generative justice as a foundation for STEM diversityâ. Pp. 132-151 in Y. A. ... environmental justice. A common ... Whatever our critique of the social and environmental damage caused by STEM may be, ... Income inequality in Europe and the.
Eglash, R., Babbitt, W., Bennett, A., Bennett, K., Callahan, B., Davis, J., Drazan, J., et al (2016). “Culturally Situated Design Tools: generative justice as a foundation for STEM diversity”. Pp. 132-151 in Y. A. Rankin and J. O. Thomas (Eds.), Moving students of color from consumers to producers of technology. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
CULTURALLY SITUATED DESIGN TOOLS: GENERATIVE JUSTICE AS A FOUNDATION FOR STEM DIVERSITY Ron Eglash, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA William Babbitt, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Audrey Bennett, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Kathryn Bennett, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Brian Callahan, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA James Davis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA John Drazan, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Charles Hathaway, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA David Hughes, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Mukkai Krishnamoorthy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Michael Lachney, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Michael Mascarenhas, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Shayla Sawyer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Kathleen Tully, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
ABSTRACT The “pipeline” model of STEM education conceives of underrepresentation by race, gender and class in terms of leaks that fail to deliver students to their destination in the science and technology workforce. But that model fails to consider the role of STEM in producing underrepresentation. This can only be solved by moving from the extractive approach of the pipeline model to a generative model in which the value produced by STEM students cycles back to their own communities. We report on our experience creating and evaluating Culturally Situated Design Tools. Using a framework of “generative justice”, we contrast the cyclic social damage, which reproduces underrepresentation with the potential for STEM education as a niche in the technosocial ecosystem that can address underrepresentation and causal factors.
INTRODUCTION The “pipeline” model of STEM education envisions a stream of students entering the educational system, but because of “leaks” only a small percentage make it to the end. Low-income, female, and underrepresented ethnic
groups leak out more than others, which “explains” their underrepresentation. This model has become so naturalized in STEM education that we no longer think of it as a model; it appears to be common sense. To think that the model itself is flawed may seem irrational. However scientists challenge models in search of better ones all the time. Consider, for example, the origins of the pipeline model in the oil industry. If scientists and engineers approached the problem in the same way--the only solution to America’s rising fuel prices is to get more oil through the pipeline--we would be trapped forever in a world with accelerating global warming, middle-eastern petrodictatorships, ocean oil spills, etc. Fortunately we now understand the importance of replacing these extractive industries with renewable energy. Biofuels based on waste products, for example, can suck up as much carbon in the plant growth part of the cycle as they release in the fuel part of the cycle. Similarly we must now replace an extractive approach to underrepresented students in STEM with a generative approach that embodies both social and environmental justice. A common reaction to this view, especially from scientists and engineers, is that we are confusing two entirely different phenomena. Whatever our critique of the social and environmental damage caused by STEM may be, surely K-12 students are unware of it. To the contrary, while underrepresented youth may not have the data or analytic tools to back up their intuition, few of those living poverty think they are inhabiting a system which treats them and their community in fair and just ways. Because they often lack the means to express this analytically, the reaction can appear irrational. In the case of underrepresented ethnic groups these include accusing high-performing black students of “acting white” (Fryer and Torelli 2010), the sense that only white and Asian students have “cultural ownership” of mathematics (Martin 2000), and the formation of an “oppositional identity” (Fordham 1991, Ogbu 1998, Margolis 2008). Deikman et al (2010) found similar results for adult women, where STEM careers “are perceived as less likely than careers in other fields to fulfill communal goals (e.g., working with or helping other people)”. Weisgram and Bigler (2006) report this effect regarding the value of “altruism” for girls in STEM education. Often researchers attempt to fix this problem by treating youth’s suspicions of STEM as ignorance or misinformation using the role model approach: successful, high profile black or Latino science superstars make a guest appearance. But the role model assumption is rarely tested. One exception is Nguyen (2008), who found that, to the contrary, “seeing a role model of poor background has a larger impact on poor children’s test scores than seeing someone of rich background.” Reinventing STEM such that its discoveries and innovations better serve lowincome communities is thus a promising approach. It has the potential to not only improve the attraction of STEM for underrepresented students, but also, as we will see in the next section, addresses the root causes of underrepresentation.
