The Future Educator Pathway is a comprehensive "Grow Your Own" program designed to recruit, motivate and mentor students of color so they can attend college and become future educators. The Future Educator Pathway is a collaboration between Millersville University and local school districts, and it consists of the following four unique…

Colleges are becoming increasingly diverse, including strengthening representation of students with disabilities in STEM (Science, Teaching, Engineering, and Math) fields; however, representation still lags behind national trends. To adapt to this changing demographic and improve representation, STEM college professors must be prepared to grant…

This article describes the tiered mentoring approach to undergraduate research at a regional comprehensive university. In addition to mentorship of undergraduate student researchers by faculty and graduate students, tiered mentoring includes high school student researchers. The high-impact practice of student research is particularly impactful at…

The existence of systemic racism in Canadian healthcare, among other determinants including accessible education, available occupation, and affordable housing, contributes to the racial divide in treatment and poor health outcomes for Black communities. Recent promising work has demonstrated patient-physician racial concordance in populations of…

Partners United for Research Pathways Oriented to Social Justice in Education is a partnership between a university research training program and a Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools® site in north Florida. It addresses the lack of demographic diversity among doctoral students in education. Emphasis is on researcher positionality and building…

In an article written by Matthew Randazzo (2017) titled "Students Shouldn't Live in STEM Deserts," he revealed that a limited number of educational opportunities exist for students to gain essential STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) skills. This need for more STEM minds is bolstered by a widespread economic shift…

In this essay, Mingda Sun, a high school student from Connecticut, recounts her summer research internship opportunity at the Center for Quantitative Medicine of UConn Health. She discusses her learning experiences, the challenges she faced, and the encouragement she received from her mentors and peers and explains how this month-long internship…

Out-of-school programs can offer personalized and meaningful learning experiences that deepen students' knowledge and cater to their passions and interests, but it has been a painful reality that many such programs have been available only to students and families with privilege and resources. Karen Hammerness, Anna MacPherson, Preeti Gupta,…

Access to enriching science programs is not equitable, with students from affluent districts having more opportunities to develop their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills than students from underserved districts. The "Building Unique Inventions to Launch Discovery, Engagement, and Reasoning in STEM"…

During a sabbatical semester in Fall 2018, "Community Literacy Journal (CLJ)" co-editor Paul Feigenbaum volunteered as a "Scholar-in-Residence" at Youth Enrichment Services (YES), a nonprofit established in 1994 that is based in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Guided by its mission "to create hope out of…

In this article, the author introduces the notion of the balloon metaphor, an exercise she created for preservice writing teachers, in which they reflect upon their writing mentors and their writing journey. The author also discusses three very important issues facing the field of literacy today: teachers are not taught to write, teachers of…

Undergraduate research is increasingly prevalent in many fields of study, but it is not yet widespread in mathematics education. We argue that expanding undergraduate research opportunities in mathematics education would be beneficial to the field. Such opportunities can be impactful as either extracurricular or course-embedded experiences. To…

Yakima Valley College--a two-year, Hispanic-serving institution in south-central Washington state--partnered with four-year universities, agricultural centers, businesses, and federal and state agencies to develop a streamlined undergraduate research experience in which students work closely with a faculty mentor in a science, technology,…

The Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Pomona College has long worked to create an inclusive and welcoming space for all individuals to study mathematics. Many years ago, our approach to the lack of diversity we saw in our majors was remediation through programming, which sought to ameliorate student deficits. More recently, however, we…

Mentoring undergraduate students in research is both rewarding and challenging. In this paper we present how we established a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in the mathematical sciences at Michigan State University. A goal of our REU is to include students who are at an early stage of their study of mathematics. We…