Tonight Amada and I watched the ASMCUE 2022 microbrew “Toward ‘Inclusifying’ the Underrepresented ‘Minority’ in STEM Education Research. The presenter was Haider Ali Bhatti, a Ph.D. Candidate at UC Berkeley. They started with a quote from former US census director Kenneth Prewitt describing the “demographically complex” nation. Bhatti then focused on the term Under Represented Minority (URM) and the problems associated with it. The first point Bhatti noted was that the term is associated with some problematic ideas. Bhatti cited work by Johnson 2021 to mention that we have to inclusify URM: “to continuously make more inclusive.” They warned of the dangers of assuming an aggregate understanding of culture with race and ethnicity. Bhatti said that to inclusify URM we have to start by redefining the term and being very clear when we use it. They also recommended data disaggregation and using multiple demographic data points. Bhatti posted on LinkedIn a reflection about the use of the term URM and received an inspiring and thought-provoking reply by a refugee. In the last portion of the talk, participants shared in the chat action steps they could take to make demographic data collection practices more inclusive, including adding the option to self describe and for “Asian” to add an option to describe. Bhatti ended with a quote from the US Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr about broadening our scope when it comes to demographic data collection. Bhatti shared their JMBE publication. During the question and discussion session, one concern was that with many categories we may lose statistical power. Bhatti noted that it is a balancing act and that qualitative data could help. The last question in the chat was from a participant sharing the fear of missing someone’s perspective by not including the appropriate categories or descriptors. Bhatti emphasized being reflective and as inclusive as possible. Justine L. shared in the chat a nice quote to that point. This was a great talk by Ali and made me think about our current data collection practices.
