Experiences of STEM Educators of Color in Designing and Facilitating a Summer Camp for Minoritized Students

• In Event: Creating Equitable Informal Mathematics/STEM Learning Environments: Addressing Racial Injustice and Underrepresentation

Abstract

In the 2024 call for proposals, the authors wrote, “I ask our community to dream and imagine, not in an illusory manner that is uncritical, ahistorical, and atheoretical, but in a manner that is rooted in justice seeking, that is evidence based, as we seek a different education reality.” In this paper, we discuss our attempt at providing a STEM summer camp rooted injustice seeking, and evidence-based practices. The 2024 call also noted that “Robin D. G. Kelley (2002) borrows from the Black radical imagination and calls for the expansion of revolutionary thinking, dreaming, and envisioning, and asks a fundamental question: ‘“What type of society do you want to live in?’” The camp that we designed and facilitated is one step toward what we envision informal STEM learning to be. Thus, in this paper, we describe those activities and our subsequent learning.

We used self-study methodology (Dinkleman, 2003) to investigate and describe our experiences designing, facilitating and revising a STEM summer camp for racially and economically marginalized students. Self-study as a methodology involves the study of “one’s self, one’s actions, one’s ideas” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 1998, p. 236). Thus, our major source of data are huddles (Soslau et. al, 2018), self-reflections, and verbal and written debriefs. Specifically, we discussed our attempts at integrating activities that include science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as we attempted to ensure that each of the activities included at least two of the stem content areas. Such interdisciplinary work is reflected in Hsu et al. (2019) work discussing “the design and the development of a maker-centered learning environment and curriculum by an interdisciplinary team” (p. 1). We reflected on our experiences in real time by taking notes as we encountered issues that arose in the camp and at the end of each day we reflected on our experience.

This study is significant because while much research focuses on students of color experiences’ (e.g., Jiang et al., 2021; Roberts et al., 2018; Schuetze, 2014), more research is needed on the experiences of informal STEM educators of color as they design and facilitate informal learning experiences for marginalized students.

Author

• Queshonda J. Kudaisi, University of North Texas