“STEM has the power to save the world”: Students’ STEM identity Stories

This paper was prepared for the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting;

Roundtable Session 12: STEM Student Identity; Saturday, April 15th, 2023.

Alexis Petri, EdD, Office of Research Development, UMKC (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8976-751X)

Tiffani Riggers-Piehl, PhD, Educational Leadership, Policy and Foundations; School of Education, Social Work, and Psychological Sciences, UMKC (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7008-4671)

Rachal Young, M.A., Teaching and Curriculum Studies; School of Education, Social Work, and Psychological Sciences, UMKC

Stories influence the work we do, what we think is important, and what we believe about others and ourselves (Coulter et al., 2007; Schramm, 1994). Using storytelling in STEM classrooms provides an opportunity to increase creativity (DeHaan, 2009), enhance problem solving and engagement (Moitra, 2014; Morris, 2015), and because of this, has potential to improve student retention in STEM fields. For example, in one genetics classroom, where stories were used as a central pedagogical strategy, students indicated that the course motivated them to retain a STEM major (Moitra, 2014). In other examples, instructors have found that use of storytelling pedagogies have had a particular positive effect for women (Ouhbi & Awad, 2021) in Engineering, such that storytelling pedagogies were associated with increased engagement in course material and interest in being an Engineer. Likewise, a storytelling intervention in a group of computer science classes showed promise for increasing belonging and “retention of college students, particularly in underrepresented groups” (Reckinger & Gregg, 2019; p.13). In classrooms where storytelling is incorporated into pedagogy, the instructors often relied upon non-fiction, historical figures’ lives as the basis for the stories they used. Students were able to find points of connection with those stories and use those connections to gain insight into course material or to the major. Considering this research, we wondered if there would be additional benefit in students creating and telling their own STEM stories, rather than listening solely to the stories of other exemplars. Further, we wondered if there would be similar elements found across the STEM stories of students who view themselves as successful and what kinds of connections could be made across those stories.

In fall 2020, we invited 13 undergraduate and graduate STEM students representing five distinct colleges and universities to join a series of conference meetings convened to identify and work toward problem-solving workforce issues in STEM in a metropolitan area in the midwest [blinded study here]. Students were included as active participants in workgroups developed from the conference to enhance the prominence of student voices in the endeavor. We incorporated a storytelling opportunity for the students, as a valuable opportunity to the students themselves (an opportunity to develop their story for future interviews and applications) and to explore the idea of storytelling as a viable way to increase STEM student belonging and identity development. This paper details the process behind the students’ development of their STEM stories and highlights the common elements found in their stories, using a Funds of Science Identity lens (Wofford & Gutzwa, 2022). 

Theoretical Framework

Funds of Science Identity (FSI; Wofford and Gutzwa, 2022) frames how we think about STEM identity in the students’ stories for this paper and is evident in the ways the students identify elements in their STEM journeys that have helped them retain throughout their STEM studies. FSI comprises three distinct dimensions, summarized here, that together capture the ways students form “justice-oriented science identities (across STEM disciplines)” (p. 66). The first dimension is focused on students’ lived experiences (Esteban-Guitart, 2016; Carlone & Jonson, 2007) which incorporates their cultural and identity backgrounds and the ways those sociocultural backgrounds interact with their disciplinary settings and experiences. FSI employs a Vygotskian perspective of lived experiences and argues that culturally mediated thinking helps articulate how identity and culture relate. According to Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, learning and development occur through social interactions, which are mediated by cultural tools and artifacts. These interactions occur within a specific cultural and historical context, and the meanings attributed to experiences are shaped by cultural and social norms (Rahmatirad, 2020; Vygotsky, 1987). Vygotsky’s theoretical stance shapes an individual's lived experiences as simultaneously personal and shaped by broader cultural and social forces and actively interpreted and constructed in relation to their socio-cultural context.

The second dimension highlights the importance of space, curricular, co-curricular, and personal/sociofamilial, to affirm STEM identity and to disrupt injustice as students develop their science identity. Classrooms, research laboratories, and other co-curricular spaces can become sites of identity affirmation for undergraduate students with systemically minoritized identities to disrupt and contend with injustices in STEM. To create an identity-affirming space, STEM faculty must use students’ identity artifacts to disrupt hegemonic ways of thinking and teaching about disciplinary topics (Wofford and Gutzwa, 2022) .

The third dimension emphasizes the larger role of disciplinary power and structures (outside of the specifically local contexts that students may encounter) in influencing students’ science identity. The third dimension also includes how systems of oppression have underscored the historical development of STEM disciplines, highlighting the need to directly discuss the injustices and oppressions that STEM disciplinary cultures have perpetuated. In the present study, we examine students’ STEM stories to see where and how these dimensions are present in the stories they tell about their journeys in STEM (Wofford and Gutzwa, 2022) .

Figure 1. Diagram of dimension two codes from student videos.
Figure 2. Diagram of dimension two codes from student videos