Researching Underrepresented Islander Minorities in Science and STEM Informed by Indigenous and Culturally Responsive Design ( Manuel Andres)

• In Event: Advocacy for Equitable Education in the 21st Century: Opportunities, Motivations, and Outcomes

Abstract

"SEAS Islands Alliance is a collaborative project funded by the NSF INCLUDES program (Award # HRD 1930998) that aims to increase the participation of underrepresented minorities (URM) in marine sciences and STEM by connecting participants across island hubs as part of the newly-created Islands Alliance. In the program, the research team aims to investigate students’ way of knowing science and the Alliance’s impact on students’ identity and sense of belonging.
SEAS Alliance includes a Micronesian hub located in Guam and two Caribbean hubs in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands which support URM students through interventions from middle school to graduate level in science careers’ pathways and students’ sense of belonging in STEM. These islander hubs play a critical role in marine science because their unique environments contribute permanently to marine science research; however, URM students’ participation in STEM and marine science is marginal (McGee, 2020; Silva et al., 2020). In this way, the interventions employed by SEAS Alliance aims to increase URM students’ participation in science careers supported by across the multiple broadening participation (BP) pathways.
Informed by an indigenous and culturally responsive research design, the study challenges mainstream discourse about underrepresented minorities’ participation in science to ground conceptual paradigms embedded in local contexts (Hopson, 2012) as well as student culture about science and their experience in STEM. Considering the context of culturally diverse groups in each hub (Nelson-Barber et al. 2005), the research team organization includes a collective team with members of UIUC and WestEd and a cultural liaison in each hub that guarantee a commitment to making visible islander participation and influence throughout the research processes.
Employing a mixed methods research, SEAS has collected information employing qualitative and quantitative strategies; they include: semi structured interviews, observations, and ethnographic field notes and surveys have been employed for inquiring students' sense of scientific identity. As for data analysis, we are employing an analytical structure to frame students' individual pathways in science and STEM as we document multiple trajectories students navigate to achieve more justice for their islands and communities (Saukko, 2003).
The data collected for the first and second year included interviews and surveys of SEAS participants in each hub. The third year (2021-2022) will add interviews from SEAS staff (i.e., hub coordinators), SEAS partners (i.e., national park site partners and collaborators), and family members (in an extended sense, i.e., grandparents, parents, aunts, etc.). These complementary participants are intended to expand on a deeper understanding of the cultural profiles and identities of each of the learners and a nuanced depiction of the ecosystem of broadening participation pathways available for students including enhanced understanding of students’ sense of belongingness to families and communities with science.
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Authors

• Manuel A. Pérez-Troncoso, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Rodney K. Hopson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• María B. Serrano-Abreu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Jonathan Boxerman, WestEd

• Kimberly Nguyen, WestEd

• Howard Forbes, University of North Carolina