Dr. Lynda Kennedy is the Vice President of Education and Evaluation. She leads educational initiatives in one of the most historically rich aerospace museums in the world… the Intrepid in New York City.

Lynda oversees a broad range of programs aimed at connecting diverse audiences with the technological marvels and historical significance of the Intrepid's collection, from K-12 field trips to veteran programs.

In this episode, Lynda shares her story into formal education and the complexities and rewards of her work. Not least, bringing space and science closer to people from all walks of life. You’ll hear about the educational strategies that make science accessible and engaging, and how the museum's unique exhibits, like the space shuttle Enterprise, serve as perfect backdrops for learning and inspiration.

In this episode, you'll discover:

·       How Lynda transitioned from an arts-focused education to leading museum educational programs.

·       The role of museums in bridging the gap between historical artifacts and modern science education.

·       The impact of hands-on, experiential learning in fostering a diverse new generation of scientists and engineers.

·       Strategies for inclusive education that accommodates learners of all ages and abilities.

·       The importance of interdisciplinary approaches that include arts in STEM education (STEAM).

Quote: 

"Every time I approach the ship and I realize I am going to my office on a 1943 aircraft carrier, it makes me smile. Sitting underneath the space shuttle, it's literally right above us. I can go up the steps and there it is. Who gets to say that?"

- Lynda Kennedy

Episode Links:

·       Connect with Lynda Kennedy on LinkedIn

·       Intrepid Museum, New York City

Credits:

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Executive Producer: Toby Goodman 

Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner

Recorded in NYC on location at the Intrepid on Nomono Sound Capsule

Artwork: Ryan Field

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Hi. I'm Dr. Lynda Kennedy, and you're listening to Your Business in Space. I am vice president of education and evaluation at the Intrepid Museum in New York City.

And what that means is I oversee a team of people who are the connection between the history and the innovation embodied in our collection and audiences, learners of all ages and abilities. It is everything from k -12 field trips to older adults with dementia to veteran programming, family programs, teacher professional development, anything that could have an articulated learning outcome.

And then evaluation piece of it is because if it has an outcome, you have to show that you've achieved it. And we also do that for other departments. So whether that would be exhibits or even, just general visitor services, we'll work with them on that. It is an amazing collection of technological innovations that came about because of very specific historical contextual needs. So the biggest artifact is the USS Intrepid, which is an Essex class, aircraft carrier built during World War 2, which in itself was an amazing piece of technology. If you think about it, it's a floating airport. Plans taking off and landing in the middle of the ocean from a, runway that's going up and down with the swells of the sea. And then it also had to support, you know, 3,000, sometimes a little more than that, crew members and pilots.

So it had, you know, sometimes people call it a city at sea. So it has everything in it from places to sleep to places to eat, barbershop, medical space. You know, back here, we're in the education center now was a bunch of shops, maintenance shops and also on schematics, a giant potato locker is how it's labeled. They imagine it was, you know, any kind of root storage. So, amazing artifact. But then we also have 28 aircraft, you know, including an a 12 spy plane, which is way cool. We have the very first prototype shuttle, the enterprise.

We have Concorde. We have a Submarine. We're big on prototypes here. The Submarine itself also was Cold War era. It's a diesel sub, you know, fitted to carry nuclear missiles. So big stuff, big stories is how we often say it. I was born in Philadelphia and raised there until I was 17. I was from Philly, everyone has a picture of Philly. It is kind of that.

It's a lot of, blue collar folks. It's a tough kind of town. It's rocky. And my dad was a cop. And not a lot of people. In fact, no one I knew had gone to college. It wasn't that kind of neighborhood. I always knew I wanted to go to college.

I also always knew there was no money for that. So my talents were artsy. I played piano. I played cello. Public schools in Philly, even in the seventies, still had music programs, which I think is really important. So I had this old beaten up cello, got into drama and that was a way my middle school adviser started talking to me about going to college which was mind blowing because I didn't know anybody who did. And that the path forward for me would be to really focus on the arts because I was not an athlete and get scholarship or something that way. And I was able to get early admissions to NYU, so that means I didn't do my senior year.

And I really wanted to leave. So I got to NYU when I was 17 and that's when I started with a bachelor of fine arts.

So I was at Tisch for drama. I think if I had had the Internet, I would have found out that there were such things as degrees in, like, arts education, but I literally did not know that that was a thing. So I got into Tisch. I applied to 4 colleges, ones I had seen in movies. That was one of them. And my plan was to get the degree in theater, which is also a full bachelor's, and then go get my master's in education, which I eventually did.

But there was a big gap in between because I was paying largely in my own way and I started a theater company with some wonderful people, you know, under a wonderful artistic director who is very they're still doing work and I still occasionally do work with them and did all that. And then I I started teaching theater, and then I got my master's in education with a focus on museum education, which was also something I didn't know existed before. And that got me into the museum field. One of the things that has gotten me doing the work that I do is I have never seen strong silos in between subject areas. Right? Creativity to me exists across all fields and I liked school. So I was good at arts, but I was also very good at math. I was also, you know, really interested in science and was in kind of advanced. One of the reasons I was able to leave school early, I was in advanced programs for those as a youngster.

