Using the Patterson Foundation grant, the College of Education and the Rural Education Center of Kansas State are integrating computer science education and place-based learning into rural Kansas schools by working with teachers. The project will allow teachers to earn credits through Kansas State by taking courses in computer science and place-based education, which will prepare them to teach the content to their students.
“The project will approach the school and community gap through innovative place-based methods to support rural community curricular involvement and teacher professional learning to support economic vitality in rural Kansas communities with high levels of poverty,” Karen Eppley, associate professor of education and director of the Rural Education Center of, said.
Place-based education is one component of the grant, which prioritizes teaching students about their communities by applying their education to the context of where they are growing up.
“The idea is that people care about where they are from, and it’s best if you can build their learning for them,” teaching associate professor of computer science Nathan Bean said. “Place-based education tries to have ties back to the community and open doors in schools to be more involved in their community.”
The dual function of the grant to integrate both computer science and place-based education into rural areas of Kansas will address the disconnect between curriculum and community, as well as the differences in curriculum between rural and larger communities.
“While the school is a social and economic hub of many rural communities, that does not often extend to its curriculum,” Eppley said. “This project seeks to build on that community by integrating the rural setting of the school into the curriculum. … We know that rural students have less access to computer science education compared to metropolitan and suburban schools. We also know that rural teachers tend to teach in the same community where they themselves went to school, or a very similar community, so that produces this cycle of reduced access to computer science because those teachers are less prepared to teach computer science to rural students.”
Eppley said the Patterson Foundation previously funded the Cyber Pipeline project at K-State, and this project continues that collaboration.
“Computer science is good for this particular grant because of the way that Nathan Bean and his colleagues are going to support teachers in their training about how to use data and modeling to learn about rural places,” Eppley said.
Nathan Bean is heading the computer science component of the grant, which continues the work of the Cyber Pipeline project. The Cyber Pipeline project supports the initiative to provide computer science education to rural schools that would otherwise lack the resources to do so.
Bean said that when he and his colleagues launched the cyber pipeline, they spoke with the leadership of rural schools and found that, while computer science education is important to these communities, they lack the resources or personnel to teach it.
“We started the Cyber Pipeline project with the basic idea of taking introductory-level computer science courses to the high schools,” Bean said. “Our real interest was: what challenges do the schools have, and how can we address that problem? So, we built a professional development program around that to help prepare teachers.”
Bean said the program supports teachers’ busy schedules by allowing them to take as long as they need to complete the courses, resulting in a high completion rate among teachers, some of whom are beginners in computer science.
“We had reached a third of the school districts in Kansas, but we knew there were a lot of schools that still needed help getting across the finish line, so we reached out to the College of Education who was partnering with the Rural Education Center, and used the Patterson funds,” Bean said. “… If we keep going at this rate, within a couple of years, we will have ideally saturated most of Kansas, so we would have at least one teacher from each district in Kansas go through our program.”
