The background for this talk is over thirty years of working with students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, Additionally, my discussions with numerous physics and other faculty members about the subject have in large measure shaped my thinking. Those who read my recent Physics Today article will recognize much of what I will have to say.
Departments should work to achieve a diverse student body because it is the right thing to do! It not only strengthens the department/program, but it helps to prepare all students for entry into the work force and society in which they will eventually work.
The institutional and departmental obligation to the student does not end with the admitting process. The following are characteristics of programs which have been successful in recruiting and retaining underrepresented students:
-There was an individual that took ownership of the program.
-The Department had personal contact with students, both before and after they were admitted. The best students were invited to visit the campus.
-Strong and successful attempts were made to build a close knit physics group. Having good students interacting with one another provides a positive influence.
-The departmental faculty was willing to share their experiences and excitement about physics with their students.
-Advisors gave honest advice. Faculty did not "water down" the material.
-Departments established a level playing field. Important information and material was made available to all students.
-An atmosphere existed in which the expectation of both faculty and students was that students could and would succeed.
-Students were treated as part of a family. They were made to feel as if they belonged.
-Financial aid was provided.
-Students were made aware of the opportunities that exist and of the requirements necessary to take advantage of those opportunities
-Transition opportunities to other fields are explicitly discussed
-Faculty and administrators help students shape their vision.
-Graduate school advisement is explicitly given.
-Ideas are borrowed and adapted liberally.
In most of the successful programs, a mentor, who may or may not have been in the department, played a valuable role in the student's progress. These mentors:
-Invest time and resources in the academic and professional development of the protégé
-Accept the protégé as a legitimate student who has potential for academic success
-Communicate with the protégé in an open and honest manner
-Give sound, constructive, and critical review of the protégé's work, free of judgmental bias
-Are advocates for the protégé as progress is made toward completion of the degree.
-Hold the protégé to high standards of academic output.
-Help sponsor and promote the protégé into the profession.
The conventional wisdom is that college students who major in science, mathematics and engineering are those who became interested early in life. Yet, we find that nearly as many students decided to major in SME after their sophomore year in college as stayed with the decision to major in SME made as high school sophomores . Maybe it is time for us to rethink the conventional wisdom and work to provide for a smooth transition between majors.
Often when we think of "mentoring", we have in mind the one-on-one relationships that are formed with thesis students with whom we have extended conversations and interactions for a summer, an academic year, or the multiplicity of years during the pursuit of a graduate-level degree.
Or we may think of mentoring as the service we provide to senior majors as we counsel them about careers. I would like to describe a complex mixture of mentoring activities, from early in the recruiting of new students through strategies in introductory and intermediate courses, to internships and research experiences and career counseling. What works? The answer is that many things work, and no one thing works for every student. To make anything work for a new student, the successful old programs and interventions often need to be repackaged, personalized, and invigorated with energy and compassion. And to make the task more interactive and more difficult, what works one year often does not work the next. Successful programs are often forgotten by students from one year to the next and they may not be as successful the next time because the local needs and context have changed. You must listen carefully, act thoughtfully, assume nothing, and bring a renewed personal and friendly touch over and over again.
It is well documented that a disproportionate share of students from under-represented groups earning bachelors degrees in physics (and the sciences more generally) come from colleges and universities whose student populations have substantial numbers of students from those groups. Additional facts include the following: predominantly undergraduate colleges and universities have a disproportionate number of physics majors; research and career internships help both to attract and retain students; informal and formal peer teaching nurture confidence; teamwork and human-scale faculty members can have an immense impact on the social rewards of doing physics; there is a synergistic effect of student peers. That these institutions carry out their tasks with a certain missionary zeal, cannot be denied. But I think that a close look at these successful programs offers insight that can benefit all students in many different kinds of institutions. The programs leading to this success can be accomplished on many other campuses and they turn out to be equally valuable for women, men and members of under-represented groups.
