When Chattanooga holds its first-ever CHA Learning Days, from May 11 to 19, 2019, as part of this year’s slate of Remake Learning Days Across America (RLDAA), it will present a kind of “show and tell” opportunity for the region’s educators.

RLDAA is a major expansion of the Pittsburgh-founded Remake Learning Days, first established in 2016 to showcase connected learning events that highlighted the future of learning throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia. This year, six new regions will host Remake Learning Days.

“Chattanooga is in a season of optimism and hope around education,” said Michael Stone, Director of Innovative Learning with the Public Education Foundation. “There’s a lot of positivity. There’s buy-in both from those in education and from the community at large. We’re working together to close the opportunity gaps, to make sure there’s an intentional focus on equity, and that every student in the greater Chattanooga community has access to excellent education opportunities.”

The great strides that stakeholders both in and out of the city’s school district have taken toward these goals will be on display during CHA Learning Days. One highlight, the STEM Jubilee on May 15 and 16, will see nearly 4,000 elementary-school students visiting STEM School Chattanooga, along with Chattanooga State Community College to engage in hands-on STEM activities. And Gig City Girls, which promotes coding and computer-science opportunities for girls and young women, anticipates more than 200 girls participating in a morning of coding on May 11.

The festival will also serve to highlight a number of local organizations that parents, caregivers, and community members may not be aware of, such as the ChattLab makerspace or Tech Goes Home, which offers tech courses to the public. Festival attendees will also get a new introduction to community fixtures they may think they know, such as the Chattanooga Public Library, which offers its 4th Floor space, a lab and educational facility focusing on technology, design, and applied arts.

At the heart of the story Chattanooga Learning Days will tell is the city’s deep commitment to hands-on, STEM-focused learning through maker-centered education and, in particular, the city’s many “fab labs”: spaces dedicated to small-scale digital fabrication, often including tools such as laser cutters and circuit-prototyping tools. The school district has 17 labs, open to students from grades 6 through 12, and including 16 Volkswagen eLabs.

Chattanooga has just one school district, comprising 80 schools that range from extremely rural to distinctly urban, with considerable demographic diversity across the district.

“The Volkswagen eLabs are showing signs of success across a wide-range of demographics,” said Stone. “That’s really exciting because it suggests that this type of STEM engagement is valuable to all students.”

In developing its labs, Chattanooga has swiftly moved from learning from other cities’ experiences in maker-based learning to serving as a mentor and national leader on the subject. That’s part of a broader trend in the city, which features a revitalized economy spurred on, in part, by citywide gigabit internet that’s the nation’s fastest. Tech start-ups have found Chattanooga to be an attractive destination, and so has Volkswagen, which located its only North American manufacturing facility in Chattanooga about a decade ago, and is now doubling down with a planned expansion of its facilities.

“All that growth on the employer side put a real spotlight on the need for workforce development for students,” said Stone. “Are our schools preparing students for these  jobs of the future?”

The why part of the city’s story is an important piece of what regional stakeholders hope to show during Chattanooga Learning Days, further accelerating community buy-in. Stone and others are especially looking forward to engaging with parents and caregivers during the festival’s planned events.

“School doesn’t look like it used to,” he said. “The goal with an event like this is to expose parents to the strategies, the techniques, the experiences that are actually happening in the classroom, so that it equips parents to be able to support their students.”

This blog is part of series highlighting the work of each participating region of Remake Learning Days Across America, led by partners Remake Learning, PBS Kids and Digital Promise. We would like to thank our national sponsors Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Grable Foundation and Schmidt Futures.