Developing Partnerships Among Refugee-Serving Organizations and Learning Institutions to Advance Informal STEM Learning Among Refugee Communities

Although the number of refugee groups has increased across the United States in recent decades, many groups do not have opportunities to engage in quality STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning opportunities, embedded within a comprehensive systems-wide approach to understanding and advancing the refugees' goals and planned trajectories. To address this issue, this project will result in the development of a partnership among an institution of higher education, the University of San Diego; a non-profit educational organization, the Teaching and Learning Collaborative; and a refugee-serving organization, the Karen Organization of San Diego, which supports Burmese refugees in navigating social services systems and accessing employment. Together, the three partners will plan and participate in a series of informal STEM learning activities in which they learn more about the strengths, cultural assets, wishes, and educational goals of the Burmese refugee community in San Diego. Based on what they learned, they will co-develop and implement maker experiences, designed to build literacy in computer science and Artificial Intelligence, with Burmese community members. They will also co-develop a trajectory for practice and research regarding how to develop collaborative, community-driven maker activities, which meet the goals of Burmese refugees while affirming their cultures. This project will result in a widely-disseminated model for how refugee-serving organizations can collaborate with learning institutions to provide quality informal STEM learning opportunities for refugee communities. Ultimately, this project is likely to broaden participation in STEM pathways among refugees.

Different organizations with complementary expertise will engage in a series of activities in which they learn about the educational goals and wishes of Burmese refugees, including children, caregivers, elders, and leaders. They will co-plan, co-implement, and co-evaluate multigenerational maker activities, designed to build participants' literacies in computer science and Artificial Intelligence. Research will explore how organizations can partner together to build fair, trusting, culturally responsive, and equitable relationships and decision-making processes, which result in quality informal STEM learning experiences for refugees. To achieve this research purpose, the project team will generate data such as detailed notes from various meetings with the community members; reflective journals written by members of the leadership team (including people from the three partnering organizations); brief questionnaires about people?s experiences of the activities; and group interviews with Burmese community members. Inductive analyses of these data will generate insights on equitable collaborations among partnering organizations, and will form the basis for a future trajectory of research and practice regarding the development and evaluation of culturally-affirming, skill-building informal STEM learning experiences among refugees.