CAREER: Investigating how informal STEM educators negotiate, redesign, and repair organizational and community infrastructures to support innovations in learning with computing

Informal learning environments such as museums, libraries, and community organizations are important settings that provide innovative learning experiences to develop young people's interests and skills with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and computing. Yet despite the increasing educational opportunities, there are barriers to meaningful participation for all youth. Research suggests that attention to the structural conditions of learning environments can advance understanding of what enables or hinders youths' successful learning experiences with STEM and computing. These structural conditions not only include materials such as tools and space but also human capital (e.g., informal educators, staff, and volunteers) which plays an instrumental role in designing learning experiences. As new STEM and technology-based opportunities emerge, educators working in informal learning environments must navigate and re-design the material, social, and knowledge infrastructures of their organizations and communities. This can include curating new materials, engaging in professional development, navigating institutional resources and policies to implement these opportunities, and connecting more effectively with community organizations and leaders who invite youth and families to these experiences. The decisions that educators make and how they implement them have a consequential impact on youth and families' access and engagement with these learning experiences. However, these important efforts tend to go unseen as much of the research and development within informal STEM and computing experiences focus on the immediate experiences and outcomes of learners. This project focuses research on the supports that informal educators in STEM and computing need to further realize the full participation of all youth and families.

This award will engage collaborators across three informal settings: a museum, a library system, and a community-based organization, each with its own structural affordances and constraints as well as networks of local and/or national community partners. Specifically, the project team will investigate how educators across these settings navigate their structural conditions as they attempt to incorporate new computational tools and learning opportunities for youth and families in their organizations and communities. This project will involve three phases: (1) an ethnography to examine the types of infrastructures and educators' emergent strategies to negotiate those infrastructures; (2) critical reflection with educator partners related to the structural resistances and possibilities of their settings and communities; (3) design and development of resources for informal educators to think systematically about the ways they collectively redesign and navigate their infrastructures towards full participation for all youth and families with computing. The findings and resources from this project will be shared widely with other STEM informal learning educators and organizations through professional networks and gatherings as well as with other researchers through academic venues such as publications and conferences.

This CAREER award is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing everyone with multiple pathways for accessing and engaging in STEM learning experiences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.