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1. Mentoring across difference and distance: building effective virtual research opportunities for underrepresented minority undergraduate students in biological sciences

   https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01452-23  

   Knox, Corey J. ; Ab Latif, Faqryza M. ; Cornejo, Natasha R. ; Johnson, Michael D. ( January 2024 , mBio)

   Freitag, Nancy E. (Ed.)

   The National Summer Undergraduate Research Program (NSURP) is a mentored summer research program in biosciences for undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Conducted virtually over 8 weeks every summer starting in 2020, NSURP provides accessible and flexible research experiences to meet the needs of geographically diverse and schedule-constrained students. Drawing from mentee reporting and surveys conducted within the NSURP framework involving over 350 underrepresented minority undergraduate students over three cohorts (2020–2022), matched with mentors, this paper highlights the potential benefits of students participating in virtual mentored research experiences. In addition to increased access to quality research experiences for students who face travel or academic setting constraints, we found that virtual mentoring fosters cross-cultural collaborations, generates novel research questions, and expands professional networks. Moreover, this study emphasizes the role of virtual mentorship opportunities in fostering inclusivity and support for individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM fields. By overcoming barriers to full participation in the scientific community, virtual mentorship programs can create a more equitable and inclusive environment for aspiring researchers. This research contributes to the growing body of literature on the effectiveness and the potential of virtual research programs and mentorship opportunities in broadening participation and breaking down barriers in STEM education and careers.

   Summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) are established to provide platforms for interest in scientific research and as tools for eventual matriculation to scientific graduate programs. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of in-person programs for 2020 and 2021, creating the need for alternative programming. The National Summer Undergraduate Research Project (NSURP) was created to provide a virtual option to REUs in microbiology to compensate for the pandemic-initiated loss of research opportunities. Although in-person REUs have since been restored, NSURP currently remains an option for those unable to travel to in-person programs in the first place due to familial, community, and/or monetary obligations. This study examines the effects of the program's first 3 years, documenting the students’ experiences, and suggests future directions and areas of study related to the impact of virtual research experiences on expanding and diversifying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

    

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2. Same soup, different bowl: Understanding the mentoring attitudes of STEM doctoral faculty at HBCUs

   Merriweather, Lisa ; Douglas, Niesha ; Howell, Cathy ; Sanczyk, Anna ( August 2022 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   ackground: Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs) have for decades played a pivotal role in producing Black scientists. Research found that HBCUs, despite being under funded and resourced, were responsible for over 10% of Black scientists with doctorates. Even though most earn their doctorates at Historically White Institutions (HWIS), understanding the experience of Black STEM doctoral students at HBCUs is of paramount importance to impacting opportunity for success for underrepresented population groups. HBCUs are recognized for approaches to learning and learning environments that are more relational, encouraging peer to peer and student to faculty relationships, particularly in the form of same-race and same sex mentorships, resulting in less negative racialized gendered experiences and less competitive atmospheres. In spite of what appears to be accepted truths, such as HBCUs offering more culturally affirming experiences, some researchers suggests that little empirical research exists on the quality of support structures available for graduate students at HBCUS in STEM academic fields, particularly mentoring. Increased understanding would provide essential framing necessary for developing more effective mentors at HBCUs, especially given that there are limited numbers of Black faculty in STEM, even at HBCUs. Theoretical Framework: Anti-racism and critical capital theory are employed as theoretical frameworks. Both are well suited for questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about the lived experiences of racialized others and for deconstructing systemic issues influencing common faculty practices. These frameworks highlight the contextual experiences of STEM doctoral learning. Research Design: The researchers were interested in understanding how STEM doctoral faculty at HBCUs perceive their role as mentors. An NSF AGEP sponsored social science research project explored the dispositions, skills, and knowledge of eight STEM faculty at a HBCU. Attitudes towards culturally liberative mentoring were explored through a qualitative case study. The participating faculty were involved in an institutional change program and were interviewed for an average of 60 minutes. Constant comparative data analysis method was used. Additionally, STEM faculty from participating departments completed two mentoring competency and attitude inventories. This case was drawn from a larger multiple embedded case study. Research Findings: The research findings indicate that STEM doctoral faculty mentors at HBCUs express attitudes about mentoring that are not all that different from their PWIS counterparts. They have a tendency to hold deficit views of domestic Black students and have minimal awareness of how culture inhibits or facilitates a positive learning experience for Black students. Further the culture of science tended to blind them from the culture of people. Research Implications: In order to enhance the learning experiences of Black STEM doctoral students at HBCUs, the Black student experience at HBCUs must be deromanticized. Understanding the impact of anti-Black racism even within an environment historically and predominantly Black is imperative. Recognizing the ways in which anti-Black attitudes are insidiously present in faculty attitudes and practices and in environments perceived as friendly and supportive for Black students highlights opportunities for STEM faculty development that can move toward a more culturally liberative framework. 

