Diversity, Equity, Inclusion

Science should be for everyone, but there is a long history of painful boundaries and barriers that have kept people out. Thankfully, more and more people are becoming aware of this problem and working together to address it. There's a lot of work to do. Here are a few of my contributions.

Research

My current research on STEM teacher retention is rooted in concerns about equity, both for the teachers, and the students they serve. This critical part of the STEM workforce are under a lot of stress. We're interested in discovering tools for departments, schools, and districts to use to improve teacher retention and diversity amongst teachers retained. We're particularly mindful that teacher retention tends to be harder at schools serving disadvantaged students. Learning what works in teacher retention will make their working environments more equitable, but it will also directly improve the quality of education for their students. By using hierarchical models of this process, we can test how school and department level predictors influence not only baseline retention, but disparities in retention amongst races and genders. Our preliminary results show that there are inequalities in teacher retention, with Black and multiracial teachers leaving at higher rates than others. Furthermore we find that the presence of discipline-specific teaching coaches seems to ameliorate this effect in math, but not science teachers. Thanks to the mixed-methods approach to our project, collaborators leading qualitative research with teacher interviews will be able to follow up on why coaches have this type of influence.

Teaching

As a teacher, I try to instill a growth mindset in students and seek to set up an inclusive environment where they have what they need to learn the material and grow. Across lecture, lab, and field classes I strive to incorporate active learning to help students engage proactively with the material. I incorporate multiple modalities in my teaching in order to help students master concepts: lecturing, discussions, videos, role-plays, problem sets, and group work. It’s important to me that my students feel comfortable sharing their opinions on the topics that we discuss so I like to start out the semester with a group exercise of setting up classroom rules for respectful discussions and refer students back to the expectations that they helped set.

In teaching ecology there are plenty of opportunities to address social justice issues and I continue to seek these out. I taught Freshwater Ecology as a teaching assistant at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) several times. When I started the discussion section time was dedicated to discussing readings from Cadillac Desert, an important work on development of water resources in the arid western United States. I led the reimagining of this discussion section time as a seminar on the management of water resources in the arid west which fully incorporates the social and cultural aspects of water. We still read from Cadillac Desert but we also included contemporary resources (Cadillac Desert is from 1986) and reevaluate this important text which includes a number of dated ideas about water management and the settlement of the American west. We talk about the colonial nature of settlement, the impact on native Americans, up to and including genocide, and the erasure of their contributions to water management. For example, we discuss how the Owens Valley (a major source of water for Los Angeles) was irrigated by the indigenous Paiute tribe before European contact. Indeed, this represents an independent development of agriculture, and yet Cadillac Desert dismisses this monumental indigenous achievement with an incorrect assertion that they must have learned it from the Spanish who settled in a completely different part of the state (this was known by anthropologists to be false even at the time of writing). We have the students watch material prepared by the Pauite in recent years as they try to argue in court for their first-use water rights which would completely upend water use in California.

Mentoring

In my role as a mentor, I strive to be welcoming and inclusive. I want to set all of my students up for success. During my PhD at UCSC my research was assisted by 32 undergraduate and eight high school students, including three undergraduate theses, and I have published a peer reviewed paper with one of my undergraduate mentees as a coauthor. UCSC is a Hispanic-Serving Institute (HSI); the student body was quite diverse and I’m pleased to say that my research students reflected multiple aspects of that diversity. In addition to students working on my research I seek out mentorship opportunities in programs that specifically recruit underrepresented students. For example, as a PhD student, I volunteered for Monterey Bay Aquarium’s WATCH Program, a research experience for teams of High School students from nearby Pajaro Valley School District, a predominantly Latinx school district. For five years, I helped teams of 3-4 students design, implement, and present their own research project. 

In mentoring students, I seek to be an honest guide to the process of doing scientific research. This involves much more than just instruction in bench and field work. I work on setting realistic expectations and maintaining open communication. It also requires a lot of discussion and explanation of the so-called hidden curriculum of academia. It is important to me to share my hard-won knowledge of how these organizations work to make that transition easier for those who I’m mentoring and recruiting into them. I try to scaffold my expectations for the interaction, frequently writing mentor contracts with my research students. I also hope these discussions about mutual expectations help alleviate conflict due to the inherent power difference between research mentor and mentee.

Outreach

I participate in a number of outreach and public education programs. I try to leverage connections with existing programs when possible, because there are so many good science communicators out there. Monterey Bay Aquarium's WATCH program was one of my favorite to participate in. I've also worked with the Udall Foundations Parks In Focus Program, which seeks to introduce underserved youth to nature through the art of photography.

I have also regularly contributed talks, walks, and table displays at outreach events or as stand-alone events at schools and in the community. Scientists can get caught up in our own world and jargon - it's important to make the science accessible to the public as well.