Chapter 11: Participation in the Advancing Out-of-School Learning in Mathematics and Engineering Project: Supporting Middle School Latinas’ Bilingual and STEM Identities

This chapter describes Latina¹ middle school girls’ participation in mathematics and engineering fields through an integrated curriculum that supports the programming of digital color video and image representations. More specifically, we explore how three bilingual Latina girls developed a sense of comfort, expertise, agency, and belonging to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and practices through their participation in the Advancing Out-of-School Learning in Mathematics and Engineering (AOLME) project.

Current statistics of the STEM workforce describe the underrepresentation of brown and black populations in STEM fields, especially females (Dowd, Malcom, & Macias, 2010; Landivar, 2013; Syed & Chemers, 2011). When analyzing the educational conditions that support these groups of students, a service gap is evident regarding quality and quantity of educational resources (Flores, 2007). This gap often transfers not only into underfunded schools that have limited instructional resources and infrastructure in need of remodeling to provide a more comfortable educational ecology, but this gap also includes an emphasis on low-level content, basic procedures, and remediation in terms of curriculum and instruction. In addition, low student expectations from underprepared teachers, who are most likely to be hired at schools with predominantly brown and Black students, especially Latinas/os. Frequently, these teachers apply pedagogies that present STEM fields disconnected from real-life applications, a situation that translates into low student interest in STEM academics, to the point that high school STEM academics are under-enrolled and are at great risk of closing (Hossain & Robinson, 2012; Rogers, 2009). These low expectations are reflected in students’ interest in staying in school. As of 2009, Latinas/os had the highest high-school dropout rates of all demographic groups and the lowest graduation percentages (Chapa & De La Rosa, 2006; Ortiz, Valerio, & Lopez, 2012). The dropout rates directly affect high school graduation and college enrollment. These persistent dropout patterns suggest educational experiences laden with lower expectations for Latina/o students that can, in turn, limit their future opportunities (Ortiz, Valerio, & Lopez, 2012).