Sociocultural and Sociopolitical Challenges for STEM Education in the Current Era

To ensure learner engagement, the importance of integrating learners' culture or, at the very least, being cognizant about it while carrying out formal/informal STEM activities has been well recognized in the STEM literature. However, the importance of considering learners' political identity while designing such activities has not been well-addressed. The lack of scientific literacy coupled with the distrust that a wide range of people has with scientific efforts of any kind that go against their worldviews, values, and beliefs can potentially have a significant impact on STEM educational activities' effectiveness. This research is grounded in the idea that both sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of learners' lives and the interplay between those realities need to be exhaustively investigated to better communicate science via STEM activities. STEM activities should be designed that should guide people to discern among evidence, opinion, misinformation, and disinformation regardless of their cultural and political identities and develop STEM identities that can coexist with them. To this end, this research will address the following research questions: (1) what approaches STEM researchers and practitioners have traditionally adopted to include culture and politics into the learning process?, (2) what challenges have they experienced in advancing or promoting science with cultural and political resistance?, and (3) what new mechanisms can be adopted or existing mechanisms can be modified to address evolving challenges in the sociocultural and sociopolitical landscape?. With increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques available for conducting research syntheses, it is now possible to look at different research domains and find answers regarding the complex interplay of sociocultural and sociopolitical factors in STEM education. Multiple bodies of peer and field-reviewed literature will be consulted in this research using a mixed studies review approach. First, the research team will look at diverse theoretical traditions spanning psychology, political science, sociology, and anthropology, to understand how sociocultural and sociopolitical perspectives in the learning sciences have centered the role of identity in the learning process. Second, the research team will review formal and informal STEM-based peer-reviewed articles and white papers to understand how STEM practitioners addressed different sociocultural and sociopolitical challenges. Third, the research team will review different mechanisms available in the existing literature to debias people and how they can be adopted by STEM practitioners. The direct beneficiary of this research endeavor will be professional audiences who are (1) individuals or organizations working in designing and implementing formal/informal STEM activities, and (2) students, faculty, and researchers interested in formal/informal STEM outreach and citizen science focus. The broader impact of this research is that it can potentially provide a better understanding to the STEM community why marginalized populations such as the rural population or communities of color have historically demonstrated unique social, cultural, and political traits that are typically averse to science learning and acceptance and what needs to be done to alleviate such a pressing issue in the current era.