Students’ exploring and refining their equity ethic within the Access Network

Abstract

The Access Network is an organization that supports vibrant interactions among students and faculty who advocate for equity work in the physical sciences. This paper uses McGee and Bentley's framework of "equity ethic" (EE) to understand how Access student leaders adopt and refine a commitment to equity and social justice work within the physical sciences. In McGee and Bentley's study of STEM students of color, they define EE as students' sense of altruism and collectivism within and outside of their communities. Through interviews with student leaders, we model components of students' EEs and how their EEs are influenced by their participation in Access. Student accounts illustrate that they are invested in improving equity within their disciplinary communities and see progress toward these goals as an important measure of success. Our findings highlight how students are already infusing an EE into their professional physics activities. This research suggests that student leaders benefit from having opportunities to articulate and refine critiques of disciplinary culture, and connect their EE to their professional practices. These accounts suggest that this work occurs in conversation with other equity leaders around issues of social justice.

Partnering with undergraduate engineering students to unearth cultural practices within a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program

“…It makes me think about the tenets of STS-thinking and whether someone can make a lot of progress towards social constructivism, but still be largely blind to many systems of oppression." At the same time, Turpen was actively involved in the Access Network [39,40,41] which established and ran a community-sourced "emergency fund" [42]. Co-organizing with students and scholars within this Network made it clear to her that these conditions were greatly shaping the lives of college students.…”

“…The project research leads and mentors drew on past experiences co-working with undergraduate and graduate student leaders in other contexts to structure the design of our research collaboration. In particular, they drew on Turpen's past experiences developing collaborative relationships with students within the Access Network [39][40][41]. The research leads, Turpen and Radoff, adapted some of Access Network's organizational structures around shared documentation and brought these structures into our research collaboration with STS students.…”

“…URFs currently in these roles often helped revise the expectations and tasks based on how the collaboration went that term, the progress we had made as a team, and the forward-looking needs that we identified. These job descriptions also included an explicit accessibility commitment (adapted from the Access Network) [39][40][41].…”

STEM students leading cultural change: How agency and capacity for collective action are cultivated within a distributed network

“…Previous work has shown how equity and social justice can be enacted by NFs. This study used an equity ethic framework-defined as "principled concern for social justice and for the well-being of people who are suffering from various inequities"-to show how NFs have developed in "their commitment to cultural change in physics, their desire to create more supportive college learning experiences for others (particularly for students of color), and their expansive forms of professional practice" [5], [6]. In this current study, we aim to understand how NFs conceptualize the work of the NF team to model how the team's collaboration cultivates such outcomes.…”