Beyond Graphs to What Truly Matters: Resilience, Sense of Belonging, and STEM Success

On January 15, 2015, I had the opportunity to participate as a panelist at the Front and Center: Bringing Marginalized Girls into Focus in STEM and Career and Technical Education (CTE). The event was sponsored by the White House and Georgetown Center for Poverty and Inequality, Georgetown Law Center. See more at Front and Center: Girls of Color in STEM Panel

To say I was excited is an understatement. I have been advocating for more attention on women of color in STEM and STEM education since I started as a chemistry major at Southern University in 1987. Finally, after 28 years, it felt like there was a space for me to matter.

I was a part of the opening panel so was elated about the chance to share a cumulative 28 years of experience as a girl now woman of color in STEM education. I shared my perspective from a variety of experiences. I decided to focus on attributes of women and girls of color in STEM that people rarely talk about. I described how most women as STEM majors maneuver like anthropologists, without knowing it, because success in STEM is predicated on an analysis of context for appropriate navigation forward.

However, more important than contextual navigation skills, I described the desire to belong and to have a sense and confirmation of belonging to a group. Sense of belonging is rarely shown on STEM achievement graphs, albeit research shows that when students have a sense of belonging in any learning environment, their academic performance in that environment increases.

Let’s begin to focus more on what truly matters. When individuals, especially girls of color, internalize the message that STEM matters and they make a conscious choice to pursue STEM as a major, it is our responsibility to make sure that when they arrive to their respective STEM classrooms and laboratory spaces that they feel like they matter and that they belong in those spaces. This sense of belonging is not something they generate for themselves. The sensation of belonging is only created when there is an intentional effort to welcome, acknowledge, be patient with, support, validate, guide and advise new people entering an existing community of practice.