The Literature reports through students' description around quality engagement by faculty members - wherein how a faculty conducts himself/herself in class interactions and outside, formally and informally (in terms of accessibility and responsiveness to people of colour), determines whether a person is truly engaged in the cause. We also found that measures like proper recruitment of faculty (diverse and sensitive), their training towards these needs, constantly working on mentor-mentee relationships, higher university leadership signalling etc. are all important factors in this regard.

Immediate steps include more dissemination and documentation. Also, collaboratively deciding with NSF and our advisory board which of our ideas should we further? Whether to delve into more literature or undertake a fresh research program ourselves. 

Very interesting question. I feel that generally all grants in near future (it has already begun) will push for a BP branch in the project. Apart from that, we would also need to diversify research experiences and help students undertake smaller community based projects or projects through crowdfunding or clubbing them with advanced PhD or post doc fellows for research experience. It is important to constantly advocate for it at the strategic level so that the effect also trickles down at the funding level.

Hi Frank,

Although we deliberately restricted ourselves to higher education, you are right in identifying that many of the factors with a slight change will overlap for secondary education as well. In many instances, exposure to research took place at secondary education level which became a strong factor for pushing people of colour to pursue higher education in STEM. Similarly, good guidance/mentorship is also extremely critical at this level. As you might agree, there is also evidence around information asymmetry or misconceptions around STEM areas which hinder people of colour in actually going for it - support from teachers or counsellors would be extremely effective in this regard. As you pointed out, factors like a well designed program with integrated CRE element right from the beginning for such schools is crucial, so is continuity in undertaking evaluation placing cultural responsiveness at the centre.

These are my two cents but this definitely calls for a longer discussion.    

Very pertinent question. For this specific project we focused only on STEM areas and US based projects, but it will be very interesting to see how this gets manifested in areas you suggested.