STEMViews: Bringing Scientists to You

Helping students from underrepresented populations nationwide envision themselves in a career in STEM.

As of 2017, less than 10% of scientists and engineers in the US were African American, Hispanic, Native American, or identified as biracial. Yet, STEM fields are the fastest growing in terms of job development. Why has the existence of  underrepresented minorities in STEM persisted? The situation can be directly traced to the lack of educational resources, STEM exposure, and role models for children of color, particularly from low income communities. 

The solution we propose is to  bring an understanding of the diversity within STEM to low-income communities of color via technology that will support teachers and students in their exploration of STEM disciplines.  Through a series of video interviews of scientists of color, we will introduce students to the variety of careers that embodies STEM fields.  Students will be able to engage with the material through an app that teachers can use to gauge student comprehension.  

Students will also be able to engage with professionals of color to ask questions or to further investigate an area that interests them.  By introducing students in low-income communities to professionals who look like them and may even share part of their stories, we will enable kids to broaden their own understanding of what their future might hold.  This will help bridge the gap between the life that most low-income children lead with limited imagined options to one where they can explore quite different versions of the future.  This is one step toward increasing the number of underrepresented minorities in an ever expanding, lucrative job market. 

Our main goal is to introduce underrepresented populations of students to people who look like them, have similar backgrounds and have been successful in STEM fields.  We will use existing technology to bring the professionals into low-income classrooms , to enable students to meet and ask questions of STEM professionals and ultimately to visit the places they work.  Teachers will be able to use these experiences to teach social/emotional learning and to reinforce STEM concepts generally by using technology to make this an exciting learning experience.No programs currently achieve these goals in a comprehensive, consistent way.

Technology will be used in three main ways:  

Interviews of Scientists of Color will be made available through videos.

Students will be able to "meet" and ask questions of STEM professionals via Zoom, Shindig or a similar platform.  These interviews will be available for other students learning.

Short online quizzes before and after each video will help define what students are learning.  We can use this information to improve the videos and interviews going forward. We can also learn at the end of the year how this exposure has helped students better understand STEM and the opportunities various fields offer.

We will meet with teachers and administrators in 3 different school districts to determine the district/school best positioned to start the project.

Once the classroom(s) are identified, we will work with the teachers to develop the online student questionnaires and quizzes for students based on the videos to be shown.

We will begin piloting the project no later than January 2019 extending through June 2019.

We will assess student and teacher input and plan to expand the project September 2019 with additional classrooms in the same district or a classroom in a new city.

Once we have piloted the program in 2-3 districts we will have developed a specific package of videos, interactive interviews and assessments that can be offered more widely within districts and to new communities.

Because the majority of the program is using technology to deliver content, the program can be offered in a wide geographic area.  Once the program moves out of Massachusetts, we can recruit STEM professionals nationally to be involved, offering new perspectives and expanding the number of scientific and medical fields explored.  The program will translate globally in the early stages and as the library of resources grows.

Initially, students will access STEM interviews through teachers and school administrators. By making this an interactive process between teacher, students and our team, we can respond appropriately to student interests, teacher needs and modify the program accordingly.  Continuous feedback about the presentations and interviews will be key to determining how we can make improve the program and ensure lasting effects for diversifying STEM fields.

For the past 2 years, I connected 12 Crimson Summer Academy high school students at Harvard University with scientists of color.  We taught students to undertake video interviews with STEM professionals from Harvard and MIT.  Each year, students indicated that they believed there should be a way for peers in their community to learn about scientists who looked like them and came from similar backgrounds and to benefit from interacting with them. The STEM professionals answered all kinds of questions posed by the students, exchanged emails for follow-up and invited them to their lab to view their work firsthand.  

In the first year, we will roll out the program in up to 3 classrooms. As evidenced in our 2 pilot efforts, we expect to see an immediate widening of student perspective of what doing STEM can mean.  Students will learn how people similar in background and ethnicity came to become the professionals they are today. We will continue to expand the program both in depth and geographically. One of the main issues both STEM professionals and students report is the lack of role models within low-income communities of color that help residents think creatively about the future.

We have done outreach to a number of academics that are eager to help us reach our target population.  So far, these academics have asked for no renumeration. Our goal is to keep their interest in this project going. We want to find a way, using technology, to get low-income students exposed to their work in and enthusiasm for STEM.  We can identify teachers who believe that students need to be exposed to professionals who look like they do and came from the same backgrounds in order to envision a creative future for themselves.

There has been an overwhelming response on the part of professionals of color in STEM to want to reach the next generation and make it easier for them to imagine a career for themselves. Since the issue of underrepresented minorities in STEM is a pressing one, we expect to fund the program through a combination of foundation and in-kind support.  In the first year, we will reach out to foundations so that by year 2, we will have a basic source of funding for expanding.  We will work within corporate, school and university resources to gather as much in-kind assistance as possible.

I attended the MIT Hack for Inclusion and learned a great deal.  The connections I made led me to investigate SOLVE and want to be part of the community.  Increasing the number of underrepresented populations in STEM is a multiyear and multi-pronged project, impacting education and the workforce at a number of critical junctures.  We need to interest and encourage underrepresented groups to consider STEM and then make the atmosphere they find themselves in conducive to creativity and success.

Low-income youth need exposure to enrichment to envision a creative future for themselves, yet it is quite difficult to find a way to bring it into school settings.  While we have connections to individual teachers and administrators in a number of schools, we need the SOLVE community to help us: push forward the notion that underrepresented populations need enrichment to succeed; identify new groups of STEM professionals willing to join our efforts and reach low-income students; cultivate sources of funding to carry the project forward; and expand geographically with a thoughtful, scalable plan.