Speaker
Description
Advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is both a collective responsibility and pathway to excellence. The challenges to EDI in STEM affect who engages in STEM and their experiences, how STEM activities occur, their success, and their applicability to society. While there is growing evidence of the importance of EDI in STEM, individuals may lack knowledge or skills to effect change. Organizations recognize the urgent need to address EDI to achieve the best possible science, however, their efforts are hampered by a lack of directly applicable tools.
The EDIT-STEM (EDI Technologies/Transformation for STEM) initiative aims to develop novel technologies as a transformative approach to address the challenges to EDI in STEM. This unique interdisciplinary collaboration unites researchers across disciplines, sectors, organizations, and geographic regions. It will make use of recent developments in the computer science sub-field of Persuasive Technology – interactive systems to motivate positive changes in user attitude and behaviour through informed persuasion.
This presentation will provide an overview of EDIT-STEM. For context, recent work on resources to empower scientists to initiate actions to advance EDI will be reviewed. The Teaching Toolkit, “Science is for everyone: Integrating equity, diversity and inclusion in teaching science and engineering – a toolkit for instructors”, and Research Pocket Guide, “Striving for inclusive excellence in science and engineering research: a pocket guide”, focus on practical, actionable ideas to engage with EDI (https://zenodo.org/communities/edit-stem/).
We will describe how the EDIT-STEM collaboration was formed by researchers from across STEM fields in partnership with organizations that are STEM changemakers in Canada. Our approach, including participatory design and integrated knowledge mobilization, will be outlined. We will sketch our vision of developing an innovative technological approach to achieve a user-centric, accessible, interactive, and scalable solution to this societal problem.
| Keyword-1 | equity, diversity, inclusion |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | research |
| Keyword-3 | teaching |