Developing solutions to large-scale collective problems -- such as resilience to environmental challenges -- requires scientifically literate communities. However, the predominant conception of scientific literacy has focused on individuals, and there is not consensus as to what community level scientific literacy is or how to measure it. Thus, a 2016 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, “Science Literacy: Concepts, Contexts, and Consequences,” stated that community level scientific literacy is undertheorized and understudied. More specifically, the committee recommended that research is needed to understand both the i) contexts (e.g., a community’s physical and social setting) and ii) features of community organization (e.g., relationships within the community) that support community level science literacy and influence successful group action. This CAREER award responds to this nationally identified need by iteratively refining a model to conceptualize and measure community level scientific literacy. The model and metrics developed in this project may be applied to a wide range of topics (e.g., vaccination, pandemic response, genetically-modified foods, pollution control, and land-use decisions) to improve a community’s capacity to make scientifically-sound collective decisions. This CAREER award is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) and the EHR CORE Research (ECR) programs. It supports the AISL program goals to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. It supports the ECR program goal to advance relevant research knowledge pertaining to STEM learning and learning environments.
The proposed research will conceptualize, operationalize, and measure community level scientific literacy. This project will use a comparative multiple case study research design. Three coastal communities, faced with the need to make scientifically-informed land-use decisions, will be studied sequentially. A convergent mixed methods design will be employed, in which qualitative and quantitative data collection and analyses are performed concurrently. To describe the i) context of each community case, this project will use qualitative research methods, including document analysis, observation, focus groups, and interviews. To measure the ii) features of community organization for each community case, social network analysis will be used. The results from this research will be disseminated throughout and at the culmination of the project through professional publications and conference presentations as well as with community stakeholders and the general public. The integrated education activities include a professional learning certificate for informal science education professionals and STEM graduate students. This certificate emphasizes high-quality community-engaged scholarship, placing students with partners such as museums, farmer’s markets, and libraries, to offer informal learning programs in their communities. This professional learning program will be tested as a model to provide training for STEM graduate students who would like to communicate their research to the public through outreach and extension activities.
Many Black youth in both urban and rural areas lack engaging opportunities to learn mathematics in a manner that leads to full participation in STEM. The Young People’s Project (YPP), the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP), and the Education for Liberation Network (EdLib) each have over two decades of experience working on this issue. In the city of Baltimore, where 90% of youth in poverty are Black, and only 5% of these students meet or exceed expectations in math, BAP, a youth led organization, develops and employs high school and college age youth to provide after-school tutoring in Algebra 1, and to advocate for a more just education for themselves and their peers. YPP works in urban or rural low income communities that span the country developing Math Literacy Worker programs that employ young people ages 14-22 to create spaces to help their younger peers learn math. Building on these deep and rich experiences, this Innovations in Development project studies how Black students see themselves as mathematicians in the context of paid peer-to-peer math teaching--a combined social, pedagogical, and economic strategy. Focusing primarily in Baltimore, the project studies how young people grow into new self-definitions through their work in informal, student-determined math learning spaces, structured collaboratively with adults who are experts in both mathematics and youth development. The project seeks to demonstrate the benefits of investing in young people as learners, teachers, and educational collaborators as part of a core strategy to improve math learning outcomes for all students.
The project uses a mixed methods approach to describe how mathematical identity develops over time in young people employed in a Youth-Directed Mathematics Collaboratory. 60 high school aged students with varying mathematical backgrounds (first in Baltimore and later in Boston) will learn how to develop peer- and near-peer led math activities with local young people in informal settings, after-school programs, camps, and community centers, reaching approximately 600 youth/children. The high school aged youth employed in this project will develop their own math skills and their own pedagogical skills through the already existing YPP and BAP structures, made up largely of peers and near-peers just like themselves. They will also participate in on-going conversations within the Collaboratory and with the community about the cultural significance of doing mathematics, which for YPP and BAP is a part of the ongoing Civil Rights/Human Rights movement. Mathematical identity will be studied along four dimensions: (a) students’ sequencing and interpretation of past mathematical experiences (autobiographical identity); (b) other people’s talk to them and their talk about themselves as learners, doers, and teachers of mathematics (discoursal identity); (c) the development of their own voices in descriptions and uses of mathematical knowledge and ideas (authorial identity); and (d) their acceptance or rejection of available selfhoods (socio-culturally available identity). Intended outcomes from the project include a clear description of how mathematical identity develops in paid peer-teaching contexts, and growing recognition from both local communities and policy-makers that young people have a key role to play, not only as learners, but also as teachers and as co-researchers of mathematics education.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jay GillenMaisha MosesThomas NikundiweNaama LewisAlice Cook