Digital East St. Louis Project

-Dr. Jess DeSpain

East St. Louis

-Population decreased 82,3666 in 1950 to 27,066 in 2010.

-Source of Project Funding: National Science Foundation ITEST

Purpose of Digital East St. Louis Project is to attract East St. Louis natives, who largely constitute under-represented groups, into STEM

Project Overview:

-Develop + test an urban place-based learning model

-Cohort of grade 6-9 participants progress through 4-week summer camps and Saturday sessions during the school year over a three-year period

-5-6 Instructors help develop + deliver content in the hopes they will take what they learn into their classrooms

Urban Place-based Education

Participants ask questions, solve real-world problems, and use field work to gather information in a local urban setting

Impacting Local Communities

1. Pairing “IRL” experiences with digital methods
2. Begin projects with a goal of listening + learning from participant experiences
3. Gauging participant technology use + needs
4. Forms of reciprocity when facing a lack of basic human needs

Middle School: age where STEM based interests often fade away, also age where web-building commonly involves playing around with text in ways that might hurt the eyes of an adult, but for the student, it is the coolest thing ever. They play with WordPress sites before working on main project.

If could start it over, prefer to work with smaller cohorts (15 at a time beginning in the summer)

Project should last 4 Years- ideally each student will be transferred into upward bound (upward bound=college readiness program for high schoolers), 3^rd year = more options, e.g. graphic novels/game design, Intrinsic based: extrinsic learning does not equal long term learning.

Biggest tension: how much control over website is given to students vs. providing a usable database

Best way to encourage extrinsic motivation: choice + presence of friends

Problems with Project: because basic human needs are not always met in East St. Louis, it has been hard to get people involved

Better luck getting people to show up by texting students instead of parents

The Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship (IRIS) Center (siueiris.com/) is a facility designed to support individual and collaborative scholarship at faculty and student levels that applies digital content as a primary methodology. IRIS facilitates cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects that involve applications, enhancements, or re-conceptualizations of technology in the humanities and social sciences.

The IRIS Center is home to a number of exciting faculty-student research projects, and IRIS-affiliated faculty have even launched a brand new interdisciplinary minor in digital humanities and social sciences.

The co-directors of the IRIS Center (Jessica DeSpain and Kristine Hildebrandt) would like to offer a tour of the Center, including some illustrations of current and past projects, conversations with IRIS faculty and student researchers, and a discussion of the minor.

We are planning two tours: one on Saturday June 11 @ 1.45pm and one on Sunday June 12 @ 10.10am. We will meet in the MUC Hickory-Hackberry Room and walk together to Peck Hall, where the IRIS Center is housed.

Session Organizers: Sudhamadhuri Arvapally, Jessica DeSpain, Matt Johnson, Sharon Locke, & Mallory Maves

This presentation will share work underway with Digital East St. Louis, a project funded by a National Science Foundation Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers grant. Housed at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the project is a collaboration between the Science Technology and Math Center, the Interdisciplinary Research and Scholarship Center (SIUE’s digital humanities Center), and the East St. Louis Community. In addition to sharing information about the project, we’ll also give session attendees the chance to interact with and comment upon student work.

Faculty in English and History who specialize in the digital humanities work alongside middle school teachers in the East St. Louis school district to develop a comprehensive three-year summer and after-school program for a group of middle school students. The research component of Digital East St. Louis is assessing how a digital humanities, place-based approach inspires student interest in the computer sciences. Over the three-year program, which launched in the summer of 2015, students will build a comprehensive database and a content-rich digital map showcasing their research into the history and culture of the city and its inhabitants.
One of the project’s primary goals is to encourage students to think across disciplines about ecology, geography, the lived environment, history, literature, and culture. Students will use skills central to information technology and information literacy to draw linkages between these topics, which will expand their critical thinking abilities and encourage them to see technology as a tool for exploring and visualizing broader questions. The project plans to train students in photography as they learn about East St. Louis architecture, learn about video production as they conduct oral history interviews with East St. Louis residents, and develop skills in research and metadata as they develop their own research interests for the project. This presentation will highlight the projects’ progress and discuss how to develop successful collaborations between the fields of STEM and the digital humanities in informal K-12 learning environments.