Using a Multidimensional-Multiplicative Lens to Examine and Disrupt Anti-Blackness in Postsecondary STEM Education

• In Event: Reimagining Methodological Approaches for Disrupting Anti-Blackness in STEM Education

Abstract

Existing policies and practices designed to facilitate Black students’ engagement in STEM and matriculation to graduate programs and professional careers, despite their best intentions, reify essentialist and homogenized perspectives of Black people when implemented at scale. This approach occurs due to limitations of research methods to facilitate a nuanced understanding of Blackness in postsecondary STEM—an approach that perpetuates anti-Blackness by overlooking diversity among those racialized as Black. A nuanced perspective of Blackness accounts for the multifaceted ways in which Black people perceive, understand, and experience life—aspects that influence Black undergraduate students’ sensemaking, navigation of, and engagement in STEM (Burrell et al., 2015; Griffin et al., 2016; Leggett-Robinson et al., 2017; T. Morton et al., 2019). In efforts to disrupt systemic anti-Black racism and equitably meet the needs of Black students in postsecondary STEM education, new methodological approaches are needed to support the assessments of Black students’ experiences and needs in STEM from a heterogenous perspective.
In this paper, we discuss a reimagined methodological approach to examining Blackness in postsecondary STEM across the United States at scale at six university-based centers across the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Southeast, and Southwest regions. This approach leverages a qualitative to quantitative mixed methods designed anchored in theories of Blackness that support a global, multidimensional-multiplicative understanding.

Authors

• Terrell Roderick Morton, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Nickolaus Alexander Ortiz, Georgia State University

• Yasmiyn Irizarry, The University of Texas at Austin