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3. Uncomfortable Conversations with Faculty and Students in Zoom: Experiences with diversity and inclusion spurred by police brutality and racial injustice in the U.S.

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--39149  

   White, Lance ; Hammond, Tracy ; Ray, Samantha ; Jaison, Donna ; Stanley, Christine ( February 2022 , 2022 CoNECD (Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity))

   The culture within engineering colleges and departments has been historically quiet when considering social justice issues. Often the faculty in those departments are less concerned with social issues and are primarily focused on their disciplines and the concrete ways that they can make impacts academically and professionally in their respective arena’s. However, with the social climate of the United States shifting ever more towards a politically charged climate, and current events, particularly the protests against police brutality in recent years, faculty and students are constantly inundated with news of injustices happening in our society. The murder of George Floyd on May 25th 2020 sent shockwaves across the United States and the world. The video captured of his death shared across the globe brought everyone’s attention to the glaringly ugly problem of police brutality, paired with the COVID-19 pandemic, and US election year, the conditions were just right for a social activist movement to grow to a size that no one could ignore. Emmanuel Acho spoke out, motivated by injustices seen in the George Floyd murder, initially with podcasts and then by writing his book “Uncomfortable Converstations with a Black Man” [1]. In his book he touched on various social justice issues such as: racial terminology (i.e., Black or African American), implicit biases, white privilege, cultural appropriation, stereotypes (e.g., the “angry black man”), racial slurs (particularly the n-word), systemic racism, the myth of reverse racism, the criminal justice system, the struggles faced by black families, interracial families, allyship, and anti-racism. Students and faculty at Anonymous University felt compelled to set aside the time to meet and discuss this book in depth through the video conferencing client Zoom. In these meetings diverse facilitators were tasked with bringing the topics discussed by Acho in his book into conversation and pushing attendees of these meetings to consider those topics critically and personally. In an effort to avoid tasking attendees with reading homework to be able to participate in these discussions, the discussed chapter of the audiobook version of Acho’s book was played at the beginning of each meeting. Each audiobook chapter lasted between fifteen and twenty minutes, after which forty to forty-five minutes were left in the hour-long meetings to discuss the content of the chapter in question. Efforts by students and faculty were made to examine how some of the teachings of the book could be implemented into their lives and at Anonymous University. For broader topics, they would relate the content back to their personal lives (e.g., raising their children to be anti-racist and their experiences with racism in American and international cultures). Each meeting was recorded for posterity in the event that those conversations would be used in a paper such as this. Each meeting had at least one facilitator whose main role was to provide discussion prompts based on the chapter and ensure that the meeting environment was safe and inclusive. Naturally, some chapters address topics that are highly personal to some participants, so it was vital that all participants felt comfortable and supported to share their thoughts and experiences. The facilitator would intervene if the conversation veered in an aggressive direction. For example, if a participant starts an argument with another participant in a non-constructive manner, e.g., arguing over the definition of ethnicity, then the facilitator will interrupt, clear the air to bring the group back to a common ground, and then continue the discussion. Otherwise, participants were allowed to steer the direction of the conversation as new avenues of discussion popped up. These meetings were recorded with the goal of returning to these conversations and analyzing the conversations between attendees. Grounded theory will be used to first assess the most prominent themes of discussion between attendees for each meeting [2]. Attendees will be contacted to expressly ask their permission to have their words and thoughts used in this work, and upon agreement that data will begin to be processed. Select attendees will be asked to participate in focus group discussions, which will also be recorded via Zoom. These discussions will focus around the themes pulled from general discussion and will aim to dive deeper into the impact that this experience has had on them as either students or faculty members. A set of questions will be developed as prompts, but conversation is expected to evolve organically as these focus groups interact. These sessions will be scheduled for an hour, and a set of four focus groups with four participants are expected to participate for a total of sixteen total focus group participants. We hope to uncover how this experience changed the lives of the participants and present a model of how conversations such as this can promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and access activities amongst faculty and students outside of formal programs and strategic plans that are implemented at university, college, or departmental levels. 

