rates than the overall population,
score lower on science and math achievement tests, and enroll at lower rates in AP science and math courses
in high school (NSF, 2006; NAEP, 2006). The lower academic achievement of African American students and
their subsequent underrepresentation in STEM professions has its roots, in part, in their formal and informal
learning environments, the perceptions of science as “not cool” and the “lack of appropriate role models”.
Catching the Science Bug
Although advocacy and education organizations such as the National Science Foundation have noted a
lessening of the achievement gap between African Americans and other students in math and science, the low
visibility of African American scientists and mathematicians in many African American communities will
continue to contribute to this gap. Many successful STEM professionals in our collection cite an inspirational
teacher, television show or even a chemistry set as the factor that encouraged them to pursue a career in the
215
Media Guide