RAPID: How People Learn Rapidly: COVID-19 as a Crisis of Socioscientific Understanding and Educational Equity (NSF)
We documented how youth and families learned the science of the COVID-19 pandemic in real time, how they activated this scientific knowledge towards informed decision making, and how these processes changed over time.
Building a Learning Model of Youths’ Community-Based Critical Data Practices
(recently funded by NSF, link coming soon)
Using empirical understandings of youths’ community-based critical data practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, we are iteratively constructing a learning model of youths’ community-based critical practices, grounded in social epistemological perspectives. We operationalize youths’ community-based critical data practices as what youth do in socially-mediated and culturally embedded ways with, in relation to, and oriented around data and data infrastructure in support of more equitable everyday living.
Research in Service to Practice: Critical, Connected Co-Making with Youth, Families and Communities (C3)
(recently funded by NSF, link coming soon)
We aim to expand understandings of STEM-rich making that minoritized youth engage in with families and communities (“life-based co-making”), and leverage these insights towards advancing community-based maker programming. Our overarching goal is to better understand the particulars of how and why youth co-make in life-based and STEM-rich ways with families and communities, such that we can better infrastructure community-based maker programs in support of youth learning and well-being.
The YESTEM Project: A US/UK Partnership (NSF +Wellcome Trust)
Taking an ecological view of STEM learning as a sociocultural process of participation and transformation, we documented multiple youth pathways across ISL (informal STEM learning) over time, impacts on learning and development, and influences on ISL organizations. My participatory research findings with youth helped us identify aspects of learning environments which shape youth access and development. From these findings and from data analyzed in partnership with ISL designers, directors, and educators, we are now sharing tools and practices from this project with informal learning organizations globally. Check out the links below to learn more!
OVERVIEW VIDEO HERE + FREE DESIGN RESOURCES HERE
Equitably Consequential Making with Youth and Communities (NSF)
I continue to conduct critical ethnographic and youth collaborative design-based research, focusing on middle school-aged children’s identity development in afterschool STEM making. Check out ongoing student work at getcity.org