STEM Strategies: Student Ambassadors and Equality in Higher Education in Bloomington, MN

More skilled young people are urgently needed in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the UK.This book indicates how policy can be developed to encourage young people to consider STEM careers. It challenges widely held assumptions about how role models help raise aspirations and support progression to Higher Education and asks whether role models really do encourage pupils, particularly girls, into STEM careers.The research presented here examined New Labour’s widening participation policy of encouraging university student ambassadors to work as role models with younger students and school pupils. The study of STEM student ambassadors working in engineering and medicine at two contrasting universities reveals how ambassadors are positioned by the discourses and activities that surround them. It examines the developing relationships between pupils and ambassadors, the learning engendered in different learning contexts, and the matching of ethnic, classed and gendered identities.The book questions the assumption that university students are role models for school pupils simply by virtue of their gender, ethnic and classed identities and their status as university students. But it also provides valuable insights into how encounters between pupils and university students can effectively support and encourage pupils in STEM subjects.
STEM Strategies
is essential reading for policy makers and for school, FE and HE practitioners involved in outreach and interested in social justice. It is especially relevant to practitioners working with ambassadors in education and to people in industry working on STEM ambassador programs and will also interest those who are looking at diversity and access to HE and at identity formation. The multidisciplinary approach developed in the book makes a unique contribution to a developing body of evidence on how best to support the diversification of students in the STEM subject areas.