Increasing Minorities in STEM Starts in the Classroom

Working in STEM is a collaborative effort. Most STEM careers rely on input from multiple STEM professionals, collaboration, and referencing work of others in the field. Better products are made when the team that worked on them was qualified and diverse. Having a diverse team results in a variety of perspectives and outlooks, which pushes the team to brainstorm wider, solve more diverse problems, and come up with a product that is more thought out and resilient than they would’ve been otherwise. But building a diverse team is more complicated than hiring minorities. The amount of minorities in STEM fields needs to be high in order for diverse teams to be the norm, not the exception.

Unfortunately, the numbers are not in our favor. The National Science Foundation reports that while the STEM workforce became more diverse between 2011 and 2021, minorities are still underrepresented in most fields. While women made up 51% of the general US population, they represented only 35% of people in STEM fields. Latinos represented 15%, Asians 10%, and Black Americans 9% in STEM related occupations, compared to 19%, 7%, and 14% respectively in the general US population. While Asian Americans were overrepresented in STEM fields, Latinos and Black Americans were underrepresented.

So, how do we get more minorities in STEM related fields? The answer is education, and I don’t mean sending them to college. STEM subjects need to be presented in a way that makes these fields accessible to minorities. One way to do this is to make the subject relevant to the students’ lives by incorporating student interests. You can also use the real world and real work to make the subject more relevant to all students. In my science classroom, I intend to incorporate student interests by incorporating them into the lessons where possible. If a student enjoys baking, for example, we could explore the chemistry of baking. I also plan on using inquiry based learning to allow students to make the content fit their interests on their own. Students would be able to investigate a problem of their choosing or complete a research project on a topic of their choice, for example. There are also lots of opportunities for incorporating real science in a classroom, some of which I discuss in this blog post.

Another aspect of making STEM accessible to minorities is showing them that they can be good at it, too. Many people go into a STEM classroom believing already that they are terrible at it. If someone has only had bad experiences with STEM and has only ever done poorly with it, then they will probably never be motivated to follow a STEM career path. While you can’t just magically make every student good at and interested in STEM, you can certainly do everything in your power to make it so that each student has the opportunity to excel. Inquiry based activities and projects already do a good job of this, but another technique I am actually pulling from my Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages class: comprehensible input.

Comprehensible input, when used for teaching students whose first language is not English, focuses on making the language easy to understand and repeating it in different words. If students do not know the words that are coming out of your mouth, there is no way that you can expect them to understand the concepts. As someone who is (hopefully) well versed in your subject matter, it is easy to get carried away and explain a concept in a way that makes it sound much more complicated than it has to be. Especially in STEM fields, there is a lot of technical jargon that probably has another meaning in another STEM field. Making explanations as comprehensible as possible and explaining each concept in multiple formats may help students in understanding something that they otherwise would have a difficult time with.

For any concept, explanations should be supported with words, pictures, drawings, hand gestures, demonstrations, simulations, etc. Any potentially complicated or new vocabulary should be explicitly defined, perhaps with pictures and simulations of its own. STEM fields are built on hundreds if not thousands of years of built up knowledge. They are complicated by nature, and the concepts that support them can be even more so. This can be incredibly daunting, especially for someone who doesn’t have a particular want to dive in. Making STEM relevant and interesting helps build that want, and making it easy to understand helps make it feel not quite so daunting. These tips are certainly not going to boost the numbers of minorities in STEM fields of the charts, but they certainly would help to prop the doors open, showing students that perhaps they really could open those doors and walk through.