Several weeks ago, a group of 17 National Science Foundation (NSF) advisors and investigators boarded the Laura B. mail boat for the voyage out to Monhegan for a day and a half of meetings. We were all part of the CREST team (Community for Rural Education Stewardship and Technology), funded by a three year NSF grant designed to test new approaches to introducing information technology to schools on the islands and coast of Maine.
Led by Institute staff members, Ruth Kermish-Allen and Shey Conover, who had spent the previous year recruiting 44 teachers and 55 students from 11 schools between Cumberland (Greeley High where Chebeague students attend) all the way east to Lubec — with other communities such as Islesboro, North Haven, Deer Isle-Stonington and Vinalhaven in between.
Each school team had developed a three-year project “question” that can be addressed by using one or more of three technologies — website development, computer mapping and/or digital storytelling (film and sound recording in an “ethnographic” setting). Each school team committed to attend the week-long intensive training in the middle of a beautiful Maine summer.
Through this project, the NSF wants to understand more about how information technologies can be integrated in school curricula in rural areas that generally have less access to such innovations than urban and suburban areas. One of the interesting dimensions of NSF’s program is that it is funded by visa fees paid by foreign workers who come to this country for information technology (IT) jobs, because — you guessed it — our schools and colleges are not producing enough young people to fill the information technology jobs currently available throughout the United States. The Island Institute is interested because island school leaders are convinced that information technology is one of the careers that students can learn, not only to get good jobs, but to develop new jobs in remote places like island communities.
The central part of CREST’s technology training occurred this past summer at one of two week-long intensive institutes that introduced the teams of students and teachers to new hardware — digital cameras and mikes, handheld GPS — and the software and units and programming techniques to run them. The summer institutes were a huge success, largely because the students learned as much as their teachers in side-by-side settings where an easy camaraderie could develop in absorbing technical fine points. Teachers became students; students became teachers. The students and teachers could also choose which technology interested them the most — web, digital moviemaking (not just I-movie), map making — and easily visualize how their new learning applied to their “backyards” in their local schools and communities. And the questions they are asking directly relate to important community issues: How can the town re-open clam flats that have been closed for decades? Or how do the patterns of property transfers and affordable housing relate to each other — to take but two examples.
Of course, it is too early to know where this is all headed and whether the three-year program will achieve its goal of making a lasting difference in each of these schools or whether it will produce students who will pursue IT careers. But a couple of lessons are already apparent. With the exception of Greeley High School in Cumberland, the remainder of the schools — both middle schools and high schools — are in remote and generally disadvantaged communities where the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches exceeds 40 percent. Nevertheless, IT careers are as interesting — perhaps even more interesting — to these students from small and remote schools as they are to those from more seemingly “connected” places. Second, delivering information technology education through place-based education (i.e., education grounded in community settings) appears to be a sound and effective strategy because it both makes sense to students and appeals to teachers. Connecting school with community works.
And a final lesson from the frontal boundary between community and education is a cautionary one. The one school that dropped out of the program at the penultimate moment was Portland High School. The reason is that the schedules of the team of four teachers that had eagerly joined in the planning sessions were re-arranged by their administration to achieve other goals, and this regrettably left them no opportunity to interact as an integrated team to plan their curriculum. Aside from the size and complexity of a city school, Portland team members were also stymied by the task of developing a question related to their community. What is the “community” of Portland, which is so big and diverse and composed of so many, many communities? Finding IT professionals in the Portland community turned out to be more difficult than it was in Islesboro or even Lubec where the answers were obvious and the community members eager to be involved.
Thus, surprisingly, introducing information technology to small, rural, even disadvantaged or impoverished communities may be more achievable than navigating the inertial dynamics of bigger city schools. Small schools, in other words, work. q
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.