1. Student engagement — overall, student engagement is my main interest and a common thread through all of my practice and research. My dissertation focuses on uniting more individual and more social conceptions of engagement, expanding current three- and four-dimensional models into a six-dimensional model (individual-affective, individual-behavioral, individual-cognitive, social-affective, social-behavioral, and social-cognitive). In doing a three-paper option, I have already submitted papers to two research journals and one online-only, practitioner journal, and hope have them accepted in the coming months!
2. Physical computing — to foster equitable engagement in computation, our team has engaged in numerous automated-hydroponics and smart-greenhouse projects, both in- and out-of-school time. Check out our short videos (3 minutes each) on STEM entrepreneurship, transparent soil, Food Justice Ambassadors, ChangeMakers, near-peer mentoring, and automated mini-greenhouses. Our most recent version uses block-based coding with BBC micro:bit, sensors and actuators with a CrowTail shield, and a laser-cut frame that youth can re-design. We have found that the transdisciplinary nature of this work draws upon a variety of student interests (cooking, gardening, lighting, coding, building, etc.) to promote engagement in computation, especially when we train high-schoolers to act as both instructors and mentors to middle-schoolers.
3. Invention education (and any user- or activity-centered design)— to build upon youth’s cultural and linguistic repertoires when engaging in user- and activity-centered design, we have partnered with the Lemelson-MIT JV InvenTeams Program to facilitate seven of their invention curriculum units. We have found that a four-fold approach to inventing (Doodling, Organizing, Talking, and Tinkering) often works better with three-person teams, which encourages youth to engage in multiple practices of user- and activity-centered design.
4. Near-peer mentoring — frequent in the physical computing work and occasional in the invention education work, near-peer mentoring (usually high-schoolers in mentorships with middle-schoolers) supports a variety of affective, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes, with implications for course achievement, academic attainment, career selection, well-being, and more. I started in this field through college graduates mentoring college students, then college students mentoring high-schoolers, before my current work with high-schoolers mentoring middle-schoolers.