Black Women Geoscientists in Post Secondary Education – Exploring the Intersectional Impacts of Disciplinary Curriculum

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

Abstract

The Geosciences are the most demographically homogeneous of all STEM fields (i.e.: Bernard et al., 2018). In fact, initiatives for gender and/or racial equity in the geosciences have focused on recruitment of minoritized students to existing geoscience programs to address homogeneity for decades (Callahan et al., 2017; Marin-Spiotta et al., 2020; Wolfe and Riggs, 2017). Despite these targeted efforts, advanced post secondary geoscience programs primarily matriculate cis-white-men. Few interventions, however, have considered the role of disciplinary pedagogy - the methods and practices of teaching that influence what it means to be a geoscientist- in shaping extant inequitable outcomes at the post-secondary level. Additionally, empirical analysis in post-secondary geosciences seldom includes the voices of Black woman geoscientists. As colleges and universities are the gateway to and socialization for becoming a geoscientist (Cropps, 2023; Levine et al, 2007), we need more research that centers minoritized students’ intersectional experience within the context of post-secondary pedagogy.

This paper draws on insights from the Black Women’s Educational Experiences in Geosciences study (BWG; IRB #230491 & #240937) to explore disciplinary pedagogical knowledge for equity. BWG is an intersectional Black Feminist exploration of the post-secondary experiences of 21 Black women in the United States who earned post-secondary geoscience degrees. This qualitative project features the autobiographies, semi-structured interviews, and focus group interviews, of a diverse representation group of Black woman geoscientists. In considering the intersectional impact of teaching and learning for Black women in the geosciences this analyses considered formal aspects of the geoscience curriculum, which I define as the course of study in geoscience required to complete a geoscience major and asks : How do features of postsecondary geoscience curricula impact Black women’s persistence in the field?

A subset of participants highlighted the impact of the geoscience curriculum on their educational experiences as they navigated formal structures in geoscience and embarked on varied pathways to and through the field. First, as established in geoscience retention literature (i.e.:Levine et al.,2007), most participants encountered geoscience at the postsecondary level. Many participants reported initial interests in other STEM disciplines that coincided with their enrollment in an introductory geoscience course. Black women geoscientists often described ways that geosciences courses differed from their originally intended majors, and particularly highlighted discipline specific pedagogical practices that provided alternative ways to engage in the scientific method. The ubiquitous nature of these experiences among participants advances potential intersectional impacts of geoscience pedagogical practices (i.e.: Rimer et al., 2023) that are embedded in the standard geoscience curriculum. These findings support and extend observed connections between content knowledge and STEM persistence as articulated by Seymour et al. (2019). Further inquiry through BWG will describe curricular aspects of Black women' s persistence in the geosciences to illuminate this interaction between institutional and disciplinary pedagogical practices to reimagine geoscience education.

Author

• Nicollette Mitchell, Vanderbilt University