The Context

For transparency, I'm trying to write every day because I defended my dissertation back in November of 2019, and for five years I have felt a toxic combination of writers block and imposter syndrome. The fact is, I enjoy writing, and I felt highly qualified to write about my dissertation research because I was studying the impacts of an informal STEM mentoring program that I helped to create and shepherd and shape for a solid three years before I even began my PhD program. Since then I've benefitted from incredible mentors that showed me new research settings and brought me deep into the world of systems change research and computer science education. (Shout out to my work wives Dr. Groome and Dr. DeLyser and my collaborators Dr. Vaval and Dr. Cobo.) Even then, I only felt "second author" energy. So now I'm committing to engaging with the research that has been published more recently and extending the scope of my dissertation research such that it tells a longitudinal story. And I'm going to write conversationally to you, each day, while I do it. Some of this may show up in my scholarly publications down the line.

I want to start broadly, and then I'll position myself tomorrow. To quote Dr. Evil: "The details of my life are quite inconsequential really." Except, of course, for the fact that positionality is crucial when you want to do work in education justice. Setting that aside for a moment...

I did not spend eight total years in Evil Education Graduate School to quote Mike Meyers movies at you.

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The context for doing my flavor of Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education research has changed. When I wrote my first dissertation chapter back in 2014 ::cough:: a decade ago ::cough::, I motivated my research in economic terms. I said something to the effect of, "The US needs the power and creativity of all our diverse minds in STEM-based businesses and research fields to compete economically with the other nations of the world." This is an argument familiar to people who have read "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" from 2007. There is a tactic behind positioning the research this way: elected officials care about what happens to the economy.

You're probably also familiar with the Sputnik-motivated national security argument for investment in STEM education. Again: This is an argument that is compelling to elected officials. And it is a 67 year old argument at the time of this writing.

Both arguments are rooted in concepts of Competition. Even over the last two decades, a strong drum beat for making STEM education more equitable to students historically marginalized and excluded from these fields (Black students, Latinx students, Indigenous students, female-identifying students, and students who claim more than one of these identities), because we want all students to be competitive for the most well-paying jobs available in America.

In the research I have done on systems change at CSforALL over the course of six years, I have seen thousands of committed leaders in education across more than half of all states and territories, from the classrooms to the district offices, stand up and say they want to change the structures in their public schools to expand access and participation to computer science education. There is a huge desire and motivation to do this thing. Something I have learned is just how damn durable the existing structures are. Even in the face of tremendous will. Change happens in communities, in classrooms, in families, in neighborhoods. This is MONUMENTALLY important.

However, sweeping, system-wide change is very very hard to make happen. Power structures are ferociously defended (Mills, 2019). I ask myself, how can I in good conscience work to get a sweet little child "gritty" enough to persist in STEM, only to have them top out into a work place that is egregiously cold and excluding? Is that the prize that I'm trying to boost them up to achieve?

Today, I feel that the shift away from Competition narratives, and toward Cooperative and Cogenerative narratives is more honest to the context. We need to build parallel structures of power in society, informed by diverse minds and ways of knowing in STEM fields, as well as in the Humanities, because in that direction that we can pour energies and see them put to good use. We build power in our communities. We are at an inflection point: our planet will soon become even more hostile to the human population and many of our fellow living beings. The technologies that we have dreamed and built to assist us threaten to fracture our attention, hijack our amigdalas, and take our knowledge and creative work away from us. These are runaway, wicked problems.

We could be driven to dire places by this inflection point. Let us INSTEAD empower our children with wisdom, with mentors, with every option for how they can joyfully and ethically make a future by cooperatively creating parallel power structures. Let us keep them safe, fuel their agency, and respect their evolving identities. Let us improve how we teach STEM, not at the expense of the Humanities, but in concert with these studies, so our kids have diverse sets of tools to ruggedly make this beautiful future together. Defiant joy! Rugged hopefulness! Love and chosen families as a safe haven for strengthening roots and branching out. STEM education has a very important role to play in this. I have gas in the tank for this. For my two offspring and for all the future. So let's do this research, yeah?

Mills, C. W. (2019). The power elite. In Social Stratification, Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, Second Edition (pp. 202-211). Routledge.

National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, & Institute of Medicine. (2007). Rising above the gathering storm: Energizing and employing America for a brighter economic future. The National Academies Press.