THE PROBLEM OF EXTRACTIVE STEM Underrepresentation is not a trivial leak in the pipeline, caused by youth’s ignorance or misinformation. It is a phenomenon with deep historical roots and sustained by present-day practices. Income inequality in Europe and the US diminished briefly during the middle of the 20th century (due to the 1930s depression and the 1940s effects of WWII), but by 1970--around the start of the information technology revolution--it began to skyrocket upwards: the top 1% of the world’s wealthy now own 50% of the wealth (Oxfam 2014). Figure 1 shows the widening gap between black and white household incomes over the last decade, with black household income after the Great Recession continues plummeting as white income recovers and rises. During this same time period, the greatest rise in asthma rates was among black children, almost a 50 percent increase. Is it any wonder that a population which halves its relative income and doubles its illness incidence shows an education disparity?
Figure 1. The gaps in white vs black net worth and the same contrast in asthma rates
Sources: Pew Trust and CDC It is instinctual for STEM professionals to immediately deny any relation between these racial disparities and science and technology. Similar to the NRA’s contention that “guns don’t kill people, only people kill people”, STEM professionals often see science and technology as “politically neutral” and “race blind”, only creating problems when abused. To the contrary, one need only glance at the role of computational mathematics, big data analytics and other information technology advances in fields such as finance, insurance, and marketing to see how science and technology are specifically--albeit unintentionally--crafted in ways that create these racial disparities. The Gaussian copula function, created by mathematician David Li (PhD in statistics), was at the heart of the faulty bond market computations that set off the Great Recession (Salmon 2009), which is clearly an inflection point for the black wealth gap above. Advances in fiber optic data transmission are often created specifically for enhancing investment computations (Steiner 2010); accelerating such gaps. Other STEM fields have similar effects: advances in chemical engineering include the pesticides disproportionately affecting Latino children (Richardson et al 2014); advances in nuclear engineering created cancer hotspots on the Navajo Nation (Brugge and Goble, 2002), and so on. When confronted with such examples, STEM professionals often point to the lack of intentionality (Vesilind & Gunn 2010). They are correct at some level: David Li did not deliberately set out to create a widening racial income gap; chemical engineers are just doing the job they were hired for; etc. But this innocence is then mistakenly transferred to the science itself. Financial inequality, racism, sexism and other social ills work like a magnetic force field on the iron filings of science and technology: it may operate invisibly but it leaves behind physical vectors: in the case of STEM, vectors by which labor value and environmental resources are extracted as the input to STEM production, and the resulting wealth and health output flows are directed to elite populations and locations. To replace this extraction with a generative cycle—to have STEM value in its many forms return to low-income communities—would address both problems at once. It would attract more underrepresented students to STEM, and it would bring more of the value produced by STEM back to those communities. This can only be achieved by integrating reform throughout the STEM technosocial ecosystem: from the ways youth learn STEM, to the ways university students are educated, to the very content and methods of university research. From 2010-2016 the Triple Helix program (https://community.csdt.rpi.edu. In this paper we will review the evidence that statistically significant improvements in youth STEM knowledge, skills, and career interests resulted from the incorporation of these materials into schools, and that the associated university research and education created opportunities to see how STEM innovation could provide partnering communities with new opportunities for “generative justice.” Our preliminary results indicate that this community-based research does not “dumb down” or diminish the sophistication of activities of grads and faculty, but to the contrary, can inspire new pathways for research that push innovation and discovery.
