Racial Equity: STEM in your Neighborhoods: Leveraging Community Stories from Past and Present to Define a Narrative for the Future.

The stories of people of color who make contributions to STEM often go unnoticed, with the exception of the few who gain mainstream attention. To challenge the pervasive narratives and shed light on the value of everyday citizens’ contributions in STEM, this project will highlight stories and the STEM identities of historically marginalized communities in local contexts.

The STEM in Your Neighborhood (SiYN) project will: 1) establish equitable ways for the racially and culturally diverse communities to work together to ensure community engagement, 2) engage approximately in participatory STEM-story sharing, 3) develop community-authored STEM narratives by working with an intergenerational analysis team and residents in participatory exercises to explore story patterns, and 5) disseminate findings within the community and nationally.

The primary research questions for this project are: 1) Which forms of capital emerge in community-authored narratives? and 2) How do different forms of cultural capital relate to feelings of belonging, competence, and autonomy? The proposed research methodology relies on a transformational mixed-methods design that centers the experiences of marginalized communities and generates knowledge and understanding of the processes and principles required to shift perspectives of STEM to reclaim community ownership.

Participants and community members will benefit from a better understanding of systemic racism and structural barriers to STEM engagement. The project achieves broader impacts by: 1) developing a system to support community STEM-story collection and interpretation, 2) freely disseminating the research findings and knowledge gained from evaluation of effectiveness at establishing equitable processes and products, and 3) packaging and providing easy access to the community-authored STEM narrative "toolkit".

This project is funded by the Directorate for STEM Education (EDU) via the Racial Equity in STEM Education activity, which supports research and practice projects that investigate how considerations of racial equity factor into the improvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and workforce. Awarded projects seek to center the voices, knowledge, and experiences of the individuals, communities, and institutions most impacted by systemic inequities within the STEM enterprise.

Programs across EDU contribute funds to the Racial Equity activity in recognition of the alignment of its projects with the collective research and development thrusts of the four divisions of the directorate.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.