CAREER: Exploring STEM Identity Formation of Black Undergraduate Students through Transdisciplinary Computational Research Experiences

Solving for today's grand societal challenges requires cutting-edge, transdisciplinary research. At the same time, the underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) in STEM fields continues to be a top challenge impacting our ability to solve for the aforementioned grand societal challenges, which disproportionately impact BIPOC communities. This project places these two priorities in conversation with each other, 1) addressing racial inequity and broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and, 2) developing effective educational models to prepare undergraduate students for collaborative and transdisciplinary research. This research explores the ways STEM learning can be reimagined and reshaped so that it centers diverse knowledge systems, fosters community, aligns with the actual goals, and needs of Black undergraduate students, and prepares them to become leaders in addressing the global grand challenges that unfairly impact their communities. Using a design-based research approach, this project investigates how transdisciplinary computational learning, can support undergraduate students' persistence, sense of belonging, and identity formation in STEM. This research makes theoretical and empirical contributions to undergraduate computer science education, design-based research, and sociocultural studies of identity and race through an empirical investigation of the ways Black undergraduate students construct, navigate, and negotiate notions of identity, self, belonging and community in relation to computing and its applications. This project broadens conceptual understandings of computing identity frameworks and relationships between computing, society, and culture by investigating how students at multiple intersections of society navigate, negotiate, and contest what it means to be in, to use, and to do computing. The output of this research provides evidence-based practices for (a) co-designing and implementing multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary computational learning experiences (b) developing meaningful research experiences; and (c) and building inclusive, sustainable, and resilient research collaborations. 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.