CSDT DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION There are two essential concepts underlying CSDTs: design tool and culturally situated. Like Scratch, Alice and similar systems, they are design tools in the sense of an open-ended sandbox; what Mizuko Ito has labeled the “construction genre” of educational technology (2009, 184). Seymour Papert and others have stressed the importance of technologies for this bottom-up, “constructionist” learning style; a means for allowing learners to teach themselves (Papert & Harel 1991). The limitations of the design tool concept can be seen by anyone perusing the website for Scratch, arguably the most successful example of the construction genre. There is an overwhelming persistence of commodified content. At our last search on the Scratch site there were 6,530 results for “McDonalds,” 2,960 results for “Barbie,” 4,600 for “Disney Princess,” 17,400 results for “Call of Duty,” 69,700 for “Halo,” and so on. As Lachney et al (2015) put it, if the constructionist genre is “turning children from consumers into producers” then why are objects of consumption so much at the center of its content? This was surely not the intention of Papert and Harel: indeed they explicitly link their constructionist approach to the free speech rights of feminism, anti-racism and “other areas where people fight for the right not only to think what they please, but to think it in their own ways.” Empirically, however, this analogy between open media for children and free speech for adults simply fails. The strong voice of corporate media in Scratch is more like the strong funding by corporations in US elections. In theory anyone can donate money to an election, but in reality our US elections have never been so influenced by the wealthy (Levey 2015). In theory the children using Scratch can do anything they want, but in reality their lives have never been so “colonized” by corporations. Beryl Langer (2004) coined the term “commoditoys” to describe the objects that hook kids into a consumption network across cartoons, movies, fast-food outlets, clothing, and an endless array of add-ons, accessories and media. Ferguson (2006) documents the ways in which Langer’s commoditoys “implicate children in a collective trance, inspiring or strengthening a subconscious belief in the mythic powers of capitalism.” But this is not exclusive to the free market: the same problem happens under communism, where authoritarian governments, rather than corporations, dominate the formation of childhood: Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists.... We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family.... We must nationalize them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist school (1918 soviet theorist quoted in Figes 2007). Substitute the word “consumers” for “communists” and you can see it is essentially the same philosophy: extracting the value of childhood--such that they are alienated from their own social productions of family, play, heritage, imagination and learning--and appropriating that value for their own purposes (private profits in the case of capitalism; state authority under communism). There is always another side to the critique of consumption, and that is the concept of “active viewer;” the idea that “these images are not simply passively absorbed by consumers but actively interpreted and appropriated in ways the producers would probably never have suspected and employed as ways of fashioning identities—the ‘creative consumption’ model” (Graeber 2011). But children privileged by race or class are vastly more immune to commodity colonization; they can afford espousing anti-materialist ideology and focusing on their bright futures while “dressing down” in ragged jeans and tee shirts. As Pugh (2011) puts it, poverty, especially that exacerbated by racial identity, means that the commodification of childhood “makes the teeth of inequality bite more fiercely, as those who do without struggle to manage the experience of cultural deprivation, and the social distance that it augurs.” Killing a classmate over sneakers or other sports apparel is thus not simply a case of the bad morality of individuals, as Bill Cosby famously claimed, but rather the most extreme expression of an extensive system of human and ecological value alienation and extraction that reaches from the sweatshop labor creating the sneakers, to the social effects created by the “prison-industrial complex,” to the demand created by Wall Street marketing schemes (Tang 2015). This brings us to the second concept underlying CSDTs, that of “culturally situated.” Our original set of tools simulated indigenous practices--African cornrow braiding, Native American beadwork, Latino drumming, etc.-using the mathematical and computational ideas that are part of the indigenous knowledge system in which they were embedded. It is crucial to understand this distinction. For example, a math lesson using a traditional weaving
in which students calculate the number of pixels in the image would not bear any relation to indigenous knowledge. Calculating the perimeter of the weave (unless that is actually an indigenous practice) would similarly miss the point. In contrast, interviewing the weaver to discover how she thinks about creating a particular angle (up one over one for 45 degrees for example) would indeed qualify as “translating” indigenous knowledge to its classroom equivalent. The reason for this emphasis on translating indigenous knowledge rather than imposing our ideas onto their artifacts was three-fold. First, a significant body of research shows that the myth of genetic determinism--the false conception that underrepresented students are incapable of performing at the same level as other students because their genes create differences in brain capability--creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, diminishing motivation and accomplishment (Steele and Spencer 2002). Providing a counter to those stereotypes—showing sophisticated math and computing concepts in black, native and Latino heritage--offers a means to break that myth. Second, myths of cultural determinism—that proficiency in STEM is “acting white”—are also contested. Third, these indigenous math and computing concepts are not merely instrumental “means to an end.” They offer students a glimpse of lifeways which are not based on alienated labor and value extraction; rather they traditionally focus on value circulation--the same “gift economy” concept which is often used to describe open source computing. Because it differs from both the “distributive justice” of socialist approaches and the commodification of relationships in capitalism, we refer to this approach as “generative justice” (Eglash and Garvey 2014; Eglash and Foster 2014). We should caution that providing a rich learning experience, which allows students to fully explore indigenous culture and discover the social and ecological values in which those sophisticated math and computing ideas are embedded is by no means straightforward. Here are several ways to do that poorly:
Trivial connections: dressing up old word problems in ethnic garb; restriction to low-level math (“how to count to 10 in Yoruba”); locating the STEM content in external analysis rather than internal meaning.
