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Education Sciences
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Increasing Participation in Higher Education STEM Programs: Practices, Policies, Pedagogies...
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Increasing Participation in Higher Education STEM Programs: Practices, Policies, Pedagogies to Disrupt Exclusion

A special issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 December 2019) | Viewed by 27144

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Susan Staats

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota, Room 372 PeikH, 159 Pillsbury Dr SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
Interests: mathematics education; ethnography of speaking; linguistics; anthropology
Prof. Amy Lee

E-Mail
Guest Editor
Writing Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, Nolte Hall, 315 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
Interests: critical pedagogy; teacher development in higher education; engaging diversity and supporting equity in undergraduate classrooms; composition/writing studies; intercultural pedagogy

Special Issue Information

Dear colleagues,

This Special Issue seeks to understand the barriers to postsecondary STEM participation and representation by diverse populations and to investigate policies, practices, and educational structures that address and ameliorate or disrupt these barriers. What barriers do students face in entering and being successful in undergraduate STEM courses and majors in international higher education settings? What form do these barriers take, with a special focus on race, ethnicity, and gender? Do these barriers differ across global contexts? This issue invites articles presenting STEM-specific programs, pedagogical innovations, and policy changes that have sought to disrupt the patterns of differential participation. The factors that prohibit more diverse participation occur not only in the classroom and curriculum, but in administrative structures, campus climates, and policy environments that inform classroom contexts. Therefore, we invite articles that focus on policy, as well as on pedagogy. Submissions should address principles of structural exclusion in the local setting, and they should intentionally bridge commentary on structure and practice. For example, we welcome commentaries on pedagogical implementations, but these should not be presented simply as a either a research report or as a “lesson plan”. The innovation should be discussed in terms of how it responds to structural exclusion and how it plays out in the classroom. 

We invite papers of all types: Research articles, concept papers, literature or program reviews, but we would like all authors to report on relationships between educational structures and how these shape educational practices or activities. For authors seeking research article designation, we encourage attention to theorizing the topic at hand. Theoretical grounding may come from your academic disciplines. It is also acceptable to develop a theoretical framework for relations between structure and practice from research traditions such as: Action research (Stringer, 2013), complexity theory (Lemke, 2000), or anthropological and sociological theories of structure, agency, and action (Ahearn, 2001, Giddens, 1989).

References:

  1. Ahearn, L. M. (2001). Language and agency. Annual review of anthropology, 30(1), 109-137.
  2. Cole, J. S. (2017). Concluding comments about student transition to higher education. Higher Education, 73(3), 539-551.
  3. Devlin, M. (2013). Bridging socio-cultural incongruity: Conceptualising the success of students from low socio-economic status backgrounds in Australian higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 38(6), 939-949.
  4. Dietrich, E. (2015). Ambition with Resistance: Affirmative Action in Brazil’s Public Universities. In Race, Politics, and Education in Brazil (pp. 155-177). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
  5. Frith, V., Le Roux, K., Lloyd, P., Jaftha, J., Mhakure, D., & Rughubar-Reddy, S. (2010, March). Tensions between context and content in a quantitative literacy course at university. In Proceedings of the Sixth Mathematics Education and Society Conference (Vol. 1, pp. 230-240).
  6. Gale, T., & Parker, S. (2014). Navigating change: a typology of student transition in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 39(5), 734-753.
  7. Anthony, G. (1989). Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration.
  8. le Roux, K., & Adler, J. (2016). A critical discourse analysis of practical problems in a foundation mathematics course at a South African university. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 91(2), 227-246.
  9. le Roux, K. (2017). Moving up or down the ladder: University mathematics students talk about progress. Mathematics Education and Life at Times of Crisis, 665.
  10. Lee, A., & Williams, R. D. (Eds.). (2017). Engaging dissonance: pedagogy for mindful global citizenship in higher education. London, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
  11. Lee, A., & Williams, R. D. (Eds.). (2015).  Internationalizing undergraduate education: Critical conversations across the curriculum.  Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
  12. Lemke, J. L. (2000). Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind, culture, and activity, 7(4), 273-290.
  13. Morina, A. (2016). Inclusive education in higher education: Challenges and opportunities. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 3(1), 3-17.
  14. Ng, I. Y. (2014). Education and intergenerational mobility in Singapore. Educational review, 66(3), 362-376.
  15. Pazich, L., & Teranishi. R. (2014). Comparing access to higher education in Brazil and India using critical race theory. Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 16 (1): 50–69.
  16. Ramrathan, L., & Pillay, G. (2015). Re-imagining and expanding the discourse of student access, throughput and drop-out within the South African higher education context. Alternations, 17(2015), 6-27.
  17. Stringer, E. T. (2013). Action research. Sage Publications.
  18. Ulriksen, L., Holmegaard, H. T., & Madsen, L. M. (2017). Making sense of curriculum—the transition into science and engineering university programmes. Higher Education, 73(3), 423-440.

