Work in Progress: Place-based Engineering with Rural Schools: Investigating the SCience and ENgineering Inquiry Collaborative (SCENIC) in Colorado

Background, Motivation and PurposeThe Colorado SCience and ENgineering Inquiry Collaborative for Rural K12 Outreach (SCENIC Colorado) is investigating an educational infrastructure for supporting engineering and science learning and identity formation as part of an outreach program with rural Colorado high schools.This research takes the rural context into careful consideration.While rural places are often described by their deficits (Reagan et al., 2019), this study operationalizes place-based pedagogy and the theoretical framework of rural cultural wealth (Crumb et al., 2022) to conceptualize and engage rural places from an asset-based perspective.We believe rural places can be rich environments for engineering and science learning.Therefore, we aspire to support high school students with the development of soil or air quality inquiry projects that are relevant to their local rural communities.Situated within a larger study on the SCENIC outreach program and its impact on student participation in and identification with engineering and science, this paper focuses more narrowly on place-based engineering with students in the rural context.The research questions are: What aspects of the outreach program's educational infrastructure enable place-based science and engineering inquiry?What aspects of place-their locality's history and culture-inform rural students' selection of environmental monitoring topics to investigate?How does conducting place-based environmental monitoring projects contribute to rural students' engineering and science identity development?In the United States, rural settings are an under-researched (Lavalley, 2019) cultural context for education, even though approximately half of school districts, a third of schools, and a fifth of students in the United States are in rural areas (NCES, 2016).Rural students are underrepresented among college attendees, specifically among STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) majors (Saw & Agger, 2021).Furthermore, rural high schools include a larger population of students who are unprepared for engineering formation and may experience lower retention throughout an engineering pathway (DeUrquidi, 2019).Programs aimed at professional engineering formation among rural students may help close this gap.The cultural dimensions of how people learn and come to think of themselves as future engineers may differ for rural students, and among students in different rural contexts (Matusovich et al., 2017).Therefore, place-based education may be particularly impactful in rural settings (Shamah & Mactavish, 2009).A key motivator for engaging in this project is to advance understanding of how to foster rural K-12 students' engineering formation and pathways.As in the rest of the nation, rural high schools in Colorado are underserved with respect to university outreach and engineering education.Research has documented that "rural students tend to lack opportunities to learn in STEM" (Saw & Agger, 2021, p. 595).One reason for this under-representation can be found in previous SCENIC assessment results indicating that almost half of the student population would be the first generation in their families to attend college.In response, SCENIC is providing university mentors to assist with high school student projects, answer questions about engineering as a career and serve as role models for students thinking of attending college