STEM UP report Cydney Snyder
This project is important not only because it is a good thing to provide children with education and better possible job opportunities. This project is important because millions of students grow up in rural communities and believe that their community is not “good enough”. In development, growth is seen as an indicator of progress which leads to a lack of understanding of places that choose and rejoice in staying small. When students have to leave their communities in order to find more educational opportunities, they are not taught about subjects that relate to their experiences and their communities. Furthermore, when students leave their communities, they quickly find that people think of small rural communities a lesser. As a result, these students learn to reject small town values and traditions, they deny the good parts of their upbringing, and repress those aspects of their background that make them feel “other”. This camp, and in general the movement of place-based education, can provide students with a new narrative of what it means to be from rural, while also giving them the opportunity to have a more well-rounded and adequate STEM education.
This project is important not only because it is a good thing to provide children with education and better possible job opportunities. This project is important because millions of students grow up in rural communities and believe that their community is not “good enough”. In development, growth is seen as an indicator of progress which leads to a lack of understanding of places that choose and rejoice in staying small. When students have to leave their communities in order to find more educational opportunities, they are not taught about subjects that relate to their experiences and their communities. Furthermore, when students leave their communities, they quickly find that people think of small rural communities a lesser. As a result, these students learn to reject small town values and traditions, they deny the good parts of their upbringing, and repress those aspects of their background that make them feel “other”. This camp, and in general the movement of place-based education, can provide students with a new narrative of what it means to be from rural, while also giving them the opportunity to have a more well-rounded and adequate STEM education.
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Background<br />
In 2015, I graduated from Celina High School, a small public school in rural North<br />
Texas. The class of 2015 was the largest graduating class in the town’s history – just ten<br />
years earlier the number has been 43. Rural is a bit of a tradition in my family - both of my<br />
parents were raised in on farms in rural towns. In 1998 they moved to Allen, Texas, a town<br />
20 minutes north of Dallas with at that time a population of 38,000 people. This town was<br />
much too big for my parents, and so in 2000 when I was 3 years old, we moved to Celina,<br />
Texas. This town had a population of 2,700, no grocery store, and still housed grades<br />
Kindergarten – 12 th grade in one building. As I grew up, so did the town, and by the time I<br />
graduated in 2015 there was a separate building for the high school, middle school and<br />
elementary. I took all four AP classes that my high school offered, I was in the top<br />
5percent of my class, and was involved in a range of activities like raising pigs,<br />
cheerleading, and acting in my school plays.<br />
I was raised to believe that my educational experience was superior to those who<br />
lived in big cities, and I did not realize the opportunities and resources that I lacked until I<br />
began college at Southern Methodist University. Whereas I had to pioneer many<br />
opportunities to become the second person from my high school to attend SMU, many of<br />
my peers had been a part of pipelines that had resources and connections to the<br />
university. SMU was my dream, and one of the best colleges that anyone from Celina had<br />
ever gone to, but for many of my college friends, SMU was their back up. My desire to<br />
help students in rural communities was further kindled as I watched my younger brother –<br />
valedictorian with the highest GPA in my high school’s history, a 35 ACT score, all-state<br />
football player and all-state choir member – get rejected from ten out of the eleven<br />
6
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