As the above section looked at BME students at different educational stages, I now turn to examine the literature on their experiences in the particular area of STEM education. I argue in this section that the current literature on BME students in STEM education in the UK is very limited and there is a need to build a stronger evidence base to inform policy and practice, particularly at PG level. From the literature it can be deduced that the relationship between people of colour and science has been complicated by racism, which, as I argue below, manifested itself through the othering of their bodies and lack of recognition of intellectual contributions.
Firstly, for a long time contributions of BME people to science have been disregarded, such as, for example, the Australian First Nations’ or South American indigenous tribes’ contributions to astronomy (Green and Green, 2010; Johnson, 2014) referring to them as savages instead. Traditionally, scientific epistemology assumed objectivity of theories and data, which allowed researchers to claim “truths” about the researched populations. However, this has been challenged by feminist and anti-racist researchers as merely a set of practices produced in, and therefore biased by a predominantly White and male environment, thus, beginning to allow more recognition for contributions of women and people of colour within science (Green, 2009; Harrell, 2015).
Secondly, science, or pseudo-science rather, of eugenics, has also been used to establish false biological differences between the bodies of people of colour and White people and to position the former as supposedly sub-human species. Eugenics was a strong trend in science in 19th and early 20th centuries (Chitty,
2001, Saini, 2019), which was used to justify such atrocities as slavery or the Nazi holocaust. Often, when people of colour were present in sciences, it was actually their bodies that were experimented on, with infamous examples of anaesthesia-free gynaecological experiments on enslaved Black women
(Ojanuga, 1993) or infecting African Americans and indigenous Americans with syphilis without administering treatment to test the disease’s long-term effects (Hodge, 2012). As a result, even until today, people of colour have to struggle with their bodies being othered and often relegated to areas other than STEM – such as sports or dancing for Black men or hyper-sexualisation of Asian women (Donnor, 2005; Park, 2009).
Literature overseas, particularly from the US and South Africa has looked at a number of issues relating to POC in STEM, such as numeral representation in STEM education and workforce (Concannon and Barrow, 2009; Gayles and Ampaw, 2011; Hurtado et al., 2009), self-confidence (Beasley and Fischer, 2012; Johnson, 2012; Kachchaf et al., 2015; O’Brien et al., 2015), issues explicitly connected to racism such as stress related to being a minority in a predominantly White environment (Clark et al., 2012; Malone and Barabino, 2009), challenging racial stereotypes (Snyder, 2014) or adjusting to forms of being (dress, language, behaviours) seen as more White and therefore more acceptable (Carlone and Johnson, 2007; Ong, 2005). Thus, the international literature engaged with the processes of othering. While it may be more extensive than UK scholarship (as I will argue below), it seems to concentrate on the individuals dealing with their otherness rather than intuitions othering the individuals. Therefore, in this research I will not only investigate the impacts of othering on individuals but also how institutions enact this othering.
However, literature examining ‘race’ in STEM and STEM education (university and pre-university level) in England is very limited and has not yet explored the multitude of issues that overseas literature has dealt with. Moreover, it seems to have had little impact on STEM education policy and practice, as the
participation in subjects with traditional BME underrepresentation has remained very low throughout the years (Gartland, 2014; Gorard and See, 2009). It has mostly concentrated on issues of pipeline, i.e. supply of students who study STEM and, what is closely linked to it, factors influencing subject choice and the
make-up of STEM student populations. Effects of student characteristics on participation and success have been measured, noting differences among minority ethnic groups, with the already mentioned research demonstrating that Black Caribbean students were underrepresented in higher tiers of KS3/GCSE science and maths exams, even when controlling for prior attainment (Strand, 2007). There is also evidence that gender and socio-economic status play a role in the take up of science by BME students at school, alongside ‘race’, with the perceptions of science being a White middle-class male domain (Archer et al., 2015a; Gorard and See, 2009). Choice of STEM route has therefore been linked to (1) the creation of one’s identity as a scientist and, linked to it,
personal agency situated within a plethora of wider factors (society, schools, national policies) (Reiss et al., 2011), and (2) the knowledge of career paths, or rather, the limitation of this knowledge, which concentrated mostly on medicine- related careers (Archer et al., 2015a; Greenwood and Bithell, 2005). Despite this, studies have found that BME students were highly motivated to study a STEM subject at both pre-university and university levels (Archer et al., 2015a; CaSE, 2014). However, the above research used psychological and psycho- social approaches concentrating on individual motivations and barriers which failed to recognise the importance of structural oppressions.
Even less is known about STEM and ‘race’ at PG level. Overall, the proportion of BME students in PG STEM education is lower than that at UG level,
especially at postgraduate research (PGR) level where BME students make up only 17.9% of the population compared with 24.9% at UG level (Advance HE, 2018c). D’Aguiar & Harrison (2015) examined who returns to education (PG STEM) after entering the workforce and found that women and BME graduates were more likely to return to PG education, which the authors linked to lower employment rates or underemployment of returners. However, they noted that overall STEM graduates had lower rates of returning to PG education than the rest of graduates.
Even despite the paucity in UK literature, there seem to be similarities between the overseas and the UK literature in terms of the investigations of the issues faced by BME students in STEM. However, more research is required in the UK which critiques social institutions rather than individual approaches, particularly
at PG level. One of the main ways by which universities operationalise their efforts to broaden education to include BME students is Widening Participation policy and practice, which I discuss next.