GP-IN: Communities Of Aquatic Sciences in Teaching And Learning (COASTAL) Research Partnerships for Equity

This project seeks to build a cross-region innovative research group focused on equitable educational innovations to support historically excluded middle and high school youth–Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC), female-identifying youth, and youth in Title I schools or rural underserved districts–to develop embodied pathways to participation in geosciences communities. The key project activity will be the creation of a practitioner research group composed of community stakeholders, teachers, geoscience faculty, and educational community partners. This group will collaborate to develop a shared professional vision around equitable participation pathways for supporting historically excluded youth in geoscience communities of practice through hands-on fieldwork experiences and digital reflections. The stakeholders will form goals, identify success measures, and work to expand their program’s goals through developing a shared understanding around what equitable participation trajectories look like across similar domains. The effects of underserved youth being excluded from the geosciences is readily reflected in the field however, less is known about the experiences of these youth in such trajectories and how geosciences educational stakeholders could redesign pathways to better serve the students. This project will use methods of community design research to 1) develop a shared professional vision around equitable participation in geoscience fieldwork; 2) develop shared best practices for facilitating more equitable participation in geosciences fieldwork and disciplinary conversations; and 3) support network partners in redesigning programs to set and meet expansive goals in this regard. Over the course of the project, the PI team will build a network of geosciences instructors and practitioners and work on iterative cycles of expanding their programmatic goals in alignment with the five key areas for the following outcomes: 1) Grounded fun; 2) STEM capital; 3) STEM trajectories; 4) STEM identity work; and 5) Agency. This project will be supported by the Directorate for STEM Education's IUSE Program and by the Directorate for Geoscience's GEOPAths Program. 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.