IGE: Advancing and Strengthening Science Identity through Systematic Training (ASSIST)

University Of Texas At San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

Developing science leaders from underrepresented minority graduate student groups such as Latinos, African Americans, and women remains a national priority. Yet the barriers to success these groups face are often not adequately addressed by traditional methods of mentoring and professionalization in science. Minority-serving institutions are uniquely poised to foster diverse science leaders, but they also require a systematic, integrated, program-wide approach geared toward nurturing and validating students' identities as scientists. This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to the University of Texas San Antonio cultivates science identity by integrating holistic mentoring with systematic training in science writing and public science communication. This program will test an innovative and potentially transformative model for diversifying science that engages both faculty and graduate students from the department of Environmental Science and Ecology in a community-supported, holistic, and systematic approach. The project will utilize a series of graduate courses, professional workshops, and community-based activities that seek to foster and validate underrepresented minority students' science identity. Nationally, these interventions may exist informally, but they are rarely, if ever, fully integrated into a coherent graduate STEM program. Developing diverse leaders in science professions is crucial as scientists navigate interdisciplinary knowledge demands and cultural challenges in a globalized and media-saturated world. The goal of this IGE project is to cultivate a science identity for underrepresented minority graduate students through the acquisition of a knowledge base (competence), the ability to perform science practices (performance), and the acknowledgement by significant others in the field (recognition). The researchers propose that fostering these identity components and making them visible in scientific disciplines and public communities can be achieved through three interrelated interventions: holistic mentoring, writing-to-learn science, and public science communication. Holistic mentoring, both in and outside the classroom environment will provide the underlying framework necessary to address the needs and challenges faced by underrepresented minority students. In addition, this project hypothesizes that holistic mentoring transforms the challenges of systematic training in research-based science writing and public science communication into opportunities to validate students' scientific competence and leadership skills. The project will use a mixed-methods assessment approach to analyze not only each intervention but also on the relationships among all three interventions. Therefore, it seeks to provide an evidence-based validation of the impact of holistic mentoring and systematic communications training on cultivating a scientific ethos for underrepresented minority graduate students. The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community. 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.