Substituting ancient empires for indigenous cultures: the Japanese abacus, Egyptian pyramids, Hindu and Arabic calculation methods etc. are commonly provided as if they are addressing the heritage of underrepresented students. Such instances simply reinforce the stereotypes of white and Asian cultures as “inherently” more mathematical than those of indigenous heritage (African, Native American and Latino).
Teaching by “instructionist” rather than constructionist methods.
Thus CSDTs have focused on not only “translating” the math and computing ideas embedded in indigenous knowledge, but doing so through constructionist design practices, both on-screen and in physical space, and thus strengthening connections to “generative” social practices. We will first illustrate this convergence of computing education and generative justice with an example of our program in Ghana, and then describe the broader variety of CSDT strategies in the US context.
CSDTS IN GHANA: ADINKRA COMPUTING Adinkra is a stamped cloth tradition that originated in what is today the nations of Ghana and Ivory Coast. There are about 60 traditional symbols that comprise the stamps; each of which signifies some social concept conveyed by a proverb. Since the symbol forms are strikingly geometric, and their ordering in the textiles reflects a systematic process, they offer the opportunity to examine the relationship between indigenous knowledge and western math and computing concepts. Figure 2 shows the symbol “Dwennimmen.” The proverb, which accompanies this symbol translates as “It is the heart and not the horns that leads a ram to bully;” implying that one must take responsibility for their decisions, no matter what circumstances they are in.
Figure 2. Dwennimmen, the ram’s horn symbol
Dwennimmen is just one of several adinkra symbols that make striking use of logarithmic spiral arcs. A skeptic might claim that they are merely imitating nature, not providing a geometric insight. But traditional artists’ elaboration and experimentation of the log spiral form indicates that is not true. Figure 3, for example, a 19th century sculpture from the Ewe people who live in Ghana and Togo, clearly shows a kind of discrete modeling of the continuous curve; what they describe as a demonstration of the artist’s adanu (“skill” or “accomplishment”). Most importantly, one of the adinkra symbols, “Gye Nayme,” uses log spirals to represent not a single species in particular, but rather a generalized concept of living things; that is to say, they are using log scaling as an “invariant property” of organic life (Eglash 1999; Babbitt et al 2015). Figure 3. 19th century terracotta sculpture of water buffalo from the Ewe (Ghana and Togo)
Thus in creating the CSDT to simulate adinkra symbols, we had ample material for students’ exploration of log spirals and other geometric properties as a form of indigenous knowledge. In addition, the cloths are typically stamped in a sequence that visually balances repetition and surprise. Reverse-engineering the sequence as an algorithm provides students with motivation to develop some coding skills that also reflect an indigenous perspective. For example, a cloth whose pattern is too repetitive is considered boring, and one which is too random is considered to lack meaning. Artisans use modular arithmetic (such as 4 symbols repeated over 3 columns) and other techniques to achieve a balance. Figure 4 shows one of the adinkra cloths undergoing simulation in our CSDT scripting interface (CSnap1).
