Equity confronts history, centers diverse perspectives through criticality, and focuses on resources

This post is a part of a series about Framing Equity. Click here to go the series’ main page.

“By amplifying research, practice, and evaluation that ensure respect, safety, and security, the REVISE Center directs our focus and resources to those most in need of funding access, while improving outcomes for all organizations, researchers, practitioners, evaluators, and learners.”

While we are concerned with how individuals in ISE navigate bias and discrimination, criticality (e.g., critical race theory, critical disability theory, etc.) offers insight and tools to challenge inequities at a systemic level. REVISE needs to confront the historical and current realities of intersectional exclusion and mistrust within ISE and STEM. We will prioritize those that have been ignored by institutions that have privileged the success of white, able-bodied male STEM learners. 

REVISE must engage in activities, support initiatives, and share resources that model self-reflective processes and examine how our own organizations’ ISE programming, policies, and practices have continued inequitable practices. This will allow REVISE to create healing counterspaces, highlight stories from marginalized groups, and co-develop transformative strategies to dismantle institutional trauma.. 

We employ a targeted universalist and intersectional approach that will center the voices and needs of the most marginalized in STEM. In reviewing the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) portfolio, we acknowledge that we are not alone in this work. Principal Investigators are giving urgently needed attention to marginalized populations: youth in rural areas, refugee youth, black girls and women facing multiple barriers, and Indigenous communities working toward sustainability. By amplifying research, practice, and evaluation that ensure respect, safety, and security, the REVISE Center directs our focus and resources to those most in need of funding access, while improving outcomes for all organizations, researchers, practitioners, evaluators, and learners.