Mobilizing Community Cultural Wealth to Transform STEM Graduate Education
Gaps in equity and inclusion within STEM graduate education in the U.S. persist. At stake is the loss of contributions toward scientific innovation and excellence from more racially and economically diverse scientists (e.g., low-income, first-generation, students of color). Indeed, these students bring various cultural strengths from their home communities that can transform learning spaces, known as community cultural wealth. However, the transformative power of their cultural wealth is only possible with institutional commitment to recognize its value, including the implementation of educational practices that take concrete steps to leverage these diverse strengths with a critical lens.
This National Science Foundation Innovations of Graduate Education (IGE) Track 2 award to the University of California, Santa Cruz will conduct a multi-stage and multi-program intervention aimed at investigating how programs build structural opportunities and support for mobilizing marginalized doctoral students’ cultural strengths and ways of knowing. Using a multiple case study design to understand the mobilization process, this project will illuminate pathways for diversifying, strengthening, and transforming STEM graduate education to better represent and serve new generations of talented scientists. The project will take inventory of a fellowship support program (Cota Robles Fellows program), an interdisciplinary research training program (New Gen Learning Consortium), and a mentoring training program (Equity-Minded Mentoring Certificate program).
The goal is to redesign program elements to better mobilize marginalized students’ strengths for learning and make crucial connections to home departments to scale culture changes in STEM graduate education at the institutional level. In Stage 1, the project will connect to home departments and gather baseline data to examine the strengths and gaps of the three focal programs. Stage 2 will focus on relationship-building between programs and home departments, including learning about the specific cultures of support for graduate students and identifying potential target areas for collaboration. This step includes presenting the mobilization framework and findings from Stage 1 to develop re-design plans. Stage 3 will focus on implementing the re-design plans. The project will use a multiple case study design to examine the implementation process through focus groups with program staff and department contacts to examine their perspectives, challenges, and questions about the implementation as it unfolds and as it relates to the mobilization process, paying keen attention to concrete steps taken and resources used toward mobilization. In Stage 4, the project will study the impacts of the implementation on the culture, practices, and support structures of the programs and department spaces in the longer term, including a final focus group to have program staff and department contacts reflect on the implementation process, again paying keen attention to questions related to the mobilization process. Findings will be disseminated through conference presentations, brief reports, and publications on lessons learned for universities, researchers, and practitioners to scale up the impacts of the project.
The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community. 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.
