The Bronzeville Fusion Network: Making Visible the Infrastructure Challenges to Developing a Learning Ecosystem

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

Abstract

A child’s decision to pursue a STEM career is not innate, but nurtured through access to a variety of quality learning experiences across formal and informal settings such as schools, parks, libraries, and public makerspaces. The layering of these experiences across settings creates a curiosity and familiarity with creative tools and computational devices that is built upon through participation in creative arts, science, and computing after school programs and by tinkering around with friends and family while at home or playing in the neighborhood. The importance of the fluid integration of STEM learning across formal and informal settings is being documented in the growing body of research that highlights the importance of informal learning as a predictor of future careers in STEM (e.g. Renninger, Nieswandt, & Hidi, 2015). However, the literature is not as vocal about how to create the community infrastructure (e.g. spaces, partnerships, programs, showcases, mentors, learning management and registration systems, online neighborhood social networks) necessary to incubate and sustain the vibrant out-of-school learning ecosystem necessary to support the ecology of informal learning opportunities needed in diverse social economic communities that are often underserved.

Many urban communities that are populated with low and middle-income families of color suffer from a lack of quality STEM informal programming (Pinkard et al, 2015), resulting in adolescents from low-income families being less likely to participate in organized after school activities (Covay & Carbonaro, 2010). A lack of articulation and documentation of sustainable socio-technical infrastructures that support equitable and robust STEM informal learning communities--not just the outcomes and curricular resources resulting from these infrastructures--limits the ability of researchers, practitioners, and community educators to take up successful innovations and spread them beyond their original context of incubation.

This poster presents the Bronzeville Fusion Network (BFN), a collective effort in one community to define and implement an infrastructure to support the provisioning of quality afterschool STEM programming for sixth-to-eighth grade youth, focusing on opportunities for physical, digital, and computational making. In 2016, the Digital Youth Network (Barron, Gomez, Pinkard, & Martin, 2014) in partnership with the Chicago Public Schools Office of Leadership and Learning and Little Black Pearl Art and Design community center, launched BFN, which acted as a living lab designed to deepen collective understanding as to how to strengthen the STEAM learning ecosystem for youth and families in one community on the southside of Chicago. The project takes a broader ecological perspective (Barron, 2006) to understand STEAM learning, expanding out from the school as the focal learning environment to the larger geographically oriented community. The poster will share the community and the infrastructure design, focusing on joint efforts to address three key roadblocks:(1) lack of access to learning spaces designed and equipped with the proper resources to support engagement in computational making; few adult educators with the technical, social and cultural skills and dispositions to lead such programming or adults in the community with disciplinary expertise; and (3) lack of safe and affordable transportation to enable youth freedom of movement between learning spaces.

Authors

• Nichole D. Pinkard, DePaul University

• Caitlin Kennedy Martin, DePaul University - Digital Youth Network

• Elaina Boytor, DePaul University