Watch our ASPIRES3 Report Launch and Installation Exhibition Video

We are excited to present the ASPIRES3 Report Launch and Installation Exhibition video! Click the link below to download a HD version of the video.

https://we.tl/t-Sxw6QRwpmo

Check out the video here:

For more information on the ASPIRES project and to access the full reports, click the link on the sidebar, or use: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/departments/education-practice-and-society/aspires-research

Blog: The ‘Lost Scientists’ Research Exhibition

In November 2023, the ASPIRES team launched the ‘ASPIRES3 Main report: Young people’s STEM trajectories, Age 10-22’ at The Royal Society in London. The report summarises the findings from the third phase of the ASPIRES research project, a fourteen-year, mixed methods investigation of the factors shaping young people’s trajectories into, through and out of STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Alongside the report launch the ASPIRES research team hosted a research exhibition representing ‘Lost Scientists’; young people with an interest and passion for STEM that have been unsupported and excluded by the education system and STEM fields. Their stories challenge dominant narratives which explain their absence from STEM as due to a lack of aspiration.

The ‘Lost Scientists’ exhibition was first developed by ASPIRES Director Prof Louise Archer, assisted by artist Maxi Himpe. It was informed by over 750 longitudinal interviews conducted by the ASPIRES project with young people from ages 10 to 21. The exhibition was inspired by the Wolfson Rooms at the Royal Society, where the exhibition was first held. The room resembles many other professional societies, typified by white marble busts and paintings of great scientists, mathematicians and engineers – who are overwhelmingly from white, male, privileged social backgrounds. Listen to an introduction to the exhibition here, read by Princess Emeanuwa.

At the centre of the exhibition was a life-cast bust, sculpted by Masters & Munn, representing one participant in the ASPIRES study: “Vanessa” (a pseudonym), a young, working-class Black woman (modelled by Happiness Emeanuwa). When we first interviewed Vanessa aged ten, she expressed a passion for science. However, as her interviews reveal, over time she came to find that her ‘love for it wasn’t enough.’ Listen to the words of Vanessa here, read by Happiness Emeanuwa.

A bust of ‘Vanessa’, representing a participant of the ASPIRES project. scientists Photo credit: Yolanda Hadjidemetriou.

Vanessa represents all the potential scientists lost to social exclusion. Accompanying Vanessa are empty frames, designed to evoke other lost scientists. The ‘thesis’ placed next to Vanessa echoes the other dissertations in the Wolfson rooms and others, to remind us of the contributions that she and others like her might have made. In this way, the exhibition challenges us to re-think assumptions about the underrepresentation of women, racially minoritized and working-class young people in STEM. It invites the excluded to claim their rightful presence in elite scientific spaces.

Vanessa’s bust and an empty frame displayed amongst those of white scientists Photo credit: Yolanda Hadjidemetriou.

The ‘Lost Scientists’ exhibition will be on public display from January to March 2024 when it is being hosted by the Geological Society. If you are interested in hosting the exhibition in the future, or have any questions about this work, please contact our research team on ioe.stemparticipationsocialjustice@ucl.ac.uk.

Guest blog by Gabriela Heck

A Brazilian PhD student, Gabriela Heck, visited the ASPIRES team at UCL during her 6-month research exchange to the UK. In this blog she shares how the ASPIRES research helped inspired her own PhD project on inclusion in STEM for people with disabilities.

I first came across the ASPIRES project in 2021 and the findings helped inspire my own PhD research in Education, in Brazil. The ASPIRES findings show how various factors shape young people’s science identities and aspirations and, in particular, how these are heavily influenced by social inequalities (such as social class, gender and ethnicity) which in turn influence whether a young person has opportunities to experience, do well in, feel connected with, be recognised in, and continue with STEM. However, when we look closer at these inequalities in STEM, there is another underrepresented group, whose exclusion, I believe, needs to be considered more in depth: people with disabilities.

The exclusion of people with disabilities from STEM is an issue that I feel passionately about. I became aware of the exclusion of the Brazilian Deaf community from science while studying towards my Biology undergraduate (2018). There was a lack of materials and resources adapted to sign language, which can deter this community from feeling included and stop them from engaging with science.

In my PhD, I hypothesise that a lack of representation and accessibility in science leads people with disabilities to feel that this field is not for them and creates unequal patterns in scientific literacy, scientific aspiration and science capital.

To challenge these inequalities and promote the inclusion of people with disabilities in the STEM field, together with supporting young people’s science aspirations and science capital, my PhD proposes to look at how science museums can (better) support the science-related inclusion and aspirations of people with disabilities.

My research aims to identify both different accessibility features in science museums that can help people with disabilities to engage with science and also the forms of exclusion that are present in exhibitions and museum spaces. I will interview visitors with disabilities and understand their perspectives and experiences regarding science museum accessibility and their perceptions of how welcoming they feel that science museums are for visitors with disabilities. I also hope to explore how science museums can contribute to individuals’ science capital.

