Creating Opportunities and Supporting Invention Education for High School Students Around the Nation: Lemelson-MIT Program

• In Event: Creating Innovative Learning Environments Through Community and Interdisciplinary Connections for Invention Education

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines ways through which the Lemelson-MIT (LMIT) program guides the creation of learning environments for high school students around the nation to engage in inventing technological solutions to problems students identify in their communities. We examine how invention education with students locally becomes possible through multilayered collaborations of national and local actors, including schools, funders, local communities, and the LMIT program.

Perspectives
Invention education (IvE) is a developing field of study in both K-12 and higher education (Couch, Skukauskaite, & Green, 2019) and a form of educational engagement in which people are taught how to find and define problems and design and build useful and unique technological solutions that contribute to the betterment of the society (Committee for the Study of Invention, 2004; Couch et al., 2019). Invention educators contend that inventiveness can be taught and that engagement with invention can begin at any age (Bell, Chetty, Jaravel, Petkova, & Van Reenen, 2018; Link & Ruhm, 2013; Sarada, Andrews, & Ziebarth, 2017). Research suggests that one of the key ways of creating access to and interest in inventing and STEM pathways for diverse learners involves engaging students in hands-on inventing that involves collaborating with each other and people beyond the school (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2019; Couch, Skukauskaite, & Estabrooks, 2019).

Modes of inquiry
This paper is part of a larger ethnographic study that examines ways various actors in local, national, and international networks create cultures of inventiveness with high school students around the nation. Interactional Ethnography (Green, Skukauskaite, & Baker, 2012) is the overarching mode of inquiry that draws on anthropology, sociology, and sociolinguistics to examine how, through discourse and interaction, people construct patterned ways of knowing, being, and doing invention education in local spaces as well as across communities. As a multi-method approach (Walford, 2018), ethnography enables us to use multiple data sources to construct in time and overtime, in-depth and larger-scope interpretations about what counts as invention education and how, when, where, and by whom it is constructed with particular purposes and outcomes.

Data
Data includes LMIT program records, teacher and student surveys, interviews with teachers, students, program staff and others. For this paper, we analyzed documents, artifacts, and interviews to uncover the ways LMIT program structures opportunities for invention education in collaboration with schools and communities.

Results
Analyses revealed intentional practices and resources that are provided to teachers and students to guide their engagement in invention at their schools. Documents, funds, webinars, trainings, and interpersonal communication between the local actors at the schools and the Lemelson-MIT program create opportunities for students and teachers to connect their invention work to the larger IvE networks. Analyses also revealed how the goals for IvE advocated by researchers, funders, and policy makers, are embedded within the guidance that the LMIT program provides for high school teachers and students.

Significance
This paper provides insights into ways of supporting invention education through intentional structuring of guidelines for student engagement in inventing solutions to problems identified in their communities.

Authors

• Stephanie Renee Couch, Masschusetts Institute of Technology

• Audra Skukauskaite, University of Central Florida