The New York Times in November 1995 and Physics Today in August 1996 touted the numerical strength of the physics major program at Bryn Mawr College, a private liberal arts college for women which graduates a total of about 300 students each year. Let me review some of that strength in numbers and diversity: approximately 40% of the undergraduate students take introductory physics in one of four different courses, approximately 30% of the graduates take their degrees in mathematics or science, and, over the last two decades, the number of physics majors has grown steadily, although fitfully. Currently (and for at least the next two years) five percent of the graduates take (will take) their degrees in physics, practically 100 times the national average for women as a percentage of the women in their graduating class. In 1995 Bryn Mawr's ten women physics majors were surpassed only by Harvard's 15 and Rutgers' 11. That some form of this success has been going on for quite some time is evident from other statistics: already twenty years ago, more than 5% of the women listed in the APS directory had received one of their physics degrees from Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr physics graduates are on the faculty of departments at Michigan, MIT, Connecticut, and Rice; they work at Goddard and JPL; and they include the Director of the Physics Program at NIST in Gaithersburg. In 1993, four of the twenty women elected Fellows of APS were Bryn Mawr graduates. In recent years about 1-2% of the 150 women earning Ph.D.s in physics each year earned A.B. degrees from Bryn Mawr and a similar number earned Ph.D.s in related fields: astronomy, astrophysics, materials science, chemical physics, physical chemistry, engineering, and medical physics among others. But these represent barely a third of our majors, and others are successfully pursuing medicine, law, high school and secondary teaching, and work in science museums, industries, and research labs. In 1997 we graduated 15 physics majors (five of them double majoring in other departments: mathematics (3), biology (1), philosophy (1)). We have an additional 15 senior physics majors enrolled for the fall of 1997.
What do I mean by whole life mentoring? The answer is that we must seek to intervene and provide counsel, comment and insight at each stage of a student's thinking about physics. We start our mentoring activities even before studens enroll. We discuss opportunities with staff at the Admissions Office, we provide posters about our programs in the corridors most frequented by prospective students and parents as the follow tours, and we provide scripts to the tour guides themselves. We prepare handouts for prospective students with descriptions of our programs and graduates and with answers to frequently asked questions. We emphasize flexibility, opportunity and lots of advice throughout the program. Once students enroll at Bryn Mawr, we work closely with each student who gives even a hint of wanting to take more physics. We give advice about placement, make special arrangements to accomodate those with unusual preparation in math or physics or both, entice some to take more physics earlier, entice some who were wavering to take some physics, and we continue to meet with students who have questions or who seem puzzled about the future. We work hard to give personalized encouragement to students who are doing well, and to specifically encourage them to take more physics.
We try to provide a richly diverse set of educational, learning and teaching experiences (both those in formal class and lab settings and those in informal consultations with faculty and fellow students. By what we grade and require, we try to affirm a variety of learning styles and a variety of different kinds off demonstrations of mastery. We also encourage and arrange internships and research experiences throughout the four years of the undergraduate experience), counsel students to consider a wide variety of careers, and, at each level, demand excellence and insist on involvement. We encourage all undecided students to consider taking our departmental placement exam which serves as a basis for assessment and counseling about starting points in the curriculum. We also make early contact with those qualifying for advanced placement by external AP exams or International Baccalaureate degrees, since some of those students are daunted by the maturity that is expected in sophomore courses. One early message in mentoring the whole life of a student is that you must stay in contact in order to provide advice and support.
We have tried various options for our introductory courses. They are most successful when they have a minimum of pre-requisites, when they have a combination of applications and an emphasis on conceptual understanding, and when students are encouraged to talk, write, discuss, and think about physics in more than chalkboard, engineering homework and textbook-based kind of ways. Demonstrations can often be distracting and inconclusive; we find that mixing demonstration apparatus with laboratory equipment gives students a sense of continuity and participation that improves their mastery. Our labs are relatively conventional, but we often try to see that they have a twist. Ours are rarely "prove the theory by experiment", or "fit the theory to the experiment", since some aspect of the idealized problem is tampered with to give anomalous experimental results. The student teams and the teaching assistants and instructors then search for explanations, reducing a larger class to only two or three investigators. We also try in lab to have different subgroups of students doing different things; This is hard on instructors but challenging for the students. We use demonstration apparatus in the laboratories for conceptual labs -- 'Take this material, figure out some interesting phenomena and questions and write us an essay about the issue and the evidence.' We also find it is important to build student confidence, especially in the introductory courses: some students may focus on the 10% wrong answers and not internalize the endorsement by a 90% correct score on an exam. Sometimes we give midterms back in person to take the chance to offer a few comments or words of encouragement. Sometimes we approach students in lab or in the corridors to assure them that they are doing well enough to major. In short, we find that the best way to expand the pool of majors beyond the "hard core", is to provide advice and encouragement.
