APPROACH
Integrating STEM Education with Civic Innovation
We believe in sparking good trubel.
To solve society’s most complex issues, we must cultivate a new generation of responsible innovators.
Building technical proficiency
The BIPOC community faces significant barriers to achieving success in STEM, both educationally and professionally. These include limited early exposure to the subject matter, institutional failure to acknowledge prior cultural or indigenous knowledge, and lack of connection between STEM content & their identities. trubel&co’s programming emphasizes building tactical STEM skills that can be used to research complex societal problems, design human-centered solutions, and disseminate information that compels others to take action.
We do this by:
Advocating social responsibility
Research shows that greater civic consciousness expands young people’s commitment to challenging pervasive injustice, increases academic achievement, and boosts enrollment in higher education. trubel&co’s civic science training prepares students to understand STEM in context of society, enhances communication skills, and increases long-term participation in civic life.
Enabling responsible innovation
We need those closest to inequity to be drivers of responsible innovation. trubel&co partners with local colleges and universities to tailor programming for students. Our learning environments center problem-solving, with classroom resources used to guide students through ambiguity. Students wield STEM principles and design thinking strategies to address challenges rooted in issues important to them.
trubel&co approaches civic innovation with
an abolitionist framework
We all have a responsibility to know our collective past. We all have a right to imagine our ideal liberated futures. And as educators, we should aim to give students tools to bridge the gap from one to another
“Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about life affirming institutions.” - Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Abolition is a constant becoming.
Abolition follows an iterative method of building to reach the goal of liberation. Rather than simply channeling under-resourced communities into STEM careers, trubel adopts liberatory design and abolitionist frameworks to democratize access to technical education, empowering youth to build STEM skillsets as a means of tackling community-based challenges and designing ideal futures.
Our partnerships with local educational institutions, advocates of urban justice, and frontline communities are instrumental to ensuring the success of our students, with the goal of being deeply entrenched into the cities in which we bring our curricula.
