Search

Rural students, schools, and communities have unique challenges that hinder academic achievement, growth, and opportunities, compared to other locales. While there is a need to study this community more, there is also a pressing need to bring the local community members together to support the future generation of learners in developing pathways that lead them to future career opportunities. This article focuses on how a Research Practice Partnership (RPP) can be developed in rural communities to support STEM pathways for local middle-school youth. RPPs are often described as long-term collaborations between both researchers and practitioners in which the participating partners leverage research to address specific persistent problems of practice. We present findings from a developing design-based RPP focused on bringing community members and organizations together to co-design opportunities for underserved youth in rural mountain communities.

Scholars have analyzed the possibilities that robotics-centered learning programs offer, including opportunities for developing collaboratively and engaging in authentic STEM professional practice....

In this chapter, we explore one aspect of the Anthropocene, the vital, vibrant connections between life and matter (Whatmore, Cultural Geographies 13(4):600–609, 2006.). Drawing on the effectivity of water as a solution and the “Flint water crisis,” we explore how humans tend not to notice matter unless it brings an effect upon them. Our approach follows Melinda Benson, (Natural Resources Journal 59:251–280, 2019) in seeking to decenter human exceptionalism and explore the chemical and biological actors relationally engaged in a system with humans engendering phenomena that are unpredictable as we demonstrate in a case study of the City of Flint and its access to drinking water for humans. As this case highlights, often matter only becomes noticed when it establishes an ontological disturbance forcing itself on human experience and becoming noticed in the process. Important elements of such “noticing” are tied up with the human-material intra-actions engendering phenomena that is shaped by race and geographic history. Rather than constructing Flint and other examples as emergencies or crises that need to be solved, education should explore the dynamic nature of these events and the intra-actions of all elements. This approach offers one strategy for transforming what K–12 science education looks like for both developing scientists and everyday citizens.

This paper examines video data of a high school robotics team to explore practices that empower youth from underrepresented groups in engineering to disrupt traditional boundaries around what engineering is and who is considered competent to participate in its practice. We analyze in-the-moment positioning work with a focus on care and maintenance practices to understand how two young Women of Color author and negotiate positional identities as part of disciplinary practices. We argue that they co-author programming positional identities by crafting a local relational space, or a comfort space, through resonating acts of care for each other’s development. A more equitable future for engineering education requires an expansive vision of engineering that explicitly includes notions of what is cared for and the kinds of identities it offers to whom, and why.