We also share within the department the tasks of helping students to plan their curricular choices. Our major program is probably more enticing because there is lots of room for choice among the curricular offerings and because substitution of other advanced math and science classes is permitted. We frequently find ourselves helping individual students to rearrange their futures (curricular plans, at least), and I suggest that it is not enough to offer this service once a year, or even once a semester, because students benefit most from this kind of advice in those crisis moments of indecision or choice. We also encourage students to gain perspective on their "home" education by taking summer research internships off campus at other colleges or universities or in industrial or government labs. In undergraduate colleges this can be a sacrifice, since to prepare a student one often invests one summer in the intensive supervision of the apprenticeship and then hopes for the second summer as the more productive "payback" time. We find that students gain much more maturity and confidence from working with those who had not taught them more elementary subjects and from returning to campus with summarized accomplishments which their local mentors had not seen pass through the foibles stages. This choice is thus not one that every department or every faculty member may wish to emulate, particularly at smaller and predominantly undergraduate institutions, but we find the efforts we make to find placements for juniors, some seniors, many sophomores and a few freshmen has paid off in better, stronger, and more confident majors.
We also have a vigorous program of research opportunities during the academic year and summers for students. Here again the twists of mentoring can lead to additional success. We have a program sponsored by college funds to "apprentice" students as faculty members, so that they can see the whole life of a faculty member. In this program we are encouraged to help the students participate in the design and uncertain phases of a research project, in the assessment and ordering of equipment and apparatus from the instrument shops, and in regular reassessment of the goals and accomplishments. In some contexts it is argued that it is important to make a research project "successful" or "conclusive". Instead we have found that it is equally valuable for students to have some insight into the doubts, despair, and moments of indecision that are natural parts of our professional lives. We have a similar program for teaching apprentices and involve those students in preparing and assessing assignments, examinations and class presentations.
Another way to mentor is through providing advice in a variety of media: printed handbooks, posters, and Web sites are among the ways we try to make information available. Our brochures, poster boards and Web site range over such topics as careers, preparing for teaching, preparing for the GRE, where recent graduates are working, and how to plan for different flexible futures. We update them often and discuss them with students over pizza and soda in the evenings. We also frequently mix with students to discuss time and stress management, to review our curriculum, and to have meals with our colloquium speakers. Our evening (dinner time) speaker program held in the dining center has been the most successful way to draw students and has give them the opportunity of dinner with other physicists. We have found that our own contacts, alumnae, and speakers list from the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics (CSWP) give us a nearly inexhaustible supply of women with diverse careers, talents, topics and stories. One way to mentor your majors is to recruit others to share in the mentoring!
We rely less on the infrequent visits by outside women than on the daily support networks that develop among students within the department: programs and facilities range from a "majors' room" with computers and lockers, key access to kitchenette and computers and classrooms, desks in research labs for students doing research, mailboxes for messages, homework solutions in the conference rooms as well as in the more distant library, student-run evening physics clinic for answering of questions. With a little luck and lots of synergy, our majors have come to think of the physics department as the place where they can and will find each other for teamwork or companionship, for problem solving or relaxation. They mentor each other as much, indeed even more sometimes, than we mentor them.
In conclusion (for this shorter story) I suggest that mentoring has three primary tasks: giving honest advice, instilling confidence, and leaving room for growth. Among the best ways to do this are:
- share secrets of successful teaching and learning strategies
-validate student mastery and career choices
-ensure a personal and socially supportive atmosphere
-be aware of the fragility of success
Perceptions are reality: what you meant or thought you'd done are irrelevant if they contradict the stories students have in their own minds. Classic chilly climate features of low expectations, mindless assignments, or sexist (racist) attitudes or remarks can destroy careful plans and good intentions -- each of us must be forever on guard to encourage and support. One misstep may destroy the atmosphere for a generation (2-4 years) of students. Become accustomed in your conversation and examples to use pronouns and career choices that reflect your students' interests: "The scientist..., she"; "he engineer who describes her work,...'. Avoid describing parents and siblings as part of ìthe non-science community".
And finally, for good and effective mentoring, keep asking, keep trying, and keep listening. (A more complete and detailed version of thoughts about mentoring activities at Bryn Mawr is in preparation for posting on our Web site and perhaps for submission to the Forum for Education Newsletter.)