Figure 4. Scripting interface and simulated adinkra cloth
In 2014 we worked with a middle school in Kumasi, Ghana to conduct a controlled study. We randomly assigned 20 students to one of two groups. The intervention group used the Adinkra CSDT website; the control group had similar lessons but without any cultural content, using the GeoGebra software package to draw abstract shapes. Both groups had the same instructor. A pretest and posttest formed the independent samples. Using a t-test analysis, the results showed a strong advantage for the scores for the adinkra-based lesson, statistically significant at the .001 confidence level. Another important difference was that students in the intervention group asked if they could stay after school and continue working on their designs. The ink for adinkra stamping is made from the bark of the Badie tree (Bridelia ferrungia). Pounded bark is put in water, and then boiled for two days. The diluted solution from initial stages can be taken to relieve gastric illness, and after straining out the bark the remaining pulp can be used for growing mushrooms. The final boil produces a thick black ink for stamping (Figure 5). Because the bark is removed in ways that allow regrowth, keeping the trees alive is a source of income, so there is less deforestation in those areas. One tree that gives you medicine, income and protects the environment it grows in: surely a good illustration of “generative justice;” that is, how unalienated value can be circulated between human and non-human agencies, rather than extracted. Unfortunately this economy is threatened by cheap imports of fake adinkra cloth from overseas; its value would be extracted and alienated from the traditional means of production. Figure 5. Ink making process
Thus we set out to combine our educational activities with those that would help to sustain these cultural practices. One school, situated across the street from an adinkra fabrication workshop, had 4 computers for 800 students. We worked with the local carver to create a set of miniature stamps that could be used on paper with a dilute form of ink, and created multiple sets of physical blocks corresponding to the virtual code blocks. Figure 6 shows a workshop in which we introduced this process: teachers could now have students use the physical code blocks, stamp the pattern they believed their code would create, and then check their answer on the one computer in the classroom. Because it used locally made stamps and ink, this was a way to link support for the local economy to the school: purchasing locally made ink, stamps and blocks rather than spending local money importing teaching materials from Europe or the US. Figure 6. Physical blocks and miniature stamps
Additional activities to sustain and extend adinkra included the use of solar energy for heating ink, the application of adinkra for an HIV prevention campaign, and burning the software to a disk for local sales as a local entrepreneurial enterprise: all ways of helping the traditional unalienated value to expand its circulation, rather than be alienated and extracted by external corporations.
CSDTS IN THE US CONTEXT The US context required a different set of tools and strategies; at the same time, we found that the “generative justice” concept could be used as a guiding principle even under very different circumstances. In some cases there was a clear analogy: for example our project on CSDTs for Navajo textiles revealed similarity to the Ghanaian situation: authentic textiles embodied culturally and ecologically unalienated value (e.g. sustaining the endangered breed of Navajo sheep; dye practices based on local plants rather than industrial processes, and sustaining cultural traditions, etc.) but were threatened by foreign-produced fake textiles marketed to tourists. Navajo children who simulated the designs were quick to combine the idea of indigenous algorithms with their own creative elaborations. Equally important, traditional weavers who saw the software said that they were worried about the next generation abandoning the weaving tradition; they saw the use of weaving simulations as a way to keep the tradition alive in a medium that children might see as their own future. In contrast to this Native American example, the concept of simulations addressing unalienated value through heritage connections for African American and Latino students was more complex, as indigenous language and cultural practices (Yoruba, Nahuatl, etc.) were uncommon. Three strategies emerged:
Simulation of contemporary vernacular practices from youth subculture such as graffiti, DJing, etc. Although this lacks a strong impact against the myth of genetic determinism, it does contest the myth of cultural determinism (Eglash et al 2006).
Simulation of cultural “survivals” (Holloway 2005): for example cornrow hairstyles as an African practice that survived the middle passage. In Eglash and Bennett (2009) we show that although children did not immediately connect cornrow hairstyles to African heritage, learning about that connection played an important role in their interest in learning more about the math and computing concepts.
Teaching youth about cultural practices that were essentially unfamiliar, and simultaneously teaching the indigenous math and computing ideas embedded in those practices (e.g. fractals in African architecture and craftwork).
