Rising next-generation leadership through youth-led community engineering

Youth have been positioned as learners to be prepared for future contributing rather than as stakeholders and agents with assets who can help solve community problems and build on community cultural capital. This thwarts youths’ inclinations to engage, and denies them opportunities to play powerful roles in creating innovations that contribute to their communities’ economic, social, and ecological resilience, while gaining competence and agency that inspire resilience along STEM pathways and engaged citizenship.

Traditionally, systems of education position youth as learners who are preparing themselves to contribute at some later date in the future. But if we're going to have resilient communities, we need resilient youth who see themselves simultaneously as learners and contributors to those communities, right now, in the present moment, and in the future.

At this particular moment in history, youth are exhibiting their immense capacity and inclination to play roles in preparing for our energy transitions, our future of our energy futures and to do that in ways that foster their own resilience and their community’s resilience. Creating sustainable futures through renewable energy transitions is a multi-pronged, multifaceted problem that presents both challenges and opportunities. Our greatest asset in this endeavor may be youth themselves. Youth are increasingly engaged in climate change activism. They are, in fact, contributing, they are making impacts in their community, and they are doing it largely without infrastructuring support by people who could be their adult supporters.

Nationally, we see declining interest in STEM; fewer students are going into STEM careers or pursuing STEM trajectories. We have historically failed to cultivate pathways for students from ethnic and racial minorities underrepresented in STEM and for students from communities that comprise lower-economic strata to participate in significant ways in STEM education or in the STEM workforce. Our systems of education often treat youth as learners and not as contributors until some future date where they'll suddenly be ready to do so. At the same time, we do have an industry community and an education system working to counter these historical inequities.

During this project, I worked with middle and high school students from the Alhambra Neighborhood in West Phoenix, and with teachers, students, and alumni of the Alhambra Elementary School District. Also important to the project were collaborations with faculty and graduate students from multiple universities, and partners from community and industry organizations. Project work explored multiple strategies for creating networks of support for fostering youth-led community energy endeavors.

Data being collected and analyzed for this study include: artifacts (including ideational contributions) that youth create in collaboration with their peers and/or in collaboration with adult supporters, including teachers in formal and informal settings, and community members. This also includes process data about who actually makes the decisions about projects and activities. If collected, this will provide insight into how teachers and other adult supporters allow students to lead in these projects. What youth report about their experiences in project-related activity and how their engagement influences their agency. Community members’ responses to the work of the youth in their community. Teachers’ experiences engaging youth in youth-led community energy engineering endeavors.

• Teacher impact: Middle grade teachers gain skills in integrating youth initiatives into STEM curricula and interdisciplinary project-based learning endeavors, increase their commitment to fostering youth agency and consequential engagement through such endeavors
• Youth impact: Framing the impact in consequential learning which is situating youth to have rightful presence in STEM, consequential learning and contributing to real work with real consequences. Fostering youth agency by creating opportunities for rightful presence that leads to consequential learning. Youth agency provides opportunities for students to see themselves as capable of contributing - and actually contributing- to their communities in significant ways. (youth have been put in several positions that are usually adult positioned like Agrivoltaics (gardens + solar energy) curriculum)
• Community impact: Youth-led initiatives and youth-adult partnerships will provide more equitable access to energy innovation or energy information for youth’s community and beyond. Youth projects build on community assets in the Alhambra Neighborhood of West Phoenix to benefit students’ peers, teachers, family members, and neighbors.
• Research Impact: contribute to developing models for design infrastructuring network of collaboration for youth-led