A collaborative effort by three UNM departments has researchers exploring the impacts of commonly found disparities between academic contextual culture within student participants and their learning environments at Arizona State University.
The research team — made up of UNM sociology associate professor Roberto Ibarra, Earth and planetary science professor Gary Weissmann and UNM graduate Michael Howland-Davis — will be be studying conceptual context diversity at ASU in a project funded by the National Science Foundation.
“What's really cool about this is that you have a study that almost never happens at universities, and through the NSF, and it's hugely interdisciplinary,” Howland -Davis said. “You have a group of a sociologist, you have a political science (instructor) through the school of public administration, and you have a geologist all working together in different aspects of this project that brought $1.2 million to UNM.”
The project focuses on a new concept of diversity that would change higher education in many ways. The research team is trying to determine how the academic cultures at ASU in the science and technology programs might be changing the way they normally mentor students, Ibarra said.
“We hope that, for the outcome, we can prove that there is new diversity which we have named context diversity,” Ibarra said, defining context diversity as an exchanging of academic culture.
“The academic system is really geared for the northern European culture approach to learning and knowing,” Weissmann said. “By broadening that out, we think it will enhance diversity in the sciences, and will enhance diversity in academia.”
What the team is doing is an interdisciplinary approach to look at what works in STEM and how to reframe these fields to become a lot more diverse and increase the chances of more students succeeding in those fields, Howland-Davis said.
“Here we are, social scientists coordinating our efforts with people who are running the program who are engineers over there. So the most important part is this is really a very interdisciplinary program, and very unique,” Ibarra said.
The team will be working with a program geared to get undergraduate students in degrees in science, engineering, math and technology, he said, which means within the program they will be working with engineers and other parts of the program, as well as with people involved in mentoring the students.
“It’s more how we can see connections and how we use those connections as well as the details. You can’t have one without the other you really need all approaches,” Ibarra said. “The goal is really to understand how these broad range of ways of knowing can come together and help our students in two different ways of knowing and enhancing their abilities.”
Because the university’s tenure system does not support interdisciplinary collaboration work, the project itself is rare as most of the academic research done on campus is through individual departments, Howland-Davis said.
As for the outcome of this study, Ibarra said the team is looking to see it picked up on a national level for a whole new breakthrough in diversity.
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“We want to change the cultural context of these academic disciplines, to become more inclusive for all kinds of students including majority students,” Ibarra said.
The theoretical underpinning of this context diversity shows that, while a lot of active learning procedures and things done in the classroom do make a difference, there still can be ways to improve those techniques.
Nichole Harwood is a news reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Nolidoli1.