All three strategies showed statistically significant improvement in studies involving either control groups or baseline measures (Eglash et al 2006; 2010).
NETWORKING K-12 STEM EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY RESEARCH AND COMMUNITY OUTREACH Expanding these activities by bringing faculty and grads from science/engineering together with science and humanities required some innovation in our research design. Communications faculty Audrey Bennett, noting the advantages accrued by allowing students to render virtual designs as physical stamps in the case of adinkra, obtained a Google “CS4HS” grant to have art teachers allow students to use CSDTs to create culture-based virtual designs, and then embellish them in mixed media as they were translated into physical artworks. This exercise in “design agency” (Bennett et al 2015) emerged as native beading algorithms became back-lit colored jars of water; virtual cornrow braids became arrays of origami, etc. Figure 7, for example, shows how a recursive algorithm for scaling lines were first experimentally turned into scaling paper triangles, and finally into an artistic narrative about a boy who “lived behind a mask to hide his true self.” Figure 7. From algorithm for virtual scaling sequence, to physical scaling sequence, to artistic embellishment
In a related effort, two social science students (Michael Lachney and Brian Callahan in the Department of Science and Technology Studies) and one science student (Charles Hathaway in the Department of Computer Science) traveled to an inner-city STEM based high school in Ohio to help with the implementation of adinkra simulations (strategy #3 in the list above); in this case using a 3D printer to create stamps from the simulations, which could then be used to hand-craft patterns on tee shirts, hats, etc. Quoting from one of the STS grad student's description:
We came expecting to merely observe for data that would help us refine the interface. But the teacher introduced us to her class as “experts that are going be here to help you with programming.” While I was the least experienced in programming, I was the most experienced in instructing with high school students, so I was tasked with the job of introducing CSnap and programming generally to the math class. The CS grad had no previous experience with field work, but he spontaneously came up with the idea of mapping student-student interactions as nodes in a network graph, which gave a useful new perspective. The STS grads were able to use their background on narrative to help the students think about the concept of control flow in programming: iteration as a flow traveling in a loop, etc. Research in interdisciplinary collaborations show that this kind of “learning brokerage” (Nacu et al 2014) and “interactional expertise” (Collins & Evans 2007) create synergistic advantages over disciplinary silos. Not only were the STS grads able to integrate this into their doctoral research, but the CS grad was able to leverage the experience into research on software metrics, measuring the complexity of scripts as they are modified and passed from one student to the next (Hathaway et al 2015). As these metrics can be applied to analyze which pedagogical interventions are most effective, it stands as a prime example of how outreach for underserved communities can simultaneously inspire university-level research and innovation. Scientists are constantly talking about what they learned from nature--the fluid dynamics of a slime mold on a rotting leaf is a perfectly dignified source of information--but somehow a low-income community in the inner city or native reservation is merely conceived as an absence or lack. Under this assumption STEM outreach becomes a one-way flow: we can teach them, but they have nothing to teach us. We need frameworks in which we can establish a bi-directional flow of information between underserved communities and university research. If we can have knowledge flow in both directions, these communities will be able to better leverage their cultural capital, play a role in research problem definition, and collaborate on addressing features of the system--poverty, health, crime, social isolation, etc.--that cause underrepresentation in the first place. Faculty played a crucial role in enabling these collaborations. In her masters’ thesis on GIS, CS grad Kathleen Tully collaborated with STS faculty member Michael Mascarenhas in determining computational features that could be utilized in both pre-college projects on social justice and university level research (Tully 2015). Starting with the ground-breaking work of Gutstein (2003) who engaged Latino middle school students in social justice analysis on housing prices in different neighborhoods, her software (https://community.csdt.rpi.edu/static/sgis/index.html) allowed youth to examine correlations such as income level and number of hazardous waste sites in each census track. Mascarenhas, whose research is primarily in environmental justice (Mascarenhas 2012), pointed out that historically this approach has underestimated contamination in poor neighborhoods, and recommended using Bullard’s (1988) approach in which raw aggregate data of each census tract is counted if 50% of the area is within a given distance of the location of the waste site. Since the PostGIS library she was using did not have a function to