On March 13, 2023, IUPUI ScholarWorks made available item number 30,000. IUPUI ScholarWorks was launched in late 2003 by the IUPUI libraries as a tool to support the open access sharing of works authored by campus scholars. It grew slowly at first, but with a little bit of elbow grease and a whole lot of collaboration with faculty and organizations, it is now one of the largest institutional repositories in Indiana. Today it includes theses and dissertations, capstone projects, works previously published in peer-reviewed journals, and a variety of educational resources.
Item number 30,000 is a handout that supports a presentation about one of IUPUI’s strengths, service learning. To mark this milestone, we reached out to one of the authors of the handout, Dr. Jeremy Price, from the School of Education, to learn more about the initiative it supports and how he uses IUPUI ScholarWorks.
The handout, “Bridging Frameworks for Transformative Service Learning,” is one of a few items that you have uploaded to IUPUI ScholarWorks related to the Collaborative for Equitable and Inclusive STEM Learning (CEISL). What is CEISL and what does it hope to achieve?
CEISL is a collaboration of faculty, staff, and students that is working directly with communities and schools in Indianapolis on educational challenges related to STEM learning and teaching. As the director, I have crafted a community-engaged approach, looking for ways to support families and communities, particularly historically oppressed and marginalized families and communities, in having a voice and strong role in the education of their children. All of the STEM education approaches we facilitate are rooted in the cultures, languages, and traditions of the people we work with to ensure that a full picture of the histories and futures of STEM is told.
Right now, we are primarily supported by a COVID-related Federal CARES Act grant through Indiana HB 1008 Student Learning Recovery Plan to support the Near Eastside of Indianapolis neighborhoods and specifically Indianapolis Public School 54 Brookside Elementary. We facilitate a Neighborhood Caucus, engage all Brookside teachers in monthly professional development, offer regular workshops for parents and families, lead an after-school STEM Studio, and run an in-school Math Studio to support culturally responsive and trauma-informed teaching in mathematical knowledge and practices. It’s a real team effort—and the grant supports 8 full-time staff members to really help make it all happen.
We bring School of Education service learning students into Brookside Elementary, and into the Math Studio specifically. Through a mini-grant from the National Association of Family, School, and Community Engagement (my colleague, Dr. Cristina Santamaría Graff, is the PI on that grant), service learning students who are enrolled in one of our courses have experiences not only in the classroom but also directly with family members so they have a better understanding of what it looks like to work in partnership with families as teachers. We were asked by Matt Hume in the School of Liberal Arts to provide a workshop for 25 English as a Foreign Language teachers from all over the world through their intercultural project focused on "Using Service Learning to Teach 21st Century Skills to English Language Learners" grant. That is where the handout is from.
You have used a wide range of methods to do your scholarship in the open—from launching your own websites, maintaining code repositories, and participating in social media. A lot of scholars would find that overwhelming. How have these approaches benefited your work?
It is overwhelming! But also greatly beneficial. I believe that scholarship—and the research behind it—is best when it is accessible, dialogical, and translatable (although in my field of education, we tend to use useable or transformative). Because so much of my research follows community voices, I believe that it is really important to keep my work in view of those same communities. I gain extremely valuable feedback and I can hone in on deeper understandings—and higher quality and more insightful scholarship—when the research and analysis is being done out in the open to allow for the kind of community dialogue that continues to contribute to the work.
You are one of the most prolific contributors to IUPUI ScholarWorks in the School of Education. From following your work over the years, I’ve learned that you also have a range of scholarly interest that include, for example, educational technology, diversity in STEM, and Christian nationalism. How do you do it all? What keeps you moving?
Coffee.
I’m also driven by the people and communities I work with, and I am supported personally by Jewish sensibilities that are centered in repairing the world through work to promote justice, pluralism, honor, and the dignity of all people and peoples.
To use the concept brought to modern life by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and reframed by Stephen Jay Gould, I am much more of a fox than a hedgehog, preferring many ways of doing things rather than just one. Weaving all these seemingly disparate threads together—and they are actually very much intertwined—provides the right kind of challenge for me and my temperament, and I find it energizing.
Why do you share your work on IUPUI ScholarWorks?
Although I certainly share final products on IUPUI ScholarWorks, much of what I share are considered “intermediate products” or intermediate scholarship. These are typically concept papers and descriptions of frameworks and approaches based on theoretical underpinnings, the benefits of empirical experiences, and the voices of participants. Or they are public-facing representations of analyzed data that are useful for thinking through practice and policy. ScholarWorks is a great way to push out these works—and I have been very pleased with the way that they have been easily found and taken up.
What’s next for you? Anything that you’re excited about that you can share with us?
I am very excited about what comes next. We’re looking forward to continuing our work with the Near Eastside neighborhoods, families, and schools to deepen the relationship and promote culturally relevant STEM learning and teaching. We’re looking to develop toolkits, cases, and models based on our work and research. We are also collaborating with two artists, the science fiction author and Afrofuturist Maurice Broaddus and XVIII Art Collective member Ess McKee, on developing a video game that is focused on helping develop strategies for and is centered in culturally responsive pedagogy. Lots of intermediate and completed work and scholarship to share on IUPUI ScholarWorks!
This work is licensed by IUPUI University Library, Jere Odell, and Jeremy Price under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.