Coming up - Free Summer Webinar for Educators of Middle School Girls!


Universe: More Than Meets the Eye

Facilitated via Zoom by The Rising Stargirls Team.

This webinar workshop is created for educators of middle-school girls (grades 6-8) from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences*. This workshop will cover how to incorporate the Rising Stargirls curriculum into existing curricula or programs. In the Rising Stargirls curriculum, girls will explore constellations in the night sky, planets in and outside of our solar system, and the unseen mysteries of the universe. They will use writing, visual art, and theater games to process what they learn and discover. And educators will learn and discover along with them!

TEACHERS: Rising Stargirls activities can be done in your classrooms to complement an existing science curriculum, or as an after-school program. And it’s free of charge (funding provided by the National Science Foundation)! For more information, visit www.risingstargirls.org or email Rising Stargirls Facilitator, Maya Silverman at <msilver2@uci.edu>

* (American Indian or Alaska Native, Black/African-American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander)

Founder and Director Dr. Aomawa Shields' Newly Published Inside Higher Ed Article: “Claiming a Louder Life: Part I” Now Available

Rising Stargirls founder and director Dr. Aomawa Shields’ newly published Inside Higher Ed article, “Claiming a Louder Life: Part I,” is now available. The article discusses the treatment of Black students further along the academic pipeline, at the college level in departments of physics and astronomy. The work we are doing at Rising Stargirls is aimed at addressing these issues much earlier in the development of girls of color.

Founder and Director Dr. Aomawa Shields Featured in Adler Planetarium Online Exhibit “Life on Other Worlds”

Rising Stargirls founder and director Dr. Aomawa Shields is featured in Adler Planetarium’s Online Exhibit “Life on Other Worlds.” An exhibit which is about the search for life and covers astrobiology/SETI on Earth, in the solar system, and outside the solar system, Dr. Shields’ exoplanet climate work is included in this exhibit. 

The Rising Stargirls COVID-19 Virtual Teaching Handbook is now available!

The Rising Stargirls COVID-19 Virtual Teaching and Activity Handbook is here! This is the Zoom-Adapted version of the original Rising Stargirls Teaching and Activity Handbook. The activities used in Rising Stargirls workshops, plus educator resources and best practices for utilizing this virtual teaching handbook through Zoom are provided in this manual. We intend for this manual to be used alongside the original Rising Stargirls Handbook when creating virtual workshops. Download it for free and use it in your virtual classrooms and informal learning environments anywhere in the world!

Workshop News Update!

In the past months we have hosted two online workshops to train educators on how to incorporate Rising Stargirls activities into their curricula. 


These webinars were a resounding success! Between our Fall and Winter workshop we had 67 interested educators of which nearly half were able to attend the selected dates. We had educators from all over the country as well as all over the world (Europe, Middle East, South Asia, and South America)! Responses to the educator training workshops have been overwhelmingly positive and we have had 13 educators already express interest in participating in future workshops.

Please stay tuned for future announcements to register for our Summer webinar in 2020!

Founder and Director Dr. Aomawa Shields Featured in “Changing the Equation: 50+ US Black Women in STEM”

“Rising Stargirls” founder and director Dr. Aomawa Shields is featured in award-winning author Tonya Bolden’s book, Changing the Equation: 50+ US Black Women in STEM. A book that features groundbreaking black women who are pioneering STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields throughout the United States.