UNT Mentorship Helps Rural Communities Bring STEM Education to Radio

The University of North Texas is helping rural communities connect to STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — education through local radio broadcasts called “Raise Up Radio.”

The idea was born out of the pandemic when many students left the classrooms to learn online.

“People say, ‘Oh, there’s broadband everywhere,'” said UNT Assistant Professor Sarah Evans. “The kind of broadband most rural communities have access to is expensive. It can be spotty.”

Evans, who is also the director of the Children’s and Young Adult Librarianship Program, wanted a way to better connect rural libraries with their communities through education.

“So we started thinking about radio,” Evans said, explaining how radio has a lower barrier for access in rural communities. “We really wanted for families, intergenerational groups, to get together and create a broadcast series of about four to six episodes that really revolved around their specific community.”

The only criteria: the episodes had to be based in STEM learning.

Pottsboro, Texas, near the Oklahoma border, is one of the pilot program communities. They create broadcasts about chickens.

“They can pick whatever topics they want as long as it’s around science, technology, engineering and math,” Evans said. “They think, ‘Oh I’m not a science or math kind of person,’ and we all do math in our daily lives, especially in rural areas. A lot of the work that happens depends on scientific concepts.”

Like in the classroom, the learning includes hands-on experiment kits.

“There was an incubator in the library with eggs that people could come visit and take a look,” Evans said, explaining some of Pottsboro’s hands-on learning.

UNT is working with counterparts at the University of Alabama for the 2-year grant-funded pilot program. The plan is to expand to West and Central Texas.

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