Trust the Teachers!: Conducting School-Based Research in a Rural Middle School When Building Relationships Face-to-Face Is Not Possible

OUTTAKE

We are a team of university faculty, graduate, and undergraduate researchers investigating how to make cybersecurity education accessible and effective for middle school students. In particular, our project makes a trailblazing effort to improve adolescents' use of security "best practices" in their day-today online activities by linking artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity principles to their mathematical underpinnings (Knijnenburg et al., 2021). Our team partnered with mathematics and computer science teachers from a rural, high-needs middle school to develop and deploy time- and teacher-friendly learning modules that can readily be integrated into the existing curriculum for Grades 5-8.

To develop and deploy these modules, we planned to regularly engage in face-to-face activities with our research team, the teachers from our partner school, and the students. For instance, regular meetings with teachers, including participatory design sessions, formed an important part of our module development strategy. Our ethnographic method also required classroom observations, interviews, and documentation to understand student and teacher needs for module creation and implementation (LeCompte & Schensul, 2010). We planned to immerse ourselves in classroom contexts to investigate if and how the innovative AI, cybersecurity, and math modules changed students' understanding of and experiences and interactions with these concepts.