Study Explores How Youth Mentors Facilitate STEM Learning, Teaching, and Doing
Eli Tucker-Raymond, Maria Olivares, and Kate Frankel
Study Explores How Youth Mentors Facilitate STEM Learning, Teaching, and Doing
BU Wheelock faculty members Eli Tucker-Raymond, Maria Olivares, and Kate Frankel have been awarded a three-year grant through the National Science Foundation’s Education and Human Resources Core Research Program (ECR) to study how acting as peer mentors helps youth develop relational and personally meaningful science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) identities. The project will run from June 2020 through May 2023.
More specifically, the team will partner with two local out-of-school organizations (the Young People’s Project and the South End Technology Center) and two Boston Public Schools (English High School and Madison Park Technical Vocational High School) to work with youth to expand what it means to do STEM, by including teaching as a STEM practice and career, stating their belief that “such a broadening of what it means to know and do STEM is important for creating humanizing learning spaces for young people.”
Tucker-Raymond is a research associate professor and Olivares is a research assistant professor. They are both affiliated with the Earl Center for Learning & Innovation. Frankel is an assistant professor in literacy education. All three are faculty members in BU Wheelock’s Language & Literacy department.
The researchers will explore how peer mentoring as a practice could possibly lead to expanded youth identification and engagement with STEM knowledge and practices. The team seeks to better understand how to design formal and informal learning environments that support STEM identity development for youth of color through positioning and developing youth as knowledgeable experts and mentors in STEM.
Through the project’s partner organizations and schools, the team will work with approximately 140 youth ages 14-24, 96 percent of whom are from communities of color, who participate in existing initiatives in which youth act as mentors and teachers to others. The team will follow these youth mentors for two years, building case studies that highlight how STEM learning, identity building, and pedagogy are developed when youth participate as mentors in sustained ways over longer stretches of time.
Beyond sharing their findings through a new project website and at academic conferences, the co-PIs will plan to host a conference that involves the four partner organizations as well as other groups from across the US who are also using mentoring to support STEM learning and identity development.