As farmers attempt to evolve quickly to confront 21ST century challenges including leveraging innovative technology to improve yield and reduce deleterious impacts from climate change, so too must the…

As farmers attempt to evolve quickly to confront 21ST century challenges including leveraging innovative technology to improve yield and reduce deleterious impacts from climate change, so too must the education in their surrounding communities. While rural communities in education deserts and urban communities in food deserts face different challenges and are often juxtaposed in the media, they have shared educational goals and complementary environments that have yet to be adequately leveraged. Both rural and urban schools are often under-resourced, leaving gaps in structured hands-on experiences that are often filled in by non-formal education programs. With precision agriculture and vertical farming growing in popularity because of their ability to increase crop yield in rural and urban areas, respectively, IT is clear that the next generation of plant growers must understand and embrace the use of plant science and technological innovation. Our food and agricultural non-formal education project will develop summer program curricula that introduces urban and rural youth to agricultural research and technology, fosters collaborations between urban and rural youth, and encourages students to develop connections between their community's cultural wealth and plant science. This project will use corn as the model system to train rural and urban youth in agricultural technology, galvanize cross-pollination of ideas and experiences between the two summer programs, and iteratively adjust the curricula based on student input and ideas. The curricula developed will be designed and assessed using the community cultural wealth (CCW) framework (yosso 2005). Borne out of critical race theory, CCW promotes the integration of a participant's identity and culture into their education including non-formal stem education programs (kelly ET AL. 2019). Youth will identify the familial and social capital they have early during the project, sharing their knowledge with others. The youth will also become experts in the agricultural technology and crop problems unique to their region, visiting each other's site to learn from one another and share their discoveries. The most successful and transferable aspects of the curricula will be used to design a scalable program for other rural and urban communities.