GO ROBOT GO!: TEACHING ROBOTICS TO URBAN TEACHERS AND STUDENTS KAREN L. TONSO AND ECE YAPRAK1 Wayne State University ABSTRACT This paper examines the learning in a summer robotics workshop for teachers and students. Participants came from African American communities, some from economically difficult circumstances. Clear examples of scientific literacy abound, with students able to use on-line resources both to help them understand how their robot functioned, as well as how to debug the function of their robot. The workshop used an approach grounded in practice theory, and took seriously calls for inquiry-based learning settings that allow students to control their learning and follow their own interests. Most participants successfully completed an exit exam typical of engineering coursework. Keywords: Urban education, identity development, pre-college engineering INTRODUCTION Education in the U.S. persistently fails to educate all students so they may choose among good lives in our democracy. The historic legacy that formed the backdrop for the Civil Rights movement is no less salient today than it was over 75 years ago when Carter Woodson penned The Mis-Education of the Negro. He and others (Ella Baker, Septima Clark, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance) emphasized that: …being educated is a dream with deep roots in America’s racial and racist history, a history with a variety of guises: enforced non-education during slavery and the Reconstruction South (Murray, 1956); being relegated solely to technical training and denied access to liberal and professional arts (W.E.B. DuBois’ critique, 1973; Murray, 1951); being mis-educated into ways of life consonant with black servitude in white middle-class soci1
Theoretical and Behavioral Foundations, College of Education, and Engineering Technology, College of Engineering, respectively. For correspondence: Dr. Tonso, #341 Education, Wayne State University, 5425 Gullen Mall, Detroit, MI 48202; email:
[email protected]. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of American Educational Research Association, April 13-17, 2009, San Diego, CA
Tonso & Yaprak, Go Robot Go!, p. 2 ety (Woodson, 1990); independently developing citizenship education to remediate years of being denied even the most basic education (Septima Clark’s approach, see McFadden, 1990); finding—even today—public schools with fewer resources, poorer facilities, lower-paid teachers, and larger class sizes (Anyon, 1997; Kozol, 1991; Morris & Morris, 2002), and … being left out of meaningful schooling decisions. (Tonso & Colombo, 2006, p. 85) In fact, the Civil Rights push for enfranchisement came with attendant educational and economic equity goals, which continue to be under-realized, especially in urban communities. On the one hand, students often misunderstand their suitability for economically viable professions, or on the other hand, fail to appreciate how high school coursework leads to such professions. One such profession worth considering is engineering. In spite of the centrality of engineering to society, and over 30 years of efforts to diversify its membership, engineering remains one of the least diverse professions. Today, while people identifying as black or African American comprise 13.4% of the U.S. population—40.9 million people, they continue to be dramatically under-represented among students in engineering schools (~6%), among engineering graduates (~5%), among Ph.D. graduates (1.4% in 2004), among engineering professors, and among engineers (
