Understanding Community-Oriented STEM Learning as Local Value Creation

• In Event: Challenges and Benefits of Culturally and Community-Responsive Education

Abstract

This design-based research intervention explores how youth create value in their local communities by recognizing needs or challenges and recruiting STEM disciplines to develop solutions. Organizing weekly, after-school programming around community-oriented STEM projects involved 19 middle and high school youth in cycles of value creation during and beyond program events. Qualitative inquiry into retrospective interviews and digital video recordings of social activity across 32 sessions over 8 months lend insight into how youth enlist STEM disciplines to create local value in and with their own communities. Findings demonstrate that the program provided an expansive context in which STEM content and community context productively intersected and created multiple opportunities to apply and realize value.

Authors

• Steven J. Zuiker, Arizona State University

• Michelle Jordan, Arizona State University