Important directions for physics departments thinking about including women and increasing diversity are as follows:
(1) increasing the number of women and minorities doing physics,
(2) cultivating gender equity awareness and practice, and
(3) becoming involved in the rethinking of science that is occurring in the humanities and social sciences -- through historical, philosophical, and cultural analyses of science with respect to gender and race/ethnicity.
While the focus here is mainly on women, many points apply to minorities as well. Key resource materials for each of these three directions are available on the Web through the University of Rochester, Department of Physics and Astronomy site, Program for Women in Science and Engineering at this URL: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/yigal/wise-intro.html .
1. Increasing the number of women and minorities doing physics.
Although this is usually considered the final goal, it is also a direction departments can take: finding ways to increase the presence and participation of women and minorities in the department. The main strategy has been to establish intervention programs specifically targeting underrepresented groups, for instance, girls and young women. We can also include here efforts by departments to admit women and minorities as graduate students and hire them as post-docs and faculty, as well as outreach activities (e.g., having faculty visit schools).
The concepts operating in such programs and efforts are as follows:
(1) exposure (e.g., of young women) to the world of physics (ex: pre-college programs for girls, or research experience for first-year college women), and of department members to higher numbers of women; and
(2) personal contact between young women and persons working in the physics world (contact in the form of regular program-based meetings, mentoring, including peer mentoring).
Among issues that departments must consider is the need for dedicated personnel -- at least 0.5 FTE (full-time equivalent), but preferably at least 1.0 FTE -- to write the grant proposals, manage the program(s) from beginning to end, and ensure that the experience is positive for all parties. This work takes time, ongoing effort, and support from chairs and other department members. While it is not necessary for many persons affiliated with a department to actually run the programs, active support -- and protection from institutional down-sizing -- is essential for persons who run programs or otherwise engage in professional activities aimed at achieving diversity.
It is perhaps important to state that, however effective programs for girls and women are (and they are effective), they are probably not the wave of the future, given the erosion of affirmative action policies at the federal and state levels. Thus, there is a need for other directions and strategies if we wish to make progress toward a more diverse physics community. At the same time, the principles of exposure and personal contact continue to apply to all types of efforts that serve those entering the world of science.
2. Cultivating gender equity awareness and practice in departments.
In this case, the main strategy has been workshops targeting faculty and/or teaching assistants to raise awareness of issues affecting the participation of women and minorities. Some departments have invited external reviewers to assess the "climate" for women; another method is departmental self-assessment, involving a thoughtful review of pertinent data and information at, for instance, a departmental meeting or retreat.
The operating concept here is creating time and space for faculty to think, individually and collectively, about the structures, policies, and practices that organize life in the department -- in terms of inclusiveness and fairness. The goal is individual and departmental self-change, through awareness of the issues which women and minorities face as they enter the world of physics.
Departments must consider several issues in the implementation of workshops: the need for effective facilitation (possibly an external, skilled facilitator); the amount of time faculty will commit to an "extra" activity like this; voluntary vs. mandatory participation; the sensitivity of the issues, and the potential to generate resentment rather than constructive awareness.
Perhaps the overriding issue is that workshops fall outside those activities which faculty consider part of their job as academics -- workshops and the issues they deal with are "extra" and therefore marginal, less legitimate, less important. To get around this obstacle, one needs to design activities to fit within existing, familiar, and accepted academic and departmental structures, such as seminars and colloquia, graduate student orientation, instructor training (if this exists in the department), mentoring programs, and department meetings.
3. Becoming involved in the rethinking of science that is occurring in the humanities and social sciences -- through historical, philosophical, and cultural analyses of science with respect to gender and race/ethnicity.
This might be considered an intellectual approach to increasing the number of women and minorities or cultivating gender equity awareness. Rather than pushing the issues of women's and minorities' participation to the margins of institutional life, this approach addresses those issues within the curriculum, the heart of what goes on in colleges and universities.
The main strategy is to create interdisciplinary courses, working in collaboration with departments of women's studies, African-American studies, history, cultural studies, religious studies, and philosophy. Such collaborations might also yield interdisciplinary seminars, seminar series, or conferences, or invited speakers at regular departmental colloquia.
The concept behind such courses (and related efforts) is to gain a deeper understanding, not only of who participates in science (and who doesn't) and why, but also of science itself. Out of such understanding can eventually emerge the kind of cultural change needed in the world of physics to make the inclusion of women and minorities "normal." Without a deeper understanding of the issues, however, physics departments may continue -- in a sense unconsciously -- to resist the entry of women and minorities, and lasting change may be impossible.
