The goal of this project is to understand what practices, within informal physics programs, facilitate and/or foster physics identity. The disparity of representation in STEM fields has stirred the scientific community to develop strategies to recruit members of underrepresented minorities. Despite significant resources being made available to meet this objective, through targeted campaigns and public-engagement requirements within most grants, lack of diversity and equity in STEM fields is a persistent issue. Recruitment efforts alone are not sufficient unless we identify what deters students from pursuing and completing careers in STEM.
Issues of equity and diversity in society have been pervasive through time and cultures. These issues permeate every aspect of our modern society. Education is one of the strongest tools to combat these issues. However, if our education system is unable to provide equitable opportunities for all, then how can we address the issues of equity and diversity in our society, which are relevant to guarantee democracy. This means that diversity in every element of society – government, educators, scientist, and researchers, etc – needs to be representative of the population it serves. We can only reach this level of representation if the structure and systems that sustained them are accessible to all groups.
In STEM and physics diversity is important to ensure access and equitable treatment to all groups, guarantee a competent workforce, and a science-literate society, as well as represents a determining factor in the advance of scientific fields, diversity in experiences and backgrounds brings diversity of ideas, ways of thinking, and approaches to solving problems, which are of essential importance for the understanding of science and finding solutions for the current and future challenges of society.
Efforts around equity and diversity within the field have been focused on determining what the curriculum should be and what students need to learn, assuming STEM subjects, and more specifically physics to be objectives. We, in the field, have gone from determining what content knowledge needs to be learned, to what are the practices that STEM students should engage in, this has been done with complete disregard to cultural practices from diverse backgrounds. Studies have shown that this has come at the cost of equity in the STEM fields and possibly worsening systemic factors that prevent women and minorities to participate and identify with these fields.
Factors such as student attitude, self-efficacy, sense of belonging, motivation, and identity are understood to be important in addressing the number, and diversity, of students who persist in STEM subjects. More specifically, studies show that a person’s self-association with physics is the strongest predictor of a person’s future career path involving physics. Thus, changing cultural practices within the fields, determining what are the practices that can improve current underrepresentation in STEM should be a priority and it is the topic of the current research project.
Different campaigns and investments have been made to “breach the gap” between female and males, as well as people of color. While these campaigns and efforts may prove effective for attracting more minorities, issues of underrepresentation are still prevalent -- high dropout rates or students changing fields. This indicates that the problem goes beyond getting them through the door, that actual practices within the field are keeping these populations away, making it difficult for these populations to pursue and complete degrees in physics.
As expressed in NRC report Learning science in informal environments “An important value of informal environments for learning science is being accessible to all”. In this project, we investigate what are the cultural practices in informal environments that make them more accessible and what is the impact that this could have on the development of identity and sense of belonging. More specifically we looked and physics university students that facilitate physics informal programs and how participation in these programs may affect their identity and sense of belonging within the physics field.
