Thanks for sharing your project with us!  Do you have any drafts or preliminary findings from your conference regarding the 'synthesis of design principles, assessment approaches, and tools' that you mention in your abstract? I'm very interested to read this if it exists...?

Hello Everyone,

My name is Jill Castek and on behalf of our interdisciplinary team, workshop participants, and partners from the University of Arizona's Office of Digital Learning and STEM Learning Center, we'd love to engage in conversation with you about designing for equity in STEM education. We are very excited and honored to be a part of this innovative showcase. 

Our convening in Feb. 2019 at Biosphere 2 sparked conversations that amplified voices from across several sectors of STEM education including libraries, museums, community spaces, non-profits, media producers, research centers, higher-ed, digital learning scholars, faculty, and K-12 educators.   

Our convening prompted conversations around several key ideas for designing for equity. I'd like to open the door for us to discuss a few of them in this forum:   

• How does your work promote new partnerships, connections, and collegiality across groups that might not otherwise have the opportunity to connect?
• In what ways does your work provide space to incorporate principles and practices of equity and inclusion?   
• How are concepts and values of equity and inclusion promoted in your work? 

Our project team welcomes your thoughts, ideas, questions, and connections.  We're really looking forward to sharing ideas with you!  

One of the ways our team is trying to incorporate principles and practices of equity and inclusion is by encourage underserved urban young adults to lead the design aspects of a new learning tool. We've done this by forming advisory groups, and meet frequently with the youth. However, we've also had difficulties within the team in incorporating the youth's advice over the intuition of the designers. Have you had any similar issues? 

I really enjoyed your video Jill - what an exciting conference you hosted! I am very interested in this topic and look forward to talking more about what you learned about designing fro equitable stem learning environments. Thanks for the opportunity to learn more about your work!

Erin 

Hi Jill. Thanks so much for sharing your work! I'm curious about how participants learned about the convening or how did your team select participants?

I was fortunate to be able to participate in this wonderful gathering of folks from varied disciplines and perspectives.  The experience was quite generative and the findings report that Jill mentioned should be quite helpful in advancing the goal of designing for equity and increasing access and participation in STEM. The conversations and presenters contributed to my own thinking about how to bring multimodal composition and maker education together, so that students are designers of communication.

Great to see you online Bridget. You are always such an inspiration.  You brought so much generative thinking to the event that we're still synthesizing and writing up to disseminate broadly.  There are so many synergies in this field and hopefully with shared thinking and events like this Showcase and future workshops we'll find more ways to innovate and collaborate. Looking forward to keeping in touch. 

The STEM Equity @B2 project was a community-college-from-nowhere instructor like me's dream come true. To be in such a breath-taking location, in the company of such knowledgeable and creative individuals was a true blessing.

I learned something from every single person that I interacted with.

All I can say is thanks for inviting me. 

Please keep in touch.

Thanks so much Esperanza for your many, many contributions and opportunities to learn with and from you!  I'm so grateful to have met you and I'm excited to find new ways to collaborate!