“I Was Told I Was Too Bubbly”: Equity Expansions Through a Virtual Geosciences Educator Network

• In Event: Frameworks for STEM Equity in a Time of Polycrisis: Navigating Tensions in Theory, Practice, and Policy

Abstract

This paper reports on a community design study (Bang et al., 2016) with a network of geosciences educators, convened virtually across New York and Maine. Due to ongoing equity issues across the field of geosciences and informal/formal STEM education (Dawson, 2014; Mutegi et al., 2022; Dutt, 2020), the goal of this professional network was to expand educators’ engagement with five key areas for equity in the sciences: Grounded Fun; STEM Capital; STEM Identity; STEM Trajectories; and Agency+ (Archer et al., 2022). This investigation focused on the research question: How do educators across formal and informal contexts and various educational roles engage with or expand key areas for equity in the sciences through a collaborative virtual workshop focused on equity-centered programmatic goals?

Using participatory methods, the research team facilitated network participants’ engagement with these five key areas in multiple ways, including an initial reflection survey, virtual webinar participation, collaborative comments via web-based applications, and a post-symposium reflection survey. The research team coded the data for participants’ perception of these five key areas before, during, and after the symposium, attending to ways their understandings shifted through engagement with the network.

Our findings showed that because our network intentionally included participants with diverse identities, they already recognized dissonance with dominant perceptions of science identities (white, male, middle-class, neurotypical) in the field. We surfaced a shared commitment to critiquing and expanding diverse identities in STEAM toward rightful presence for educators and their students. We found participants expanded conceptions of affect for diverse youth in field work settings, attending to socioenvironmental issues and intersectional racialized identities. We saw that in some cases participants resisted ideas around changing paradigms of STEM capital for youth (particularly in formal settings), pointing toward the continued necessity of providing access to more traditional STEM capital because of the need to understand the “hustle” of standardized tests to navigate gatekeeping. These findings expand and challenge the initial Archer et al. framework by showing additional considerations that diverse field studies-based STEM educators have across formal, informal, and professional geosciences learning contexts. We point toward implications for professional developments designed for STEM/geosciences educators in this time of polycrisis, and ways such networks can help participants expand their equity understandings to address issues the field is currently navigating.

Authors

• Karis Michelle Jones, Baylor University

• Monica L. Miles, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Danielle Emeny, SUNY - Upstate Medical University

• Aimee Lennox, Empire State University - SUNY

• Melody Lindsay, Bigelow

• Nadia Harvieux, Finger Lakes Institute

• Amy Sheldon, SUNY - Geneseo