Sustainability education offers higher education institutions opportunities to broaden the participation of groups traditionally underrepresented in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. This chapter focuses on an exploratory case study that looks at how sustainability education can be used as a tool to increase…

The purpose of this study was to solicit perspectives of underserved youth and educators who serve them regarding college and career readiness. In this study, underserved youth refers to adolescents who experience inequitable access to educational resources. Purposeful sampling was used to select 84 focus group participants including educators and…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which white fear governs school discipline policies and practices in Alabama. Specifically, we advance white fear as a conceptual framework through which school discipline policies implementation, interpretation, and data reporting can be understood. We focus here on the case of Alabama public…

We leverage variation in the timing of women's colleges' transitions to coeducation throughout the 1960s-2000s to study how exposure to a gendered social environment affects women's human capital investments. Applying event study and synthetic control analyses to newly collected historical data, we find that the share of women majoring in STEM at…

Diversity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce is in continual demand among underrepresented minorities and women. Of particular concern is the disproportionality low rates of Black women in STEM in relationship to their science and engineering (S&E) degree attainment and overall representation in the…

Educational researchers are often tasked with postulating and measuring unknown processes that account for observed outcomes. Logically, this requires inductive reasoning about which constructs are relevant to the situation we seek to understand, prior to attempts at measurement. Exploratory mixed methods designs, along with a few classic designs…

Minorities are underrepresented in the aviation industry. More than 90% of professional pilots identify as White males. While research has identified this phenomenon, little qualitative research exists to understand low retention's driving factors. This phenomenological study sought the experiences of minority graduates of collegiate aviation…

In a detailed exploration of inclusion in physics, social scientist Maria Ong makes the case for far-reaching higher education reform, noting that despite diversity efforts to recruit more women and students of color into science and mathematics programs, many leave the STEM pipeline. "The Double Bind in Physics Education" takes readers…

Naturalists enrich our scientific understanding of biodiversity. However, just as countries have fallen behind on commitments to provide biodiversity conservation funding, so has the focus of life science stayed arm's length. The purpose of this article is to consider why biodiversity should be the center of life sciences education and how…

The implementation of gifted programmes in the 1970s provided a way for school divisions to circumvent many of the aims of desegregated schooling as called for in "Brown v. Board of Education." This study examines the implementation of one such system in a Southern school district that saw schools close rather than integrate in the years…

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the mentoring program of the Minority Scholars from Under-Represented Groups in Engineering and the Social Sciences (SURGE) Capacity in Disasters initiative, a pilot program that aimed to address the challenges that graduate students of color face in academic programs. SURGE promotes mentoring…

This article systematically reviews 35 empirical articles on the topic of networks and career advancement into academic leadership positions. Our objectives in this systematic review are to clarify: (1) the functions that networks fulfil; (2) the outcomes of these functions in terms of career advancement; and (3) whether networks are likely to…

Underrepresentation of women in physics is a prominent issue in the western countries. Since physics teachers are in a unique position to affect new generations of students, it has been suggested that they are an important part of the solution. In this paper, we explore how trainee physics teachers create spaces for themselves as learners of…

This study examines autism diagnosis prevalence within the New York City (NYC) Universal Pre-K for All (UPK) program expansion into racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse NYC neighborhoods. Here, it is hypothesized that racial/ethnic differences in autism diagnoses may close as more children are referred for testing by UPK programs,…

Inequity in workforce programming has been historically difficult to address for community colleges trying to meet labor market demands. Even a concentration on placing Black and Latino students into high-demand jobs is not much use when those opportunities sit at the lower end of the wage scale. Yet, access to life-changing careers remains an…