Wheels of change: Stanford Spokes cyclists tackle education awareness

Published Sept. 25, 2024, 9:06 p.m., last updated Sept. 25, 2024, 9:06 p.m.

Six Stanford students embarked on a cross-country bike ride over the course of 10 weeks to raise awareness about educational inequality.

Starting on June 18, the Stanford Spokes team biked 4,000 miles from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. while holding education workshops for under-resourced communities. 

Since 2018, Stanford students have joined a national student-led effort to bring STEM education to underserved schools while they bike across the country, along with students from schools like MIT and Harvard. The idea behind the Spokes’ journey is simple: combine education and cycling to inspire students and show them that learning isn’t restricted to memorizing facts — it’s a lifelong journey.

Disparities in education, especially STEM, have only grown greater across the income gap in recent years, according to The Nation’s Report Card. Will Yu ’27, a current member of the Spokes, joined because of his interest in addressing this divide and advancing education equity. 

“I believe that everyone deserves the right to an amazing education,” Yu said. 

This year, Spokes led a variety of teaching workshops to K-12 students in libraries, schools and other environments where they engaged students through activities ranging from creating chalk rockets to extracting DNA from strawberries. Through this summer’s workshops, Yu hoped to help students realize that school is “more than just kind of reading books and digesting facts, it’s about experiencing things and finding what you’re genuinely interested in.”

The outdoors aspect of Spokes also draws instructors to the program. After seeing an Instagram post about the Spokes team, Eva Matentsian ’27 was immediately interested. 

“It mixed my two passions together,” she said. “I love working with kids, and my dad was really into cycling, so we did a lot of biking trips, and I was looking forward to having a summer outdoors.”

Although the Spokes bring educational resources to schools across the country, Matentsian said that she also learned from the communities she came into contact with along the way. 

“It’s always just so cool meeting people from all different types of backgrounds, especially since I’ve grown up in California,” Matentsian said. “As we continue east, it’s really cool seeing another side of our country.”

The Spokes’ work is funded and supported by multiple organizations, including Stanford Digital Education (SDE). Cynthia Berhtram, director of project strategy and operations at SDE, believes that the Spokes’ work aligns perfectly with SDE’s mission to expand equitable access to education. 

According to Berhtram, SDE manages the administrative and financial side of Spokes so that team members can focus solely on their educational work on their journey. It provides a layer of “administrative logistics and technical support to help them just really think about lesson planning, about planning their route, about getting their equipment up and running,” she said.

For many cyclists, the summer experience brings them a deeper understanding of the issues facing American education and a renewed commitment to advocacy, informing their future work in the field of education.

“We’re all teaching workshops that relate to what we’re passionate about or what we’re studying in college,” Matentsian said. “We’re bringing all our knowledge. We talk about our background, studying and doing research in these topics. So I think that is really cool.”

The Spokes’ journey across the country finished on Aug. 28, bringing an end to their 10-week teaching trip.

“I want to make sure that kids across America can feel that whatever they want to explore, they can explore.” Yu said. “I hope that these workshops will ignite some sort of interest in them and help them realize that if there is something that they’re interested in, they should pursue it.”

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