Between August 2022 and January 2023, I undertook a small-scale research project at Newcastle University and in October 2022 I was pleased to visit UCL to talk with the STEM Participation & Social Justice group about my PhD project and other activities that I have developed in Brazil, related to Science Capital.

Professor Louise Archer (ASPIRES Project Director) with Gabriela Heck.

Since 2021, I have been translating and summarising materials produced by the research group into Portuguese, and have made them available on social media, with subtitles and with translation to Libras (Brazilian Sign Language). I worked with the STEM Participation & Social Justice group (which the ASPIRSES project is a part of) to translate the YESTEM Equity Compass into Portuguese, and helped translate the Primary Science Capital Teaching Approach too.

I believe that Science Capital is a useful concept for understanding inequalities in science participation and the factors that lead to the (dis)continuation of young people in scientific fields after compulsory education. When focusing on people with disabilities, it can help us to understand the causes of their exclusion and foreground the lack of accessibility and representation as well as helping us to consider measures to support their inclusion and wellbeing in STEM. Breaking down barriers so that more people can be inspired by and engage with science not only expands the number of people who can work in STEM jobs, diversity also benefits and enriches STEM, enhances innovation and can help create a fairer and more inclusive society.

Further Reading

• ASPIRES 2 report (2020)
• ASPIRES report (2013)

You can find Gabriela’s Portuguese summary resources on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

A re-post from the IOE blog (available here) written by Tatiana Souteiro Dias and Emily MacLeod.

Collaboration with individuals and organisations beyond academia for the benefit of society is an increasingly important part of research teams’ activities. But how can academics achieve this when there are so many competing priorities? For Professor Louise Archer, Principal Investigator of the ASPIRES/ASPIRES 2 project – who received the 2019 ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize Panel’s Choice Award this week – investing time and effort in building long-term relationships based on trust and respect is one of the answers.

The multiple award winning team of ASPIRES, a longitudinal research project studying young people’s science and career ambitions from age 10 to 19, shared their successful impact strategies as part of the first IOE Impact Meet-up, a new series of workshops bringing together experts, doctoral students and early career researchers from the IOE to discuss how to make authentic impact a key consideration in research projects from their inception.

Professor Archer also advocates the idea of ‘co-serving’ as part of a successful impact strategy; she explained that she is always working with and learning from stakeholders through a wide range of formats, including advisory groups, sitting on committees, being a Trustee and close partnership work, such as co-designing teaching approaches with teachers.

Professor Archer and project officer Emily Macleod described the way their project has influenced science education policy and informed change in organisations as varied as the Science Museum Group, the Greater London Authority and Education Scotland – and how this was achieved.

Here are five takeaways from the talk:

1- Research impact is for the long run – It may take years for researchers, policymakers and members of organisations outside academia to gain the mutual trust and understanding required for the research impact to fully develop. Therefore, remember to consistently record the dissemination of your work and its impact from the beginning of the project, as you never know where it will lead, advises the team. Research projects may end, but the impact will continue.

To this effect, Emily Macleod recommends a simple spreadsheet to record what impact has occurred, who the impact has influenced, and how it was achieved, as well as the following categories:

• Date of impact
• Source/Output of impact
• Author/Actor of impact, and the type of author (e.g. teacher, charity, government department)
• Whether the impact is UK-based or International
• Audience Reached by the impact
• Key finding(s) from the research which influenced the impact
• Evidence of the impact

2- Learn how to work in new registers and speak the stakeholders’ language.Organisations may have a different culture and work in very different ways than researchers are used to. Although it is not always easy to achieve, Professor Louise Archer highlighted the importance of always considering and working to understand others’ points of view as well as their needs and interests when working collaboratively.

3- Institutional memory can be easily lost. Key employees, internal communications officers and, to a lesser extent, civil servants the team built relationships with moved on – and with them went the prior knowledge of the project. Continuous engagement then is required. Often, the team needed to start again from scratch. Policy changes due to emerging government priorities might also become a barrier to achieving impact, and a degree of flexibility and serendipity comes into play.

4- Be open and responsive. Having a communications officer as part of the research project team proved to be a valuable addition, as the researchers were alerted about useful developments within the world of policy that they might otherwise have missed. For instance, the communications officer who worked on the ASPIRES 2 project in 2018 found out about a newly created All Party Parliamentary Group on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM – the British Science Association APPG. This led to an opportunity for Archer to make a strong case for reviewing the effectiveness and desirability of the current GCSE Triple Science system (for more information see Aspires Triple Science Policy Briefing).

5- Partner with professional services staff. Large national research projects such as ASPIRES often have the budget and ability to incorporate a project officer to help plan and record their public engagement and impact activities in a timely, consistent and organised manner. As such, the expertise of professional services staff is highly valuable and saves academics crucial time. The researchers also benefited from a regular newsletter summarising key policy developments for an academic audience issued by the Public Affairs and Policy team.

We are delighted to announce that the ASPIRES2 project has won the Panel’s Choice award at the 2019 ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize, and was finalist in the award’s Outstanding Societal Impact category.

Watch a video about our project impact here:

More information about the ESRC’s Celebrating Impact Prize 2019 here.