Page 57 - Resources and Support for the Online Educator

CHAPTER 2 • How Might Teachers Respond to the Challenges?

Applying these perspectives, Scott and White (2013) sought to
understand how unique STEM learning contexts employing
CRC practices affected girls’ pre- and post- programmatic
engagement. Their research study, conducted on a
sample of forty-one high school students participating in
COMPUGIRLS, a National Science Foundation–sponsored
program teaching technoliteracies to girls in digital media,
game development, and virtual worlds, contended that
girls are interested in technological fields despite a lack of
culturally relevant opportunities to pursue such disciplines.
They discovered the more complicated the technology
and the higher the expectations, the more COMPUGIRLS
participants expressed enjoyment. Moreover, Scott and White
(2013) observed that the power of manipulation (e.g., to
design and build an artifact that performs a task) not only
intrigued participants, but also empowered them to perform
individual research on specific technological topics in
innovative ways—encouraging social change. This example of
spiraling back to a time of connecting students, technology,
and the world through educative experiences proposes an
opportunity for reconnection between the means and ends of
education today and our role as teacher educators.
My experiences as a K–12 STEM educator, STEM TOSA,
and STEM program developer within a public high school
have revealed the value and importance of building a social-
culture that is human-centered, rigorous, place-based (has
a positive role in the community), and connective to the
discrete, individual experiences of students. These foci are not
only reflected in the research presented above but emerged
out of a number of experiences with my students while
building a STEM-based program, namely through rigorous
competition (e.g., US FIRST Robotics, NASA Student
Launch, and Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam), but also through
student-designed opportunities (TeenHacks Hackathon)

38 Closing the Gap: Digital Equity Strategies for the K–12 Classroom

Excerpted from Chapter 2, “How Might Teachers Respond to the Challenges?”

Closing the Gap: Digital Equity Strategies for the K-12 Classroom 57