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The Colorado SCience and ENgineering Inquiry Collaborative for Rural K12 Outreach (SCENIC Colorado) is investigating an educational infrastructure for supporting engineering and science learning and identity formation as part of an outreach program with rural Colorado high schools. This research takes the rural context into careful consideration. While rural places are often described by their deficits (Reagan et al., 2019), this study operationalizes place-based pedagogy and the theoretical framework of rural cultural wealth (Crumb et al., 2022) to conceptualize and engage rural places from an asset-based perspective. We believe rural places can be rich environments for engineering and science learning. Therefore, we aspire to support high school students with the development of soil or air quality inquiry projects that are relevant to their local rural communities. Situated within a larger study on the SCENIC outreach program and its impact on student participation in and identification with engineering and science, this paper focuses more narrowly on place-based engineering with students in the rural context. The research questions are: What aspects of the outreach program's educational infrastructure enable place-based science and engineering inquiry? What aspects of place—their locality's history and culture—inform rural students' selection of environmental monitoring topics to investigate? How does conducting place-based environmental monitoring projects contribute to rural students’ engineering and science identity development? 

This paper examines an online professional learning intervention to develop teachers’ pedagogical design capacity to develop five-dimensional (5D) learning and assessment opportunities, which involve integrated use of science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts in science to make sense of phenomena and problems that are interesting to students and support students as knowers, doers, and users of science. We present findings from our design study, which suggest both the promise of such an approach and some of the challenges and tensions experienced by teachers as they chose and used phenomena to support 5D learning opportunities for students.