A Community Centered Approach to Improving STEM Pathways for Underrepresented Students
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Because of the siloed nature of formal educational curricula, students who opt out
of STEM coursework, for whatever reason, lose the opportunity to engage with the domain of science almost entirely. This disproportionately impacts students of color and women. To transform under-represented groups participation and retention within STEM, we must think about ways to engage them in different kinds of educational activities and in alternate venues that promote broader meanings of STEM. Our pilot alliance consists of community-engaged partners, including educational agencies, community organizations, and local businesses. We will leverage interdisciplinary spaces in the curriculum, particularly the humanities and social sciences as a forum for integrating and applying STEM to bear on the practical, social, economic and political issues of modern life. We propose to establish a physical Community STEM Advocacy Center as an anchoring institution for change. This Center will be situated within the community that the pilot alliance serves, bringing STEM opportunities and engagement to students instead of asking them to come where STEM education is currently provided. The activities enacted through the Center will focus on enduring problems experienced by the communities, where students, community residents, teachers, and experts from higher education, industry and other community-based entities can come together to work on understanding them and developing evidenced centered advocacy as a means for addressing them. To facilitate the work at the Community STEM Advocacy Center, we will create a Community Ambassadors Program (CAP), leveraging participation across pilot alliance members in partnership with the community. This Design and Development Launch Pilot will cultivate the necessary knowledgebase to develop a scalable model for implementation across diverse urban communities speaking to what, how and where STEM education can be re-envisioned and develop a new pathway for entry into and retention in the STEM pipeline for students of color, women and other underrepresented groups.
Barbara Rogoff
UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor of Psychology
This is brilliant! The focus on using STEM knowledge to address community issues is very promising, for engaging students in the knowledge system. And the idea of having university students from the community lead in this endeavor meets so many goals. I wonder if the project will evaluate the impact on the university students in their academic work, from the opportunity to give back to their community?
Lisa Lynn
Barbara, this is a great point. We definitely expect this to be a positive, supportive experience for the undergraduate mentors to put their knowledge into action and strengthen the connection between their home community and their newer academic/scientific identity. First steps in evaluating this aspect of the project will be observations and interviews with the Community Ambassadors. This will give us some more insight on how the experience is impacting them personally and academically.
Shannon Alfaro
I appreciated the passionate energy I could sense from Kim when we met at the NSF INCLUDES PI conference in January.
I'm curious as to whether your efforts will include teaching parents/adults in STEM concepts activities as a way to support their younger learners?
Lisa Lynn
Hi Shannon! The STEM Community Advocacy Center will be open to people of all ages in the community. We are certainly hoping that students participate with their parents or other relatives so that we are all learning together across age and educational levels. We would love to see community members (of all ages) taking science topics home, back to their families to discuss, and then using our project as a resource to develop some type of parent workshop if parents feel it would be useful.
April Lindala
Aanii (hi) Kim and Lisa - So grateful to view this inspirational video!! Great work! Love the community emphasis!!! What types of measurement examples will you employ? How might you communicate to industry and other partners to "go to the community" as a means for building bridges for engagement? :-) ~ April
Lisa Lynn
Hi April! Our pilot measures are dealing with science identity--interest in science, science self-efficacy, and science identity (e.g. "I am a scientist.") We are also collecting a lot of qualitative and process data as we get things up and running.
We are lucky that many of our partners are steeped in the community and are very much in the habit of "going to the community." We are continuing to work on making this a habit/practice we share across the project. At this early stage, I think one way to communicate it is by setting the example: to do it ourselves (as the PIs/university folks), to talk about it in meetings, and to constantly remind each other of it until it becomes a part of our project's "culture."
Chris Boynton, EdD
I love the idea of going to the community and being in the community! How will the program sustain itself? How has the infrastructure been developed?
Lisa Lynn
Chris, good question. Ideally we would love to see the community take ownership of this project and take leadership in choosing issues for inquiry and advocacy, and for the university to provide support and resources. I think the best way we can do this is to build a strong partnership with a broad base of community organizations and develop a communication network to support the partnership. Currently we are experimenting with social media, email, and a website as communication infrastructures. At this early stage, though, there is no technological substitute for being physically present at community events, meeting folks and building relationships!
Dr. Smith
Hello! Thank you for sharing. I like the collaborative approach in this project in terms of involving the community. An important point made is that many students decide very early that they have no interest in STEM. Connecting STEM to their communities is a great approach. I would encourage the team to at least identify the institution at the University of Illinois Chicago at least in the beginning. Many may not know UIC! Dr. Dwyane Smith, provost Harris-Stowe State University.
Allison Rowe
Hi! I am excited about your project, especially your ideas to create physical STEM advocacy centers in communities, and to establish a Community Ambassadors program for university students. I wonder if you might be willing to share what the participation of these university students will look like. Will the Community Ambassadors program be incorporated into university coursework, as a service-learning project? Or will it take place as extracurricular volunteer engagement?
Darnell
Hello, this is an amazing project. How have you envisioned replicating this work in other large cities like Los Angeles?
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.