I grew up again in Philly. Franklin Institute is like a fixture of everyone's visits. So, you know, going to planetariums, learning basic stem stuff, walking through the heart, the discrete model of the heart, and learning really that science requires a lot of creative thought and a lot of playfulness, and it's not it's not divorced from that. And in fact, one of my first kind of quote unquote acting jobs, I was in high school, was doing plays for the Philadelphia Zoo to explain environmental things for kids. Right? So so there's never been a divorce to me between arts and STEM. So moving into museums and finishing my my PhD, you know, on urban education, which is dealing with the challenges in urban setting for education. You know, I was working in a series of places that always incorporated a variety of content areas whether that's moving image media at the Museum of Moving Image, which included digital design, which also is history, which is also arts. We're coming here, which is a national historic landmark, the ship, but also has the largest artifact, NASA artifact in the northeast, the shuttle, and like a Soyuz capsule and, you know, the ship itself was involved in the space race and capsule recovery.

So again, it is all this integration and we think of what we do here in the Education Center as the Center for History and Innovation actually. We think of it in an integrated way. So space and the creativity of space that needed people to get to space, the problem solving, all of that is is heavily integrated into we talk about steam, right? The a in STEM, put the arts back in there. So we use that quite a lot and we were discussing earlier how the creating an environment that people could live in for extended periods of time and keep morale up and do their jobs in an extreme environment of the middle of the ocean on an aircraft carrier is very analogous to the preparation as we think about what do people need for long voyages into space and how do we make that happen? What can we learn from the past? What's happening now? And how can that inform what we do in the future? And I am fascinated by that trajectory and in in terms of just space purely space, I mean I'm of the age where we had, you know, the full size GI Joe. We actually have one exhibit here made me laugh when I started working here in a space capsule and like it was the same size as a Barbie, so we'd put the Barbie in the space because GI Joe had cooler stuff and he had a lot of space stuff in the seventies. Space was big. So just that whole idea of of Star Trek and Star Wars and that people would live long term in space, I am beyond thrilled that there's real talk of this really happening on a larger scale than just the space station, in my lifetime. Some of the misconceptions of just sciences in general and certainly space is that you have to be top of your class in physics in order for this to be a career for you.

That that to be a scientist means you're stuck in a lab and never see a person, another person. To be an astronaut or to work for NASA, you must be an astronaut, you know, pilot, you know, engineer, daredevil or you must be a rocket scientist and that's it. So a lot of work that we do here with all audiences, but particularly with young people, is to say that's not true. That the space economy or the aerospace economy has so many different aspects to it that if you're someone who's great with people, there's PR. It's a PR department, you know, at any at NASA or any of these private companies. There are designers. How you design a plane directly affects how much fuel it consumes. Thinking about all the potential roles, there was someone on those Apollo flights who thought about how they were gonna test eating in space.

So how are you gonna cook, you know, once we get these long term settlements, like, in microgravity? Because someone who's out there for many years may may not want to subsist on, you know, ready mades. Right? So, like, how does this how does what happens here need be adapted for out there? And for the generation coming up, this is the kind of thing they should be thinking about. I mean, space law, there's already space law majors, like and do we need that everywhere? Probably not. But you wanna understand how your whatever it is that you do, we're gonna need plumbers in space. But how does being in basically a frontier where there isn't a Home Depot to get your parts gonna affect your work? How is being in microgravity gonna affect your work? That's kind of where we talk about it. And we we've had for many years over 15 years a summer program for girls in stem and it's really more and more just begin to really focus on the aerospace industry because that's where there is a lot of opportunity. It's also what our collection is strong in. So this summer, it's actually a paid opportunity through with the city, the summer youth employment, completely focused on aerospace.

We have and we have mentors come in from all these different roles. Women in the fields, some of them are indeed rocket scientists. Some of them are in public relations. Some of them are in fabric testing. Every crew you could think of has a an opposite number in aerospace. So having them come in and just talk about the trajectory, I think, helps a lot of young people understand that there might be a role for them indeed. Right? So and that's taken out too in public programs to different age audiences. Absolutely, they'll have panels of people, talking about all these different jobs and that'll be for, you know, adults or families or big public events with 3 days of NASA here at kids week.

It amuses me no end. And it's a hoot to be, like, in meetings with an astronaut. Right? That my very first day, they gave me an iPhone. I never use iPhones and I was having trouble setting it up and I was in a meeting and the fellow I was in a meeting with, one of them reached across the table, picked it up, and start fixing it for me. And it was Mike Massimino, and I was sitting there thinking the man who fixed the Hubble Telescope twice is setting up my iPhone. That's pretty cool. We are fleshing out our youth leadership work, again, with this much more focused aerospace lens. We are also, I mean, these are just big projects.

We are, a recipient of the NASA Community Anchor funding. So reaching out, in our case, to the Latine communities to make sure that, you know, we have so many events here that look at what's going on with NASA and fabulous NASA speakers. So making sure they outreach to those communities as being done and that there's, you know, language access, supports for folks who would need it and making sure because, you know, New York City is a wonderfully diverse and rich city and we wanna make sure everybody is getting exposed to these opportunities and we have, the state has given us the approval to award teacher professional development credit that they need. So we have an inspiration academy for teachers, which is again, this current round really looking at supporting teachers in their first 5 years because that's when we lose them, especially teachers of color or teachers who teach in a primarily minority school to have in inclusivity. Again, I have a sense of belonging in STEM. I'm going down to DC next week for the You Belong in STEM, convening. That's by the federal department of ed. We really believe in that here that for the best ideas to get us into the future, we need to make sure everybody's included along the way.

So that's our big focus areas right now. And Everything we do is also really designed for lowering barriers for people with disabilities, particularly neurodiverse audiences. We we run a lot of programs because again, a lot of creativity in that population and that is typically, been excluded from opportunity.

I'm Dr Lynda Kennedy, and you've been listening to Your Business in Space.

All the ways to connect with me or find out more about programming and exhibitions at Intrepid are in links in the show notes.

To discover more, head to interastra.space

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