Denise Nacu
Adult educators play a wide range of roles that support youth learning and development. For example, teachers present content and organize projects, provide encouragement and access to resources, broker connections to people and learning opportunities, and prompt learners with feedback to revise and improve their work. Particularly for underserved youth, being able to interact with educators who can play these diverse roles in a way that builds relationships and helps them navigate into areas of interest and career pathways is needed. This work takes a design approach that uniquely leverages data that is available from the local learning context (e.g., youth and parent surveys, logs from online learning platforms, and program participation data) that can be used by educators as a resource to understand youth, their interests and engagement, and social interactions.
In this poster, we ask how can we better enable educators to provide individualized and equitable support to youth? Based on observations of mentors working with middle-school aged girls in a 10-week out-of-school STEM program, we describe how various types of support roles were played over the course of the program and present ways in which data visualizations can help educators identify specific needs and opportunities to support and engage students.