It is also important to see activities in this area as part of physics -- or at least adjacent to physics, much the way one might combine business, teaching, policy, or other disciplines with science, either as an area of interdisciplinary study or as a career path. For students, such courses open up new vistas in their thinking and create new study and career options, drawing some toward "traditional" science and some away from traditional science toward the humanities. If and when physics faculty get involved, the insight they gain is likely to feed back into the design of intervention programs and reflection on gender equitable practices in their department, including the content and pedagogy of physics courses.
What this is not: Social studies of science are not about, for example, Great Women of Science, the triumph of science over superstition, or other familiar themes. What this is (or can be): Such studies generate questions that shift our perspective on the issues of women and minorities in science.
Historical studies raise questions like: What were the social conditions and beliefs that excluded most women from science, as science became a profession? What were scientific (or pre-scientific) activities in which women did engage, albeit without recognition as scientists? And, what did the new profession of science (in the 17th and 18th century) have to say about sex and gender difference?
One finds, for example in the work of Londa Schiebinger, that class, country, and connections (to scientific men) were important determinants in whether or not a woman took part in scientific activity. One finds that as science moved away from the courts, the salons, and the guilds, and as it moved into the universities and academies, women were increasingly excluded. One finds that women (and a few men) did protest and argue for women's access to learning -- they did not take their exclusion as a given. And one finds that the profession of science, and the actual knowledge produced by science, colluded in the exclusion of women, using the new methods of observation, measurement, and experiment to justify women's unequal status. While the history of the relationship of people of color to Western science is not identical to that of European and American women, a similar theme is found of using of science to explain and justify their subjugation, "Other"-ness, and exclusion.
Culturally oriented studies look at such questions as: What are distinguishing features of the professional culture of science? Where does this culture come from? How might it contribute to the absence of women in science? David Noble has made an extended argument that Western science is rooted in Christian clerical culture and is essentially the outcome of a thousand years of efforts to create a "world without women." Evelynn Fox Keller has addressed the questions: Is science "masculine"? Why does it seem so? What does this mean? Her work speaks to the effects of removing women from science, of polarizing ideas into "masculine" and "feminine" categories, and of overvaluing so-called masculine qualities of knowledge, at the expense of so-called feminine qualities.
Recognizing that science failed to be "objective" in relation to gender, philosophical studies have asked: Is science objective at all? What is objectivity? What determines the degree of objectivity in science? Helen Longino, for example, has argued that objectivity is a social process, not an individual one. Objectivity depends upon the capacity of a community to hear and respond to criticism from all qualified participants; and science benefits by cultivating diversity -- of backgrounds and ways of thinking -- among its participants. Donna Haraway points out that any observation, whether by human or technological "eyes", is necessarily embodied and situated (in space, time, and culture); science cannot give us a total or an exact representation of nature, only a collection of embodied, situated interpretations of nature -- each of which may have particular uses. Sandra Harding, among others, has asked: What have been, and what could be, the uses of science -- political, economical, or otherwise? What, and who, is science good for? Scholarship in this area has moved beyond critique to formulating the basis for an inclusive, diverse science.
In conclusion, adding women to physics clearly is momentous -- particularly if one contemplates that it may be a reversal of a thousand-year project to realize a "world without women." It is important to recognize that including women in science comes with the "shoe horn" of the women's movement and feminism. "Feminism" here refers not only to promoting the status of women; it also means bringing to the foreground parts of human history, culture, and knowledge that have traditionally been in the background -- ignored, devalued, or suppressed. Cultivating gender equity and educating ourselves in women's studies and other social/cultural studies of science are feminist practices.
Such studies, such practices enable us to go from talking only about more women becoming physicists to also talking about physics becoming more feminist. Physics departments need to go in both of these directions. Both will generate vitality in undergraduate science education and sustain physics into the future. And both are necessary if we are to bring about positive change in the culture of physics and realize a truly diverse physics community.
Stewart Smith described the implementation in Physics of Princetonís universal requirement that each student write a junior indpendent paper and a senior research paper. Faculty members take this responsibility very seriously, and students cite the importance of this experience in their undergraduate education. Evidence was presented that the requirement can work effectively with students of quite different ability levels and interests. Some of the projects typically lead to publication.