by Carol Sowers

A soulful image of a teenager, head bowed over his arms, flashes across the screen.

The picture is the signature piece of the penetrating documentary on high school dropouts by 15--year-old Nancy Paz-Arredondo, a freshman at Trevor Browne High School in Phoenix.

"The boy is sad because he knows his education is lost," she said in an interview.

Nancy's documentary was one of several presented recently to friends and relatives during a ceremony for 60 teen girls in various phases of an Arizona State University education outreach program called COMPUGIRLS. The participants, from area middle and high schools, are learning to use technology "as a tool to make changes to society," said Kimberly Scott, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies with ASU's Mary Lou Fulton College of Education and founder of COMPUGIRLS.

Scott said the program's mission is to put girls, many from lower socio-economic neighborhoods, on a level playing field with boys who are often more at ease with technology. The Fulton College was recently awarded a three-year, $800,000 National Science Foundation grant to support COMPUGIRLS. Scott and a team of ASU researchers will lead efforts to evaluate, expand and refine the program and provide additional support to its participants.

The grant was awarded through the Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program. ITEST was established by the NSF's Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings in direct response to the national concern about shortages of technology workers in the United States, and it focuses on the need to expand and diversify the number of students prepared to enter careers in the field.

ITEST projects funded in communities across the country provide school-aged children and teachers with experiences that build the skills and knowledge needed to advance their academic study and expose them to STEM content careers.

Scott is principal investigator of the new ITEST-funded initiative titled COMPUGIRLS: A Culturally Relevant Technology Program for Girls. The project has brought together an interdisciplinary team of co-principal investigators from across the university, including:

• Bryan Brayboy, Borderland Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies with the Fulton College;
• Jenefer Husman, associate professor of psychology in education with the Fulton College;
• Sethuraman "Panch" Panchanathan, professor and director of the School of Computing and Informatics;
• Gregory Aist, assistant research professor with the School of Computing and Informatics; and
• Elisabeth Hayes, professor of curriculum & instruction with the Fulton College

COMPUGIRLS, Scott said, is one of the few programs that wed critical thinking, social justice issues, and technology. The girls have learned to use digital cameras, camcorders, several types of software and Geographic Information Systems, tools that will help them challenge injustices such as racism and gender bias, Scott said. Their documentaries have explored weighty issues such as teen pregnancy, bullying, and students in special education classes.

"We are proving to the girls that even if they are 14 or 15, they have the means to make global change," Scott said. "It could be something as simplistic as communicating with girls in other countries about their experiences, for example with sexual harassment, and brainstorming across the ocean on how they could change the problem."

In her probe of school dropouts, Paz-Arredondo, included statistics showing that low-income students are the most-at risk for leaving high school. She linked high dropout rates to "families' lack of support," and unmotivated students "who would rather party." Dropouts, she said, are vulnerable to depression and teen pregnancy. But she dismissed pregnancy as a reason for leaving school because she said "schools have programs to help those girls."

"Being a dropout," she warned, "is much harder than you think."

Scott said the majority of the NSF funding is being used to provide greater support to Naz-Arredondo and other program participants, including a group of 60 girls, comprised of 40 new participants from the program's four current partner school districts, and 20 affiliated with the new site, the Boys and Girls Club of the East Valley, Sacaton Branch, on the Gila River Indian Community. The two new groups will begin the two-year program in the summer of 2009. The grant also will support the remaining participants of the original group of 40 girls who joined the program in the summer of 2007. They will complete their final year in the program this summer. Fifteen other girls are expected to complete the program in 2010.

The grant funding will support the participants in a variety of ways by subsidizing the costs of transportation to summer and after-school classes; stipends; internships; and salaries for ASU graduate students and in-service teachers who serve as mentor teachers in the program.

Jerry Gemmette, superintendent for instructional technology with the Phoenix Union High School District, said that because "there is an overabundance of males in computer-oriented careers, girls of color benefit from this kind of instruction."

He said that along with ASU, Phoenix Union provides some teaching staff and has loaned some of the technology to the program.

"It is very valuable and supports our mission of preparing all students for success in college, career and life. It's a worthwhile effort," Gemmette said, adding that the district plans to continue its partnership with COMPUGIRLS as the program expands.

The teens come from Central, Camelback, Thunderbird, North, Trevor Brown and Alhambra high schools in the Phoenix Union High School District. Schools from the Tempe Union High School District and Roosevelt and Fowler elementary school districts also are affiliated with the program.

Heather Padilla, a student at Santa Maria Elementary School in the Fowler district, said she joined COMPUGIRLS because, "I wanted to learn more about technology," and to document what she considers to be inequities for special education students.

She questioned state funding for students like her friend who is in special education classes. Her documentary showed images of special education students being bullied or teased.

Kelly Padilla, Heather's mother, said the program has expanded her daughter's vision. Husman's contributions to the project are designed to build upon this positive program outcome. She is developing questionnaires and surveys to determine, in part, how the girls imagine their futures and whether they can envision themselves in a technology career.

"If they identify with it," she said. "They will be more motivated in their pursuit of their goal."

The research may show that some girls believe they wouldn't fit into the technology field, "which is fairly restrictive," Husman said. "There is a model within the field of computer programming where a certain background and certain look is expected, and there is a resistance to people who don't work and act that way," Husman said, adding that some scientists are considered "unpleasant and not family-oriented."

If those stereotypes are a barrier for some COMPUGIRLS, Husman said "we will refine the project to shape the girls' sense of identity as a person who does computer technology. We want to build up their personal identity and commitment."

Hayes work with the project is focusing on how computer games can be used for computer-related learning. "We want to know what kinds of activities need to be built into the COMPUGIRLS program so that girls find it engaging and push their learning." Hayes said.

She suggested two wildly popular computer games, Teen Second Life and Sims, which the girls used to create their documentaries. The games are similar in that they allow players to create their own neighborhood, invent characters, create a persona for themselves and talk to other teens.

"Girls," Hayes said, "tend not to have the peer support or access to the technology or Internet that make learning through these tools easier."

To solve that problem, the girls were loaned lap tops to take home. Hayes said her research will also affect the curriculum, how mentor teachers will be trained, and how "you implement that with girls of color."

The goal, she said is to "adapt teaching to the ways the kids are learning."

Scott has enriched the program with field trips, one planned to Intel, a leading maker of computer chips in the East Valley, and another last summer to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Gabriella Chevalier, a 13-year-old freshman at Tempe High School, was one of two COMPUGIRLS on the trip. Gabriella said she went to learn more about Scratch, an MIT-designed programming language that allows young people to design interactive stories, animations games, music, art and post them on the Web.

Gabriella's mother, Cecilia Chevalier, a former electrical engineer, and now math and geometry teacher at Sierra Vista Elementary School in Phoenix, accompanied her daughter on the MIT trip, where she also learned more about Scratch.

Cecilia said the trip inspired her to use the Scratch program so her eighth-grade geometry students could experiment with the animation and use their math knowledge to morph three-sided triangles to multi-sided figures. She said Gabriella thrives in the COMPUGIRLS environments because she is surrounded by other girls teased for being bright.

"She can talk to the other brainiacs," her mother said.

Gabriella said the class has made her far more aware of social inequities, such as school funding. As part of the program's emphasis on social justice, Gabriella said she and other girls conducted a survey of teens in South Phoenix-area schools, and learned that many of them believed their schools were "poorly funded," she said. "I didn't know about that before," she said.