Dr. Susan Staats
Prof. Amy Lee
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • STEM in Higher Education
  • Inclusion and equity
  • Diversity
  • Pedagogy
  • Curriculum
  • Teacher development
  • Institutional structures

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Editorial

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5 pages, 177 KiB  
Editorial
Introduction to Special Issue on Increasing Participation in Higher Education STEM Programs
by Susan Staats and Amy Lee
Educ. Sci. 2020, 10(5), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10050139 - 14 May 2020
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3015
Abstract
This special issue highlights the work of several higher education practitioner–scholars who describe their approaches to facilitating participation in STEM courses and programs. Writing from the standpoint of chemistry, mathematics, and ecology in publicly supported universities, the authors discuss their pedagogical or curricular [...] Read more.
This special issue highlights the work of several higher education practitioner–scholars who describe their approaches to facilitating participation in STEM courses and programs. Writing from the standpoint of chemistry, mathematics, and ecology in publicly supported universities, the authors discuss their pedagogical or curricular choices with reference to the broader structures and systemic considerations that sometimes limit and sometimes enable faculty effort. In this editorial, we reflect on the ways in which these authors invoke their own practitioner agency to establish equity-based innovations in higher education STEM settings. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Increasing Participation in Higher Education STEM Programs: Practices, Policies, Pedagogies to Disrupt Exclusion)

Research

Jump to: Editorial, Other

22 pages, 302 KiB  
Article
Taking Universal Design Back to Its Roots: Perspectives on Accessibility and Identity in Undergraduate Mathematics
by Juuso Henrik Nieminen and Henri Valtteri Pesonen
Educ. Sci. 2020, 10(1), 12; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10010012 - 31 Dec 2019
Cited by 34 | Viewed by 9790
Abstract
Universal Design has been promoted to address the diversity of learners in higher education. However, rarely have Universal Design implementations been evaluated by listening to the voices of disabled students. For this study, we investigated the perceptions of three disabled students who took [...] Read more.
Universal Design has been promoted to address the diversity of learners in higher education. However, rarely have Universal Design implementations been evaluated by listening to the voices of disabled students. For this study, we investigated the perceptions of three disabled students who took part in an undergraduate mathematics course designed with the principles of Universal Design for Learning and Assessment. The study consists of two parts. First, we observed the experiences students had in relation to the accessibility of the course design. The second part consisted of a further analysis of the students identifying processes to understand how they talked about their learning disabilities during the course. Our results highlight many opportunities and challenges that the course offered to the students, whilst also raising concerns about how the students excluded themselves from their student cohort in their identifying narratives. Based on our results, we argue that Universal Design should be returned to its roots by connecting it with the social model of disability. We call for future research to learn from our mistakes and consider the identifying processes of the students while designing, and hopefully co-designing, inclusive learning environments in mathematics. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Increasing Participation in Higher Education STEM Programs: Practices, Policies, Pedagogies to Disrupt Exclusion)
19 pages, 748 KiB  
Article
Implementing Reflective Group Work Activities in a Large Chemistry Lab to Support Collaborative Learning
by Hannah Leopold and Ann Smith
Educ. Sci. 2020, 10(1), 7; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10010007 - 27 Dec 2019
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 7058
Abstract
Many classrooms in higher education are becoming increasingly diverse. Diversity is an asset when student interactions are promoted and facilitated by instructors. The challenge is, many times students are grouped together for a collaborative project without attention to or skilled support for the [...] Read more.
Many classrooms in higher education are becoming increasingly diverse. Diversity is an asset when student interactions are promoted and facilitated by instructors. The challenge is, many times students are grouped together for a collaborative project without attention to or skilled support for the learning and development that can occur through the intercultural collaborative process itself. Instructors often assume this learning happens automatically or organically and does not need to be acted upon explicitly. However, collaboration skills do not come naturally; simply putting students in groups is not enough. When collaboration is facilitated skillfully it benefits all students, especially those from marginalized and historically underserved groups. Here, we enumerate barriers instructors face in supporting groups, describe/share a model, and explore the implementation of this model in a general chemistry lab, which relies heavily on group work. We found that these activities are feasible in a large STEM class, that students participated and found value in them, and that they enhanced students’ content learning and the development of cross-cutting competencies sought by employers. We hope after reading this paper, instructors will recognize the responsibility and opportunity they have in supporting interactions, and have new inspiration and a pathway to do so. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Increasing Participation in Higher Education STEM Programs: Practices, Policies, Pedagogies to Disrupt Exclusion)
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10 pages, 227 KiB  
Concept Paper
Nature in the Eye of the Beholder: A Case Study for Cultural Humility as a Strategy to Broaden Participation in STEM
by Maria N. Miriti
Educ. Sci. 2019, 9(4), 291; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9040291 - 8 Dec 2019
Cited by 16 | Viewed by 5960
Abstract
Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines suffer from chronically low participation of women and underrepresented minorities. Diversity enhancement initiatives frequently attempt to mitigate skill deficits such as math skills in an attempt to improve preparedness of these students. However, such interventions do [...] Read more.
Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines suffer from chronically low participation of women and underrepresented minorities. Diversity enhancement initiatives frequently attempt to mitigate skill deficits such as math skills in an attempt to improve preparedness of these students. However, such interventions do not address cultural or social barriers that contribute to the isolation and marginalization that discourage continued participation in STEM. Science exists and is developed within social constructs.; because of this, cultural conflicts can occur pertaining to contrasting cultural belief systems between educators and students, or to socially-biased perspectives that are embedded in disciplinary values. These conflicts are implicated in the low recruitment and retention of underrepresented students in STEM. To address the relationship between culture and STEM diversity, I present a case study that examines the role of culturally-biased views of nature on the lack of diverse participation in ecology and environmental biology. I conclude by advocating the use of inclusive, culturally-sensitive teaching practices that can improve the climate for underrepresented students and increase diverse recruitment and retention in STEM. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Increasing Participation in Higher Education STEM Programs: Practices, Policies, Pedagogies to Disrupt Exclusion)
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