KM Anderson's List: STEM education in underserved communities

• For kids like my students – inner-city kids from poor families (whether working-class or on welfare), average or below-average academic performance, some with behavior problems – interests in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) dies by 10^th grade and one of three things kill the promise of opportunity.
• • Lack of resources
   
  • Benign discouragement by well-meaning adults
   
  • Active exclusion by powerful gatekeepers
• This conversation about the role of privilege and access to STEM by diverse students is an important one. Miriam and I both have been very active in science outreach to under-served (and urban) initiating these conversations in our respective scientific spheres.

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• And her story also led to a discussion on how low-income students of color often are discouraged from exploring STEM subjects. Biologist DNLee, who writes the popular Urban Scientist blog on Scientific American, wrote a powerful column on how STEM education is denied to too many students before they step through the door.  Christopher Emdin, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College penned an even more blistering piece.

• The National Science foundation recently released data indicating that women, persons with disabilities, and three racial/ethnic groups -- African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians -- constitute smaller percentages of science and engineering degree recipients (as well as employed scientists and engineers) than they do of the population. The fact is that the science and engineering workforce is largely white and male, and minority women, especially African American women, comprise about 1 in 10 employed scientists and engineers.
• In many classrooms, particularly in science classrooms, both teachers and students are given scripts to follow and cookbook-style science experiments that provide no space for creativity. For students who are curious about science, and are told exactly what to do and how to do it throughout every second in the science lab. Unfortunately, these lowly scientific explorations result in situations like Kiera's. What educators should have been done in Kiera's case is bring the experiment she conducted into a classroom and discuss the process behind it. Sadly, these types of teachable moments are off the curriculum script, yet are also the moments that birth scientists. Avoiding them makes school and science boring and punishing students for them alienates them from science altogether.