Population Served

CTAN reached over 2,000 K-12 students across four afterschool sites offered by Techbridge (Oakland, CA), Community Science Workshop Network (Fresno and Watsonville, CA) and Discovery Cube (partnering with the Fontana After School program in Fontana, CA). These sites reach students from rural and urban communities who are traditionally underrepresented in STEM. Across sites, the majority of participants were children of color, with up to 100 percent of students qualifying for free and reduced price lunch, and up to 70 percent of students being English Language Learners depending on the site.

Program Features

CTAN explicitly took an equity-oriented approach, seeking to provide learning experiences that support all youth’s successful participation in activities and contribution to learning communities. This is done by building on students’ personal interests and prior experiences, considering them resources for new learning, rather than deficits.

Further, we know that making activities hold the promise of providing valuable learning opportunities, particularly when incorporating STEM tools and practices. We were concerned about whether or not this promise is fulfilled for children underrepresented in STEM. How can STEM-rich making provide expansive and equitable learning experiences for all youth? And what professional supports are necessary for educators to support meaningful making experiences for youth? To investigate these questions, we formed a research-practice partnership and jointly analyzed observation data together over three years.

Program Structure

Techbridge offers inquiry-based science and engineering activities for girls through programs located on school campuses. School-day teachers team up with Techbridge staff to lead STEM-based activities. Within the CTAN partnership, high school girls created projects of their own design to showcase at San Mateo’s Maker Faire, which often incorporated Arduino microcomputers and other computer science aspects.

CSW offers STEM-based, open-ended making activities at drop-in afterschool centers. Youth choose what they want to make and are welcome to bring their own projects to work on using CSW tools and materials. These sites also operated as community drop-in centers, in which family members of all ages were welcome. In both Fresno and Watsonville, many of the paid staff had themselves been community drop-in participants as youth.

Discovery Cube with Fontana After School Program focused on teaching STEM-rich making activities with 3rd-5th grade children. Making activities included explorations with circuitry, such as creating circuits and building scribbling machines.

Professional Development

Techbridge offers a week-long professional development (PD) for their educators every summer, as well as monthly professional developments throughout the school year. PD reflects the best practices for inquiry-based learning, addresses equity issues in STEM learning for girls of diverse ethnic, racial, socioeconomic and ability backgrounds. Additionally, educators try out the making activities they will be teaching in order to understand first-hand the type of questions and learning that may emerge for youth.

CSW also offers hands-on PD learning experiences for their educators, as well as trainings that explore program mission, goals, equity issues that arise across different drop-in sites, and supporting families and youth mentors.

Discovery Cube hosted a regional professional development workshop, which Fontana After School Program coordinators and educators attended. The PD reflected the best practices in maker education, and attendees had the opportunity to implement the activities they learned.

Partnerships

The goal of our partnership was not only to explore how STEM-rich making can provide expansive and equitable learning experiences for all youth, but also to challenge the gaps that often exist between researchers and educators. Our partnership wanted to challenge traditional models of educational research and practice--where researchers come in with their own questions, implement theory-driven solutions, collect data, and make recommendations with little to no input from educators. We formed our “research-practice partnership” with the goal of improving communication across researchers and educators while developing research that was jointly analyzed and therefore more useful to educators. Typically, these types of partnerships sit at the intersection of research (knowledge-building) and evaluation (program improvement). Partners review, discuss, and analyze evidence, collected in the form of video or field notes, in order to gain a deep yet practical understanding of how program implementation affects youth and adults. In our research-practice partnership, the shared interest was a desire to articulate what high-quality STEM-rich making looks like.

Outcomes

Our research found that making can support several aspects of student learning, regardless of students’ gender, ability, socioeconomic status, or community of origin. However, to achieve these valued outcomes, making activities must be implemented in ways that are both STEM-rich and equitable. Additionally, making programs provide a powerful context for socio-emotional and academic learning in the following ways:  

• Supporting students’ persistence by offering opportunities for intellectual and creative risk-taking.
• Engaging students in STEM practices, such as designing, building, testing, and refining.
• Supporting the development of 21st century skills such as collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking.
• Supporting connections across informal and formal education settings toward deeper learning both in and out of school.

Our research findings also define the characteristics of productive making programs and the necessary professional supports for the educators who lead them. Read our report, “STEM-Rich Making in Afterschool” to learn about these findings in depth.

Funding

CTAN’s major funding sources were the National Science Foundation and the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. CTAN equally valued both educational practice and educational research, and therefore made it a goal to ensure all partners received equal amounts of funding for both programming and research.

Our Resources

Throughout the project, CTAN team members reflected on what it takes to build positive and equitable working relationships between educators and researchers. We developed two resources to document this, however they’re useful for thinking about any partnership!

1. Building Equitable Partnerships spells out what equitable partnerships look like and guides questions for establishing, engaging, and encouraging equity between partners.
2. Value Mapping is an activity partners complete together that surfaces power dynamics and diverse perspectives.

For maker activity guides, PD resources, or to learn more about equity in afterschool visit our Resources Webpage.