Dr. Edna Tan (Teacher Education and Higher Education) received new funding from the National Science Foundation for the project “STEM-based Making for Youth, Families, and Communities.”
The 3-year Research in Service to Practice project, Critical Connected Co-Making (C3), addresses the Enhancing Knowledge Building and Broadening Participation priority area. As the field of maker education is solidifying quickly, the aim of the C3 project is to expand what the field knows about the rich and deep ingenuity in STEM-rich co-making that minoritized youth engage in with families and communities (“life-based co-making”). The overarching goal is to figure out how to infrastructure for pathway building between how and why youth and families make at home and in communities and in STEM-rich maker programs. Infrastructuring refers to the actionable components that are the building blocks of connecting pathways between life-based co-making and STEM-rich making programs serving minoritized youth. Such infrastructuring would systematically support the development and movement of social relationships and routines-of-practice including resource-sharing, pedagogical decisions, making processes and overall maker project arcs.
