Using Participatory and Community-Engaged Practices for Large-Scale Proposal Development

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: “Making Communities”: Reimagining Cohort-Based Education Through Participatory and Community-Engaged Research in STEM (Table 24)

Abstract

This session paper seeks to describe how reimagining postdoctoral opportunities through community-engaged approaches can begin to transform the postdoctoral model in STEM education research and how community-engaged inquiry can offer spaces to transform the context of postdoctoral education. We describe the process of using community-engaged research approaches to build a grant proposal for the National Science Foundation, and how the process supported the formation of a new kind of writing as well as an intentional interdisciplinary community.
Perspectives
Three interlocking frameworks guided initial work. First, humanizing approaches to research enlist researchers to enact care and dignity in the research process (Paris and Winn, 2013). Second, decolonizing approaches to inquiry seek to disrupt Eurocentric approaches to research, where we make legitimate under-represented methodologies, particularly those in STEM (Hernandez, 2022; Tuhiwai Smith, 2022). Third, community-based, participatory research, one that engages communities (broadly) toward the aim that the best outcomes occur when research occurs with communities, for communities (Delemos, 2006).
Methods
This session paper draws from narrative inquiry in the context of a case-study based methodology. Narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2022) explores the shared experiences of community within time, storying those shared experiences within larger prose and sometimes poetry. As a case-study, we also draw boundaries around the context of the shared story, and for this case-study, those bounds include place (Michigan State University), season (Winter and Spring 2022), region (Northern United States and satellite sites), and purpose (community-based postdoctoral training in STEM education research within Indigenous contexts).
Data sources
Several forms of data were used to create both the proposal of the STEM Ed PaCER project and the story for this session paper: Documents from email communication, records of collaborative sessions, and visual mapping; and recorded reflective conversations and reflective collaborative writing.
Findings
Our findings are presented as a three-part story about how we developed the STEM Ed PaCER proposal with the larger community: Part 1 introduces the concept of community writing from a large and broad-based perspective of multiple individuals across three universities and local communities. Part 2 describes the tension of writing within the “bounds'” of academia, our positionality, and the beginnings of making community. Part 3 offers perspectives on pushing against normative approaches to STEM education research and the larger academic structure of the National Science Foundation and its willingness to engage in a community-based inquiry project.
Significance
The postdoctoral model in the field of STEM education research largely reproduces a traditional Western, white, essentialist perspective (Hinton et al., 2020). This model of postdoctoral education is a mainstay in the STEM fields. However, these traditional approaches at best overlook “non-dominant” ways of knowing and learning in STEM education research and at worst gate-keep access to STEM education research through the function of social reproduction (Guhin, 2021; Yadav et al., 2020). This paper offers insights into the specifics of bringing a diversity of faculty, community members, and students together to build a proposal to transform STEM education research and challenge traditions of STEM education research.

Authors

• Emiko Blalock, Michigan State University

• Julie Libarkin, Michigan State University