Investigating Chicago's Digital Divide through Participatory STEM Learning

This multiphase dissertation project contests the boundaries of STEM education by centering the discursive relationship emergent between participatory learning and community self-determination. In the contexts of both my science classroom and summer technology program, I explore how teachers and students engage the structure-agency dialectic present within a participatory STEM project to address community issues at the intersections of canonical STEM knowledge, environmental justice, and digital technologies. The holistic set of data include curriculum documents, program recordings, and interviews with teachers, students, and community leaders. This video clip features a specific week in the summer technology program, in which West Side youth investigate how disparate internet speeds and prices from major internet service providers contribute to Chicago’s existing digital divide. Their findings informed the ways in which they developed and deployed the Westside Community Network, a community application (app) capable of circumnavigating broadband infrastructure disparities. By articulating the particularities of the community app and our program’s curriculum design, my research foregrounds the relationship between STEM learning and community contexts in ways that position youth as transformative intellectuals who enact their agentic power to transform oppressive structures and help their communities to self-determine.