Inverness Research
Inverness Research served as the external evaluators for the INSPIRE project, a collaboration between faculty and staff at the University of Utah and Utah State University. The project engaged refugee youth in an afterschool program in building cosmic ray detectors, data analysis and coding, research experiences with cosmic-day detection data, and in autoethnography and filmmaking and family science events. Because this research project employed ethnography and discourse analysis, which is heavily focused on providing iterative feedback, the role of the evaluation was focused primarily on facilitating the input of the advisory board as an external review mechanism.
Accomplishments of the Project
Overall, this project successfully engaged refugee youth in an afterschool program setting at the University of Utah in building, decorating and mounting four cosmic ray detectors, calibrating the detectors, learning coding, and working with data collected from cosmic ray detectors to answer questions of interest to them. The project also successfully engaged the youth in ethnographic activities that helped them explore their identities both within the context of the STEM-rich project and in their day-to-day contexts.
The research conducted by researchers at Utah State University through this project led to several key publications and new areas of inquiry for research. The project sought to answer two fundamental research questions, which were modified throughout the project based on data collected: How do students author STEM-related identities (disciplinary identities in physics/computing/other) across the contexts and relationships afforded by INSPIRE? What diversity of STEM-related identity work did this project afford? (In other words: What pathways of STEM-related identity work occurred in this program?) The research team worked throughout the project in helping to develop pedagogical tools for identifying diverse students’ funds of knowledge and for unpacking how refugee youth experience (or do not experience) identities as refugees. They also worked on discursive practices for understanding how instructors and mentors enact culturally sustaining learning environments and documented examples of translingual practices and play as a culturally-sustaining practice. In addition, they developed a set of design principles for enacting asset-based pedagogies for refugee youth in online learning spaces, and studied pathways of identity development. The research team also worked throughout the life of the project to disseminate findings, including articles in three peer-reviewed journals, and ten peer-reviewed presentations at conferences.
Advisors were impressed by the thoughtfulness and hard work that the project staff put into everything in the project, from the work with students, to the research, and the preparation for and participation in the advisory board meetings. Throughout the project, the advisors and evaluators appreciated the project team’s flexibility in adapting to an array of challenges and situations. Advisors found noteworthy the number of students engaged consistently, through zoom during the pandemic and in-person afterwards, and the work the students were engaged in, both with cosmic ray detection research as well as ethnography and filmmaking. In addition, the advisors were impressed by the amount of data being collected by the research team, the development of student profiles from that data, and the willingness of the research team to pivot to new questions as they have analyzed the data.
Importantly, both the cosmic ray detection work with students and the study of key research questions that emerged through this project is continuing through other funding. Advisors were impressed by the work the project did in year four to continue the program at the Salt Lake Center for Science Education (SLCSE) high school, and through a Research Experience for Teachers project which integrates high school education with professional scientific research in experimental cosmic-ray physics at SLCSE. The University of Utah also became the new home for the High School Project on Astrophysics Research (HiSPARC) and received detectors from Denmark.
In addition, the structure and work of the advisory board provided a positive, generative experience for both the project team and advisors and is another key outcome from the project.
Benefits of the Project
To Youth: The project provided multiple benefits to participating youth, particularly those that stayed engaged throughout the entire length of the project. In particular, youth gained knowledge and skills about cosmic-ray physics, computing and filmmaking; became more interested in physics, coding and filmmaking; and increased their sense of self-efficacy in these areas.
To the REFUGES Program: The INSPIRE project was embedded in an existing after school program for refugee youth at the University of Utah, called REFUGES, that offers enrichment experiences in STEM and other subjects, as well as tutoring and homework support, and college prep support. The funding for the INSPIRE program enabled the REFUGES program to create a sustained physics, coding and filmmaking learning experience for students. And being embedded in the afterschool program helped the program address critical student needs through its existing homework and college prep support efforts.
To REFUGES Afterschool Staff: Afterschool staff gained exposure to instructional techniques and culturally sustaining pedagogies. They learned from the students and learned how to adapt the physics and coding instruction to zoom and to address the challenges of delays that happened throughout the project. Most importantly, they gained experience balancing teaching of rigorous physics and computer science content with student autonomy.
To the Research Team: The research team gained valuable experience in research with refugee populations and in physics education. They also gained experience in adapting to the challenging delays and in addressing new questions that emerge from large sets of data collected from the students. They also benefitted from having opportunities to present at different types of conferences, including the American Education Research Association, the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, the American Educational Studies Association, and the Physics Education Research Conference, to name a few.
To the University of Utah: The University of Utah gained infrastructure through the project; in addition to the detectors built by the students that are now mounted, the University also inherited the HiSPARC project infrastructure from the Netherlands (including detectors and the database). In addition, the project team gained knowledge of the processes and procedures needed to mount detectors. All of this is important infrastructure which can be built on in the continuation of this project and in future work.
Challenges
A majority of discussions with each one of the advisors, and a topic of discussion during each of the annual advisory board meetings, focused on this key design challenge: how to enact authentic culturally-sustaining pedagogies within the framework of the topic of cosmic ray detection that was chosen for the students, and specifically, how to support more translanguaging (use of multiple languages for all students).
A related challenge most advisors engaged with the project team on is related to student engagement and how much freedom/autonomy students should have in terms of their ownership of the content/topic of activities when the project has set out to accomplish certain physics learning experiences. Most of the advisors acknowledged that this too is a difficult challenge, and one they have grappled with in their own work.
Another challenge the project faced and discussed with advisors was that the refugee youth in the INSPIRE program spoke a variety of different languages. So, in addition to addressing the challenge of how to adapt rigorous physics and coding to a range of ages, interests and abilities, the project also had to address the differences in languages spoken.
Another challenge the project faced was dealing with the pandemic, first in having to move all the instruction online to Zoom in the beginning of the project, and secondly, in dealing with supply chain disruptions for detector parts. And then the project had to deal with another delay in waiting almost a year for the detectors to be mounted due to regulatory hurdles.
Another challenge the project faced was how best to balance the pursuit of the initial research questions alongside questions of interest that arose during the evolution of the project and the ongoing analysis of the large volume of data from students they collected. While advisors noted that studying STEM identity in refugee youth is interesting to look into, and particularly in this project, related to physics and computer science, they were also encouraging of the research team’s willingness to pivot to pursue additional questions that interested them, such as the role of play in informal learning experiences, as they learned along the way.
Conclusion
Overall, the INSPIRE project, despite some challenges, created and implemented an engaging and generative informal STEM project for refugee youth. Each year, the project staff and researchers worked with the evaluators and advisors, reflected extensively on every dimension of the project, and made thoughtful adjustments. The project generated benefits for youth, project staff, the overall REFUGES program and the two universities. The project team persisted in building relationships across stakeholders and as a result have created an infrastructure for future opportunities to engage teachers and students in cosmic ray detection and research in the region.
The ongoing adjustment and articulation of the design principles not only improved the work of the project over time but also has the potential to inform other projects with similar foci or goals. Understanding the role and nature of culturally-responsive pedagogy in a multi-lingual context in STEM is relatively new to the field, and this project has contributed some helpful insights.
Finally, defining and understanding STEM identity has been, and likely will continue to be, an area of great interest in the field. The INSPIRE researchers, together with the advisors, have generated important and nuanced questions about this line of inquiry which not only deepened the work of the project but also opened up new and interesting research pathways.