determine polygons (census tracts) with fifty percent areal containment within a circle (or even within a polygon approximating a circle), this created an opportunity in her thesis to do some original algorithm development rather than merely applying pre-built functions. Our team is currently investigating its application for K-12 classroom exercises that allow underrepresented students to investigate environmental justice concerns. At the same time Mascarenhas and Tully have moved forward in utilizing the software for professional analysis of the kinds of environmental pollution that most affects the communities inhabited by children of color (Mascarenhas et al under review). In presentations of this work we occasionally hear the misinterpretation that our research is a matter of using university resources to solve community problems. A more accurate account would be the metaphor of a plant seeking water. The water fans out through the soil as physics allows; the plant roots fan out as their biology allows; and somewhere in the middle the two find a meeting point. That was the case for EE faculty Shayla Sawyer. Her research on the fluorescence of metallic nanoparticles was already being used to develop sensors for industrial water contamination. But the group we were working with at the time (the Navajo Nation’s Diné Environmental Institute) was interested in measuring contamination from organic compounds due to coal and oil. Sawyer saw this as an important challenge, and began a new investigation into the fluorescence of organic nanoparticles in the same substrate: a research path which today is an important part of her work. At the same time our outreach team began developing curricular materials for using sensors in compost, local bodies of water and other field experiments accessible to high school classes.
Expanding these connections to biology classes, STS grad Colin Garvey was struck by the highly negative reactions of black and Latino students to learning evolution (“what? I’m not related to monkeys!”). In his doctoral work on social implications of evolutionary theory, he ran across the fascinating new evidence (Desmond and Moore 2009) that Darwin’s theory arose in the context of his family’s commitment to the abolitionist cause opposing the polygenesis theory promoted by pro-slavery factions with a new monogenetic theory. CS grad Kathryn Bennett then took up the challenge of developing software that could translate this complex humanities scholarship into a “Darwin game”2 that could be utilized by high school biology classes. Although her sample size was too small for statistical analysis, she found that African American students had strongly positive reactions to learning evolutionary biology in the context of the abolitionist history. The potential for positive affiliation with the theory of evolution for black teens goes far beyond raising STEM scores, as teen pregnancy rates, HIV infection, homophobia and other damaging social trends in low-income communities are also related to opposition to an evolutionary perspective (Eglash, 2015). In biomedical engineering, grad student John Drazan explored black and Latino student interest in athletics, in particular basketball. STEM education sports examples are typically in an awkward and decontextualized form, bearing little relation to the actual sports experience, and similar to corporations marketing candy bars and sneakers with sports: both are creating the subjectivities required for mass consumption. In contrast, a generative justice approach begins by better understanding the embodied value youth already create in these activities when it is not commodified; working with youth to discover what kinds of “bridges” to and from STEM would best allow the value to return to themselves and their community in the least alienated ways possible. Working with Sawyer’s grad student James Davis on electronic sensing, they developed DIY pressure sensors that would allow students to investigate the physical parameters to improve their basketball jump shot. In other words, the passion that sports ignite in the youth can serve as an unrecognized form of experimental capital in which they extend their sense of authentic membership or belonging in sports to its connection to an area of biology or other STEM research (Drazan et al 2015). The transformation of high school students involved in the project was extraordinary. Beginning solely through their interest in athletics, by the end of the second year they had presented their experimental results at an IEEE conference (Figure 8) and were conducting their own STEM outreach program for middle and elementary school students. Figure 8. IEEE conference poster created by high school students
CONCLUSION Diversity in STEM education is typically approached as a matter of plugging up leaks in the education pipeline. This metaphor diverts our attention from the actual systemic causes of underrepresentation in poverty, exploitation,
political disempowerment and other means by which our nation’s democratic and humanitarian mission is undermined. Rethinking the goals of STEM diversity in terms of generative justice--replacing the alienation and extraction of value with the circulation of unalienated value--can develop better paths to addressing the causes as well as ameliorating the symptoms.
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