Welcome from the leadership team and participants of the Catalyzing Inclusive STEM Experiences All Year Round (CISTEME365) initiative. We are excited to engage with you in conversations about the engineering design process for social justice, and how this process not only applies to engineering design, but also to the design of our classroom and STEM Club environments. How are you using empathy to inform how you design your STEM education initiatives? What are the challenges? What are the benefits? We look forward to learning with and from you this week.

Very interesting, I have never seen empathy explicitly put into an EDP graphic. But I agree that it is an essential element. The NY Hall of Science has conducted some research and learned that even the framing of a design challenge prompt can make all the difference in engagement. Narratives that resonate with empathy and helping others increased engagement, particularly for girls in STEM. Happy to share articles and resources upon request! 

I greatly appreciate the point that DEI initiatives are often over generalized and that opportunities to ensure DEI efforts in STEM specific contexts are needed. Additionally, the idea of creating teams of both teachers and counselors that work together and learn about STEM/DEI is a great idea so that a common and focused approach can be used.

This project is fascinating! Our team has also been investigating empathy and engineering (thanks for the shout-out, Jasmine!) and I love how you are also thinking about the design of classrooms and learning experiences with empathy in mind. Can you say more about how you supported teachers in doing action research for equity projects? What kinds of knowledge were teachers already building on, and what additional supports or structures were helpful in guiding the process and helping them identify issues to tackle?

Many of us know that the design process begins with empathy yet this is the first time I have seen it used in the context of thinking about students in STEM.  Listening to the teachers and counselors talk about how their thinking and actions have changed as they began with empathy and considered their students experiences as STEM learners has made me curious about how these changes have impacted outcomes for students.  Have student displayed greater confidence, interest or success in STEM classes?  I can't wait to learn more. 

Empathy has been central to our work on designing inclusive engineering experiences at NYSCI, as both Jasmine and Suzy have mentioned so this is very interesting to us!  I am particularly struck by the systems approach you are taking and interested in knowing more about how these efforts might be contributing to changes in the school culture overall (what changes if at all are you seeing in teacher-family communications, academic engagement, etc).  I am also interested in learning more about how teachers engaged in the action research portion of the project and how the learnings they gained from testing strategies in the clubs make their way back into their classrooms and counseling practices. What does that look like? What kinds of supports are in place to do this?  This is hard and important work and I often find that having a space like an after school club where teachers are free to experiment allows for these things to take hold and succeeds in changing mindsets in powerful ways.  What other tangible or unexpected outcomes have you seen? 

 Having heard about this project at the U of I in different contexts I was excited to watch this video. Thanks so much for sharing this work! It really helped me better understand the program design :)

Has your team developed a framework that can be widely shared with curriculum and PD developers?  For example, we work with an NSF-funded nonprofit that is integrating CS into STEM courses with DEI at the PD core. An intentional integration of empathy into their PD would likely strengthen their materials. 

Great video! I appreciate that you start with empathy with a focus on empowering students to advocate for themselves. 

What an amazing video. Identifying the gap in STEM comes from the high school-college transition. A specific question: how are counselors instructed and educated more on STEM? How have their mindset changed over the time? Also, I would like to know more about the anti-racist practices that teachers are fostering with in their classrooms.

I love your opening screen shots!  Most striking!  

Also my own "counseled" experience some decades ago reminds me of what I see now happens all too often nationwide. I was advised by my high school counselor to "maybe apply for community college" but an older cousin looked at my grades and activities in high school and said "you should apply for top tier schools; your counselor seems to be a little out of touch. I think you project 

I wish you great success!

Gerald Knezek

simEquity Project

Great to see the application of design thinking to social issues (like creating effective inclusive classrooms!) with empathy at the core of the process. Bravo!

Echoing all of the appreciation for beginning with empathy, and also the education around the role of school counselors.  A faculty person in the School of Ed at my institution recently invited me into a conversation about the ways in which high school counseling shapes recruitment in physics and I feel like such a learner here.  I will share your presentation with her!

Wonderful research and excellent video! I love that you begin with empathy and integrate this into the EDP, as Jasmine and Nacy also said. This reminds me of Julia Robinson and colleagues' culturally relevant engineering, I encourage you to check out their video: Teachers' Culturally Relevant Engineering Self-Efficacy.