New Video Series Showcases Research on Black Males Navigating and Succeeding in STEM

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A brand-new video series that highlights the diverse experiences of Black boys and men in the science, technology, engineering and mathematic (STEM) fields, has launched under the direction of a prominent researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Brian A. Burt has created the Black Males in Engineering (BME) project, an interactive guide that spotlights his critical research over the past decade. The project not only chronicles the trajectories of young Black men in STEM but also offers recommendations and suggestions on how to guide Black males in STEM fields from primary school through the Ph.D.

The videos draw upon the largest collection of qualitative data on Black males in engineering graduate programs and contributes to the knowledge base related to understanding how Black males develop their perceptions of what it means, for example, to be an engineer, all the while broadening their participation in educational and workforce pathways. 

“Aspiring to a career in engineering can be daunting for Black males and a less traveled road they are expected to pave themselves,” said Burt, a UW-Maidson professor of education and director of the Wisconsin Equity and Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB). Burt is also a 2019 Diverse Emerging Scholar.  “We aim to provide a growing and well-informed community of support for these hardworking students.”

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, where so many researchers pivoted to Zoom to share their scholarship during webinars, Burt thought that he needed to create a new way to make his research more accessible to others outside of the academy. His solution was short, creative videos for the “people out there who will never read my articles, can’t access my articles because they won’t be able to go to conferences, those are the people that I want to reach,” he said.

Burt culled together ten years of his research, and with the assistance of UW-Madison, created a series of videos with a targeted audience in mind.  All of the videos combined, he said, tells a powerful story of where the nation is with regard to Black males, education and STEM.

“The statistics over the last five decades have basically been stagnant,” said Burt in an interview with Diverse. “Black males have always been historically hovering at around 1 to 2 percent,” in STEM fields. Burt said that much of the research on the issue has focused either at the K-12 level or higher education and pointed out that a new and holistic paradigm is needed to help move the needle. 

“I think what we need are strategies that bridge the entire pathway, otherwise we’re focused on small pockets and not seeing it as an entire picture,” he said. 

At the college level, Burt noted that there are many reasons for the underrepresentation of Black male faculty and students in STEM, including racial microaggressions, low expectations of STEM capabilities, pressure to represent their entire race in STEM environments, and a lack of belonging on campus.

At the K-12 level, Burt challenges teachers to pique the interest of Black boys in STEM fields by teaching culturally relevant pedagogies, providing students with examples of everyday STEM innovations and adopting an “asset-based mindset where students are viewed as capable learners of STEM.”

This topic is on the agenda to be explored at the upcoming International Colloquium on Black Males in Education, scheduled to take place next month in Pittsburgh. 

Supported and funded by the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and Wisconsin Center for Education Research, Burt said that BME project’s focus is to remind stakeholders “that it’s all of our responsibility to think of new and innovative ways to change, to broaden the participation of STEM.”

At the official launch of the BME project last week, Dr. LaVar J. Charleston, UW-Madison’s Vice Chancellor for Inclusive Excellence lauded Burt’s project as “an important step forward in fostering inclusive excellence within the field of engineering,” and added that Burt “has always displayed an unwavering commitment and passion to creating opportunities and paving the way for inclusion for all in STEM fields.”