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4. Youth-Community Invention: Community Epistemologies and Expansive Iterative Design

   Calabrese Barton, A. ( January 2020 , American Education Research Association)

   Objectives We examine the community epistemologies in youth’s iterative refinements of STEM-rich inventions across settings and time. Iteration in STEM-rich engineering/invention work refers to re-thinking ideas/designs within prototyping processes (Cunningham & Kelly, 2017). The objective of this paper is to examine the political dimensions of iteration through a) how iteration involves pre- and post-design “lives” of inventions especially towards new social futures, and b) the intentional incorporation of cultural epistemologies towards advancing new forms of legitimate inventor knowledge/practice (Yosso, 2005). Framing We draw from critical justice and consequential learning studies. Critical justice focuses on recognizing diversity and addressing structural inequalities perpetuated through systemic racism and classism. It seeks re-shifted relations of power and position within multiple scales-of-activity in learning, intersected with historicized injustices in learning environments. Consequential learning examines what matters to people, and how associated values and practices, when coordinated through social activity, allows for imagining new social futures (Gutierrez, 2012). Viewing the iterative process of inventing through a justice-oriented consequential lens calls into question traditional modes of knowing, and challenges/expands who and what areas of expertise are recognized and valued. Methods Our study takes place in two community makerspaces in mid-sized cities. Both center community engagement and support youth in designing/inventing to address problems they and their communities care about. Both also support minoritized youth in inventing through engagement with a wide range of community/STEM stakeholders. In researcher-educator roles, we collaborated with both makerspaces to establish programs supporting youth in sustained engagement in STEM and making/inventing in culturally-sustaining ways. In our two-year, longitudinal critical ethnography, data were generated in weekly community making sessions between 2016-2018. Data include artifacts, youth conversation groups, and videos capturing youth interaction with STEM and community experts at various stages in their design process. Analysis involved multiple stages and levels of coding based on open-coding and constant comparison procedures. Findings We ground our paper in four in-depth longitudinal cases of youth’s iterative design work: Nila’s light-up #stopracism sign; Su’zanne’s massaging slipper, Sharon’s geodesic play dome, and Jazmyn’s portable fan. Across cases, we illustrate three findings. First, youth located broader injustices within local making/inventing discourses with support from community and STEM allies, suggesting youth drew from multiple epistemologies, some grounded in community cultural wealth, others in STEM. For example, Su’Zanne drew from a familial culture of care and resistance in recognizing injustices nested in homelessness while iterating a way to make her slipper “more massaging.” The geodesic dome youth-makers drew from collective solidarity/resistance in making a structure for younger peers due to unjust lack of play infrastructure. Second, iterative engagement involving community wealth afforded further design and inventing experiences and expanded ownership over inventions across many stakeholders. For example, youth turned Nila’s #stopracism sign on during group discussions when they felt that racism needed to be foregrounded. Third, the afterlife of youth invention processes impacted the emergent inventor-maker culture through influencing the iterative process. Significance Iterations expand hybridization of cultural knowledge/practice and STEM-rich inventing, re-shaping whose cultural knowledge matters, and fostering justice-oriented collective outcomes. 

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5. COVID-19 and Housing Security in Remote Alaska Native Communities

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey ; Supple, Laura ; Criss-Carboy, Laura ( November 2023 , Virginia Tech Publishing)

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey (Ed.)

