NSF Award
2308517
Historically, women and people of color have shouldered a disproportionate burden for leading equity efforts in STEM. Despite these efforts, there are still many groups who are underrepresented in STEM. Nationwide, women make up the majority of bachelor’s degrees awarded overall, at 57%, but only 38% of them graduate with bachelor’s degrees in a STEM field. Students coming from underrepresented groups receive bachelor’s degrees in STEM at lower rates: 15% for both Hispanic students and Pacific Islanders, 14% for American Indian and Alaska Natives and 12% for Black students. There are a number of underserved and underrepresented groups that are often invisible to these statistics (e.g., persons with disabilities, veterans, persons who identify with the LGBTQ+ community, and low-income first-generation). The Center for Engineering Peer Equity Throughout the Student Collegiate Experience at Colorado School of Mines will establish a framework that trains a wide range of students as peer leaders who promote equity in STEM. This center aligns with the NSF program mission which states that there has been a growing recognition of the need to create and support an inclusive and innovative engineering profession for the 21st Century. Doing so requires an understanding of how engineers from all communities are formed and how they can be supported to successfully obtain both the technical and professional skills needed to solve complex, often critical, problems facing today’s society. The Center will support students from a wide variety of diverse backgrounds, well beyond the usual and visible categories based on gender, race, and ethnicity, but also including veteran status, first generation students, and differently abled students. Peer leaders will come from all areas of the student experience, including athletics, fraternity and sorority life, housing, and student clubs. The training program will cultivate a broad sense of shared responsibility for fostering equity and will enroll the entire community as advocates and allies in changing our STEM culture by integrating equity and allyship into a peer-leadership program. <br/><br/>This Center will stand up infrastructure and demonstrate a successful STEM-wide approach to peer education and allyship that changes culture and outcomes for all students, and in particular, underrepresented students. A research and assessment program will evaluate effective strategies for transformation of STEM culture driven by student peer educators and leaders. Center research will address the novel integration of funds of knowledge (FOK) in peer educator and ally training and assess whether this approach helps engineering students in the development of their professional engineering identity. Centering FOK helps students traditionally underrepresented and underserved in STEM develop stronger engineering identities. This is believed to be the first approach to develop a formal ally training model for college students at the scale of an entire campus. This Center will create reproducible models for these best practices and evaluate their impact, reproducibility, validity, reliability, and effectiveness. The outcomes would catalyze significant change in STEM culture; a much-needed transformation for STEM.<br/><br/>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.
