Despite decades-long efforts to broaden STEM participation, the underrepresentation of people from communities of color persists in STEM across many areas, including, for example, laboratory work, engineering, and teaching. Research suggests that more expansive STEM learning opportunities are possible in school and out of school when youth have opportunities to develop and share their experience with others, both in and beyond the classroom. Mentoring is a widely accepted strategy for supporting youth learning and identity development across a variety of sectors including education and workforce development. There is broad concern, however, that more empirical research needs to be done, especially related to middle school and high school youth in STEM. Young people can be effective leaders in both formal and informal learning contexts and such mentorship and pedagogy can lead to STEM learning and positive identity development with implications for broadening participation. In formal and informal contexts, having youth act in facilitator roles holds promise for identification with engaging in STEM content and practices. As such, this project investigates the ways in which young people construct and develop affiliations with STEM in their capacity as mentors, facilitators, and curators of STEM ideas and practices among younger youth. Additionally, the project outcomes seek to understand the design of formal and informal learning environments that support STEM identity development for youth of color by orienting to youth as knowledgeable experts and focusing on youth's ongoing pedagogical development as mentors in STEM.
In partnership with two informal and two formal learning partners in the Boston area, this project will work with 140 young people, aged 14-24, 96% from communities of color, who participate in activities related to youth mentoring initiatives in STEM areas. These partners have a rich history of initiatives focused on developing high school and college youth mentors to work in STEM summer camps and juniors and seniors in high school to mentor freshmen and sophomores in mathematics and digital fabrication engineering. The project intends to investigate how youth mentors teach, where they are successful and where they need support, and to develop principles for professional learning opportunities for schools and out-of-school organizations. The project focuses, in particular, on understanding “youth pedagogical development†(YPD), or youth’s ongoing process of learning to be mentors. Exploring YPD involves understanding youth’s learning of STEM ideas, literacies, and pedagogical strategies and how youth come to identify with STEM and STEM mentoring. Youth mentors can reach large numbers of learners, and more importantly they can connect deeply with other youth in meaningful ways. This participatory project draws on ethnographic and case study methods and employs areas of work shown to support broadening participation in STEM: a) prior research on youth as mentors in STEM learning; b) distributions of power and authority in formal and informal learning contexts; c) academic identity development; and d) STEM literacies. By collecting and analyzing data from four different contexts with organizations that have shared values and practices, including distributed authority for knowing, the partnership intends to understand program design principles that support students as mentors in regard to STEM literacies, learning, identity development, and pedagogy. By following youth mentors over two years, the case studies will highlight how STEM learning, identity building, and pedagogy are developed when youth participate as mentors in sustained ways over longer stretches of time. In addition to disseminating this work at academic conferences, the project will have a website that will be useful to other community groups and schools that utilize mentoring practices and will host a conference that will involve all partner organizations as well as groups from around the US who use mentoring to support STEM learning and identity development.
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.
