Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/22/2015
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
Nonprofit Center
Tech Networks of Boston (also known as TNB) is pleased to invite local employees of nonprofit organizations to a Roundtable session with Nettrice Gaskins, STEAM Lab director at the Boston Arts Academy.
The focus of this session will be on STEAM, which stands for “Science Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics.” The benefits of learning about this innovative, inter-disciplinary educational movement will seem most apparent to those work in schools, after school programs, and arts programs – however, we believe that a wide range of professionals from mission-based organizations will be inspired and informed by this Roundtable session.
To help you start thinking about how STEAM can be incorporated into your operations and programs, Nettrice has provided these links to information about nonprofit organizations that have moved forward with it:
- http://www.upliftdc.org
- http://www.divasforsocialjustice.org
- http://fablearn.stanford.edu/fellows/blog/toward-making-change-beyond-blacklivesmatter-one-introduction
Here’s a little more about Nettrice:
Nettrice Gaskins, Ph.D. was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She majored in Visual Art at duPont Manual High School in Louisville, KY. She earned a BFA in Computer Graphics with Honors from Pratt Institute in 1992 and a MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. She worked for several years in K-12 and post-secondary education, community media and technology before enrolling at Georgia Tech where she received a doctorate in Digital Media in 2014. Her model for ‘techno-vernacular creativity’ is an area of practice that investigates the characteristics of this production and its application in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics). Currently, Nettrice is director of the STEAM Lab at Boston Arts Academy, the city’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts serving over 440 students that reflect the diversity of Boston’s neighborhoods.
When she is not advancing interdisciplinary education, Nettrice blogs for Art21, the producer of the Peabody award-winning PBS series, Art in the Twenty-First Century and publishes articles about topics such as Afrofuturism. Her essay was included in “Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader” published by ETC Press. Nettrice “Afro-Futurism: Countering Mass Culture’s Reductional Breakdown Through Creative Forms of Representation” for Nictoglobe Magazine, and “Urban Metaphysics: Creating Game Layers on Top of the World” for UCLA’s Mediascape.
In the past Nettrice has supported the use of digital technologies by students and faculty in all art/media disciplines; worked as a teaching artist for the Boston 100K Artscience Innovation Prize; and was a youth media/technology trainer for Adobe Youth Voices. She was board president of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture and on the board of the Community Technology Centers Network (CTCNet).
Nettrice presented Black Futurism at We Are City 2014 in Indianapolis, Cybism and Decoding the Letter at ISEA2011 in Istanbul and co-facilitated Augmented Reality in Open Spaces (AROS) at ISEA2012 in Albuquerque, NM. She moderated Enlightenment, Strange Mathematics & Rhythmic Equations at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2014). She was a Digital STEAM research intern at the Smithsonian Institution (2013) and received funding from the National Science Foundation for Advancing STEM Through Culturally Situated Arts-Based Learning (2014).
In keeping with the spirit of the TNB Roundtable series, this session will NOT be a sales pitch for any product or service. The Roundtable is an educational opportunity for nonprofit professionals to learn along with their peers from other organizations.