Exploring Making Through Mobile Emerging Technologies in Underresourced Rural Communities

• In Event: Making at the Margins: Engaging Underserved Communities in Maker Technologies, Activities, and Spaces

Abstract

When we think of underserved populations in the American education system, we often focus on young people living in densely populated urbans areas. Rural students, however, are equally as underserved in our public k-12 system. Rural public schools depend more on state funding than city/suburban schools; spend more per student than public schools in cities, suburbs, and towns; and have lower pupil-to-teacher ratios than schools in other locals. Rural instructors are less diverse, have fewer years of experience, and earn less on average than peers, even after adjusting for geographic cost differences. About one-third of the approximately 100,000 public schools in the United States are located in rural areas and a larger percentage of rural children live in poverty than their urban, suburban, and exurban peers.

Our poster will introduce the critical maker education community to EMMET – Exploring Making through Mobile Emerging Technologies. Education through Making and Mentoring. EMMET aims to get rural youth interested and involved in career pathways associated with computer technologies and engineering through participation in a range of community-based making experiences. Our work is situated in Northcentral Wisconsin, an economically struggling rural region with many manufacturing companies desperate for engineers and skilled employees who are STEM literate. Recruiting qualified personnel is challenging and the need to “grow our own” STEM workforce has become vital to strengthen Wisconsin’s economy. Meanwhile area high schools struggle to get students interested in higher education and to think of themselves as potential members of the technical, manufacturing workforce (Alcoa Foundation, n.d.; Jaschik, 2015).

The EMMET projects aims to: (a) Introduce a mobile makerspace to small, rural communities and offer open, informal workshops at various community based organizations; (b) train 32 local teens and teachers as “ Maker Mentors” to staff the trailer to deliver STEM maker programming in their own communities; and (c) establish a fixed-site STEM Center at Northcentral Technical College’s main campus in Wausau, Wisconsin, where participants can continue their education in an informal setting, or in one of several pre-engineering associate degrees.

Our research addresses three key questions: (1) How do drop-in, open-ended making experiences impact community perception of and interest in computing technology and engineering learning and careers? (2) What do students who become maker mentors learn about computing technology and engineering content, learn about themselves as makers and STEM learners, and how does this participation impact their postsecondary trajectories? (3) What aspects of the community-involved maker experiences are sustained beyond institutional intervention?

Building on the growing body of research that describes makerspaces as productive communities of practice, making as a set of constructionist STEM activities, and the maker identity as relevant for successful participation in the 21st-century economy (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014) we aim to use this framework to stretch across high school, technical college, and informal learning settings. We hope this research-practice partnership will expand how rural communities can define STEM and computing education and how and where maker-based learning opportunities are offered to address the opportunity and resource gap that exists in these communities.

Authors

• Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Michael Hladilek, Northcentral Technical College

• Darren Ackley