Reconciling Modern Engineering Education with the Everyday of Rural Schools and Youths

We highlight the impacts of inequitable distributions of resources across geographies, structural challenges faced in partnerships with rural schools, and the importance of asset-based arguments to recognize and engage with systemic challenges. Precollege engineering education often focuses on engaging students and teachers hands-on with novel technologies and experiences that frequently distract from systemic inequities, particularly pertaining to place. Given national efforts in rural STEM education, there is a need to recognize important contextual factors influencing precollege engineering education. Through a lens of working with rural Appalachian schools, we hope to challenge practices and assumptions in precollege engineering education.