Opportunity Landscaping: Infrastructuring Healthy Learning Communities to Power Positive STEM Futures

The communities in which we live and learn are largely the product of historical decisions related to race and ethnicity made by politicians, elected officials, and others with power and money. In Chicago, during the Great Migration, the Chicago Real Estate Board set up a committee that determined where Black residents could and could not live. In the 1930's redlining and greenlining funneled money and resources away from areas identified as "bad investments," which were communities that were non-white, and toward white communities deemed to be a "better investment." In the 1970s, desegregation mandates resulted in new magnet and selective enrollment schools that were open to anyone but required young people to travel far from their homes to attend. Today, boundaries, such as Wards and neighborhood school districts, continue to be drawn and redrawn-sometimes with the best intentions-in ways that fracture communities. These imprints of the past continue to impact ways of being today that continue to create an inequitable present that is not authentic to the needs and desires of the communities in those places. Creating a more equitable landscape for learning science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics, and sports (STEAMS) in the future requires making the past and present of places visible and giving agency to communities to change their landscapes in ways that serve their current and future needs. Using lessons learned from over 20 years designing learning ecosystems in collaboration with cities, neighborhoods, affinity groups, civic learning institutions, and families, I will put forth the concept of opportunity landscaping as a hyperlocal ecosystem approach to supporting communities in visualizing and tuning their learning infrastructure to provide the learning places, spaces, resources, caring adults, and peers to nurture healthy STEM identities and lifestyles for youth and families living in historically disinvested communities. Given my background as a computer scientist, I will focus examples of efforts to develop computational making activities throughout the ecosystems discussed.