   https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/alaskanative/ At the start of the pandemic, the editors of this annotated bibliography initiated a remote (i.e., largely virtual) ethnographic research project that investigated how COVID-19 was impacting off-site modular construction practices in Alaska Native communities. Many of these communities are located off the road system and thus face not only dramatically higher costs but multiple logistical challenges in securing licensed tradesmen and construction crews and in shipping building supplies and equipment to their communities. These barriers, as well as the region’s long winters and short building seasons, complicate the construction of homes and related infrastructure projects. Historically, these communities have also grappled with inadequate housing, including severe overcrowding and poor-quality building stock that is rarely designed for northern Alaska’s climate (Marino 2015). Moreover, state and federal bureaucracies and their associated funding opportunities often further complicate home building by failing to accommodate the digital divide in rural Alaska and the cultural values and practices of Native communities.[1] It is not surprising, then, that as we were conducting fieldwork for this project, we began hearing stories about these issues and about how the restrictions caused by the pandemic were further exacerbating them. Amidst these stories, we learned about how modular home construction was being imagined as a possible means for addressing both the complications caused by the pandemic and the need for housing in the region (McKinstry 2021). As a result, we began to investigate how modular construction practices were figuring into emergent responses to housing needs in Alaska communities. We soon realized that we needed to broaden our focus to capture a variety of prefabricated building methods that are often colloquially or idiomatically referred to as “modular.” This included a range of prefabricated building systems (e.g., manufactured, volumetric modular, system-built, and Quonset huts and other reused military buildings[2]). Our further questions about prefabricated housing in the region became the basis for this annotated bibliography. Thus, while this bibliography is one of multiple methods used to investigate these issues, it played a significant role in guiding our research and helped us bring together the diverse perspectives we were hearing from our interviews with building experts in the region and the wider debates that were circulating in the media and, to a lesser degree, in academia. The actual research for each of three sections was carried out by graduate students Lauren Criss-Carboy and Laura Supple.[3] They worked with us to identify source materials and their hard work led to the team identifying three themes that cover intersecting topics related to housing security in Alaska during the pandemic. The source materials collected in these sections can be used in a variety of ways depending on what readers are interested in exploring, including insights into debates on housing security in the region as the pandemic was unfolding (2021-2022). The bibliography can also be used as a tool for thinking about the relational aspects of these themes or the diversity of ways in which information on housing was circulating during the pandemic (and the implications that may have had on community well-being and preparedness). That said, this bibliography is not a comprehensive analysis. Instead, by bringing these three sections together with one another to provide a snapshot of what was happening at that time, it provides a critical jumping off point for scholars working on these issues. The first section focuses on how modular housing figured into pandemic responses to housing needs. In exploring this issue, author Laura Supple attends to both state and national perspectives as part of a broader effort to situate Alaska issues with modular housing in relation to wider national trends. This led to the identification of multiple kinds of literature, ranging from published articles to publicly circulated memos, blog posts, and presentations. These materials are important source materials that will likely fade in the vastness of the Internet and thus may help provide researchers with specific insights into how off-site modular construction was used – and perhaps hyped – to address pandemic concerns over housing, which in turn may raise wider questions about how networks, institutions, and historical experiences with modular construction are organized and positioned to respond to major societal disruptions like the pandemic. As Supple pointed out, most of the material identified in this review speaks to national issues and only a scattering of examples was identified that reflect on the Alaskan context. The second section gathers a diverse set of communications exploring housing security and homelessness in the region. The lack of adequate, healthy housing in remote Alaska communities, often referred to as Alaska’s housing crisis, is well-documented and preceded the pandemic (Guy 2020). As the pandemic unfolded, journalists and other writers reported on the immense stress that was placed on already taxed housing resources in these communities (Smith 2020; Lerner 2021). The resulting picture led the editors to describe in their work how housing security in the region exists along a spectrum that includes poor quality housing as well as various forms of houselessness including, particularly relevant for the context, “hidden homelessness” (Hope 2020; Rogers 2020). The term houseless is a revised notion of homelessness because it captures a richer array of both permanent and temporary forms of housing precarity that people may experience in a region (Christensen et al. 2107). By identifying sources that reflect on the multiple forms of housing insecurity that people were facing, this section highlights the forms of disparity that complicated pandemic responses. Moreover, this section underscores ingenuity (Graham 2019; Smith 2020; Jason and Fashant 2021) that people on the ground used to address the needs of their communities. The third section provides a snapshot from the first year of the pandemic into how CARES Act funds were allocated to Native Alaska communities and used to address housing security. This subject was extremely complicated in Alaska due to the existence of for-profit Alaska Native Corporations and disputes over eligibility for the funds impacted disbursements nationwide. The resources in this section cover that dispute, impacts of the pandemic on housing security, and efforts to use the funds for housing as well as barriers Alaska communities faced trying to secure and use the funds. In summary, this annotated bibliography provides an overview of what was happening, in real time, during the pandemic around a specific topic: housing security in largely remote Alaska Native communities. The media used by housing specialists to communicate the issues discussed here are diverse, ranging from news reports to podcasts and from blogs to journal articles. This diversity speaks to the multiple ways in which information was circulating on housing at a time when the nightly news and radio broadcasts focused heavily on national and state health updates and policy developments. Finding these materials took time, and we share them here because they illustrate why attention to housing security issues is critical for addressing crises like the pandemic. For instance, one theme that emerged out of a recent National Science Foundation workshop on COVID research in the North NSF Conference[4] was that Indigenous communities are not only recovering from the pandemic but also evaluating lessons learned to better prepare for the next one, and resilience will depend significantly on more—and more adaptable—infrastructure and greater housing security. 

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