The federally funded effort to foster inclusivity includes UCSC researchers such as astronomy and astrophysics professor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, psychology associate professor Rebecca Covarrubias and psychology professor Su-hua Wang.
“We’re excited to lead this effort to redefine what it means to succeed in STEM and academia,” said Wang in a statement. “By challenging traditional meritocratic frameworks and valuing the unique cultural strengths our students bring, we can create more supportive, empowering environments where every graduate student feels a sense of belonging, finds their voice and has the opportunity to thrive.”
According to the project’s description on the U.S. National Science Foundation website, “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.”
Researchers will assess support and mentoring programs at UCSC such as the New Gen Learning Research Consortium, the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship and the Equity-Minded Mentoring Certificate program. The aim of the grant-funded project 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.”
Researchers have devised a four-stage approach to redesign the programs, which begins with gathering baseline data to find the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three programs. The second stage, “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 redesign plans.”
The third stage of the project will look at implementing the redesign plans for each of the programs while gaining further feedback. The final stage of the project includes studying the impacts of the redesign implementation over the long term and communicating the project findings through reports, publications and presentations.
“This design affords a fine-grained look into the transformative power of relationships: how daily exchanges, interactions and activities among program members serve as the most critical spaces for shifting culture and for recognizing one another’s strengths,” said Covarrubias in a statement.
To read the project description, visit nsf.gov.
©2024 the Santa Cruz Sentinel (Scotts Valley, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
