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Rural populations represent an important and often overlooked audience for broadening participation in computing efforts. More than 20% of all students in the United States live in a rural region, and surveys of access to computing education consistently show these students have less opportunity to and engagement in learning computer science than both suburban and urban peers. Recent scholarship has suggested that rural populations subscribe to a cohesive group identity that (at least in some cases) can subsume ethnic and racial identities, especially important when we consider 22% of the rural population is composed of individuals with these intersectional identities. In this paper we describe example lessons under development for use in our Cyber Pipeline project, an outreach program that provides Kansas schools with a modular computing curriculum and in-service teachers with professional development training to utilize it. These lessons are being developed using culturally relevant pedagogy and a community learning approach to ground the lessons in the everyday experiences, cultural identities, and concerns of these rural students. We are co-developing these lessons with both K-12 teachers in the Cyber Pipeline and disciplinary experts across our campus. We present our our approach in the hopes that it will be of benefit to other educators seeking to reach rural populations.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2026
Engaging Rural America in Computer Science: Understanding the Rural Context
In the United States, 1 in 5 people, approximately 66.3 million individuals, live in a rural area. To address the growing need for computing professionals and the need for a computationally literate populace, we need to engage rural learners effectively. A first step in this direction is understanding the learning context for students engaging in computer science, and how that differs for a rural population. In this paper, we draw upon the National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education, the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, and the 2021 American Community Survey, to underscore a lack of access to computer science learning contexts for students in these communities. We also explore how rural out-migration is compounding this challenge, and explore the roots of the rural out-migration trend. We then examine how multiple strains of research and scholarship identify rurality as either a place-based identification (i.e., where a student is from) or a distinct social identity. While convenient, geographic-based definitions lack important nuance in understanding rural populations and tend to emphasize heterogeneity in rural populations, especially regarding economic factors (i.e., what the communities produce). In contrast, identity-based definitions often emphasize commonalities across rural populations including a set of shared values, a sense of belonging to a rural community, emphasis on social bonds, and a distrust of solutions offered by government, academia, and technology which are often seen as misguided and antithetical to those shared values. In certain kinds of decision-making, this rural identity has even been shown to overshadow intersectional racial and ethnic identities. This is an important consideration as 22\% of the US rural population is composed of racial and ethnic minorities. Finally, we discuss strategies to engage with rural populations authentically and meaningfully. We offer as an illustrative example our Cyber Pipeline program, an outreach effort including a Creative Commons licensed, customizable, modular curriculum; extensive teacher preparation program; and ongoing support for K-12 teachers working to bring computer science into rural schools. We also describe reasons why these rural-dwelling teachers seek to provide computer science education for their students. We highlight the specific challenges of this program, as well as our identified promising practices, in the hopes of fostering similar programs across the United States.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2216625
- PAR ID:
- 10652159
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- computer science education K-12 rural education rural identity rural context rural computer science education
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Montreal, Qubec
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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