Connected Learning Ecosystems

About Projects Blog Team Partners

Connected learning recognizes an ecosystem of support for young people’s learning and development. Learning that is connected across home, school, community and career contexts is both resilient and meaningful. The Connected Learning Lab has a portfolio of projects that examine how STEM and arts learning is supported through informal learning environments and connections across settings.

Projects

Transforming and Scaling Teen Services for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (TS4EDI)

TS4EDI is a research-practice partnership funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and led by the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine. TS4EDI addresses the challenges in designing interest-driven teen services in libraries, evaluating teen services, and demonstrating the value of interest-driven learning.

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Capturing Connected Learning in Libraries (CCLL)

The CCLL project was a research-practice collaboration between the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), the YOUMedia Community of Practice, and the Connected Learning Research Network (CLRN) that enabled libraries to better assess learning outcomes for their connected learning programs and boost their ability to use evaluation data to improve those programs.
Case Studies, Tools & Video Series

All Together Now: The Role of Mentorship in Persistence in Informal STEM Programs

The All Together Now project investigates how informal programs can broaden participation by building social capital in STEM for youth from underrepresented groups. The project integrates social network analysis with research on informal learning, and draws on the connected learning framework for how to connect learning across settings. It builds on evidence that sponsorship of youth interest, affinity-based mentorship, and brokering connections to other settings and opportunities can build social capital and support interest and persistence in STEM.

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Making Connections Across Settings to Support STEM Learning Transitions for Middle School Girls

The Making Connections project leverages the connected learning framework to study the design of strategies and models that support making connections across settings for girls from STEM programming to future academic, civic, and career-related STEM opportunities. Though we have research evidence for how STEM learning is supported within individual out-of-school programs and learning experiences, less attention has been given to how STEM learning is connected across learners’ lives and specific and intentional ways to support transitions between STEM opportunities and across settings. Through partnership with STEM Next and its Million Girls Moonshot (MGM) initiative, this research studies how networks, programs, and the people within them make connections across settings to support girls’ persistence in and transitions to STEM opportunities.

Connected Arts Learning: Connecting Interests, Opportunities, and Relationships, in Out-of-School Arts

The Connected Arts Learning project presents a framework for 21st century arts learning with a focus on connecting youths’ interest-driven art making to opportunities through supportive relationships. Drawing from a review of arts education and connected learning literature, interviews with key advisors, and case studies of nonprofit arts learning organizations, this project offers recommendations for the design and evaluation of connected arts learning. Connected arts learning pushes the arts education field to consider a broader range of outcomes of the arts, including those civic and career related, promote interest development, emphasize networks and connections through art making, draw from culturally sustaining practices to make connections between spaces for learning, and center the holistic affordances of the arts.

Tracing the Enduring Effects of Community Arts Programs (TEECAP)

TEECAP aims to explore how participating in community arts programs influences the career and life trajectories of people who come from communities where such programs are based. Working in collaborative partnership with community arts programs across the US, Australia, and United Kingdom, the project will examine the potential shaping force of OST programs on identity formation and the influences on life activities resulting from participation. The study intends to shed light on the capacity of creative communities of practice and OST programs, in particular, to impact the life experiences of marginalized youth.
Press Release: Universities Awarded $1.6 million Grant From the Wallace Foundation to Study Long-Term Impact of Participating in Informal Arts Programs