Co-designing Science Lessons in Spanish: Connecting Science, Home Language, and Community for Undergraduates

Abstract

Nuestra Ciencia (NC) is a university-school partnership connecting faculty and undergraduates with elementary learners from bilingual schools. Interdisciplinary teams of undergraduates and faculty develop experiments and educational resources, and lead activities in Spanish. The program teaches elementary students everyday microbiology concepts, engages them in hands-on science, and connects them with Spanish-speaking scientific role models. This chapter describes the collaborative process of developing and teaching a virtual lesson in Spanish about vaccines’ mechanism of action. We analyze the impact of NC undergraduates’ views on research, scientific content in Spanish, and sense of belonging to STEM and higher education. We present how undergraduates came to view research as collaborative and relevant, as they reported bringing their “whole selves” into the design and teaching process, and saw the “real-world impact” of microbiology lessons that mattered to their communities. Additionally, designing and teaching in Spanish impacted their views on academic Spanish, as they connected science, home language, and community. Multiple goals of NC focus on Spanish-speaking children’s microbiology literacy and interest in science. However, the impact of our co-design process on undergraduates shows that, as we work on designing and implementing lessons, NC also has a positive impact on undergraduates and their families.

Our teaching team of undergraduates and professors sit nervously behind computers at home, texting each other to verify the Google Classroom link for our first time teaching elementary students online. Suddenly, a grid of 25 little squares with children’s faces fill the computer screen, smiling and talking on mute, as we join a 4th-grade online classroom in spring 2021. Two blond girls climb onto an outside picnic table while a handful of boys peer out above desks in various bedrooms, dining rooms, and a kitchen. Other children sit side-by-side on living room couches looking into the screen. Maestra J greets students cheerfully in Spanish and welcomes us as special university teachers visiting their classroom to lead a science activity. Students hold their pencils and worksheets up to their cameras as Maestra J states, “¡todos pueden enseñar los materiales, académicos preparados!” listing one by one the materials they need for today’s lesson.

The worksheets the students hold up were designed by the Nuestra Ciencia program team to introduce the everyday science topic of vaccines. The first one is a Nuestra Ciencia pre-activity questionnaire in their home language (either English or Spanish) that asked students to talk with their families about childhood vaccinations and answer how they thought vaccines worked. It also asked them if they thought of themselves as scientists. As the students hold their completed questionnaires up and look at the screen expectantly, our teaching team feels nervous but excited. We have been developing the vaccine lesson for a few months now, and today is the big day. It is also the very first time teaching for everyone in our team of four Cal Poly undergraduates and two faculty members (chapter co-authors). The Nuestra Ciencia logo that the undergraduate facilitator, Julio, designed fills up the screen. “Hola a todos, somos Nuestra Ciencia,” says Fernando, another undergraduate facilitator, and the first virtual lesson begins. After introductions, facilitator Jade brings up findings from the pre-questionnaire and the fact that many of these elementary students did not think of themselves as scientists. The students sit up a little straighter and lean in as she talks. She says, “El cuestionario que contestaron al principio de la semana, en el cuestionario dijeron que no se consideran científicos. Hoy es el día para cambiar eso. Hoy es el día para que todos sean científicos.” She emphasizes the last part, “Today is the day in which all of you are scientists.”

For 6 months, the team of undergraduates that includes Julio (Political Sciences), Fernando (Psychology and Child Development), Jade (Biomedical Engineering), and Marina (Biological Sciences) have been meeting virtually on Zoom and designing different parts of the vaccine lesson. They have prepared pre- and post-activity questionnaires, developed an analogy to explain the mechanism of action of vaccines, and created an educational video and storyboards with original cartoons, all in Spanish and English. In the days leading up to the lesson, our university team meets almost every day to prepare slides and a script and practice our lesson. During our “dress rehearsal” the night before, Jade changes her portion of the teacher script and says she wants to be more intentional with how she will address the elementary students.

As a first-generation college student with family from Mexico, Jade is passionate about teaching science in Spanish. She recalls watching Bill Nye on TV and loving science as a kid, but also internalizing the message that science is something done only by white men in lab coats. She says that Spanish should not be a second-class language and should not be a separate identity from being a scientist. She wants the students to think of themselves as scientists, so she changes the script to address them as “científicos.” Julio agrees and chimes in with his own childhood memories of a split identity between learning in English and speaking Spanish at home. “It was so hard trying to translate, I did not have the right vocabulary.” The conversation reminds all of us that we may have spent the last few weeks focusing all of our efforts on making sure we convey the safety and efficacy of vaccines in Spanish, but when we go to the classroom, we will be simultaneously teaching something else, equally as important. We will be teaching that scientific inquiry has no owners and no set language, we will be teaching that we can all be scientists.

At the end of the vaccine lesson, students hold up their storyboards, showing their interpretation of the villain vaccine and superhero immune cell. Our team feels on cloud nine seeing how excited the elementary students are to learn about vaccines and create stories in Spanish related to how the immune system works. Jade is impressed with the breadth and depth of questions they ask, similar to the Y-Plan group’s dual appreciation for lenses that allow us to both “focus” and “widen.” She also expresses gratitude to be giving back to her community. Reflecting on the experience teaching and overall Nuestra Ciencia program, she explains, “I feel like this project helped me redefine, like, what science is, or should be, and helped encourage a different culture within the science community too.”

Introduction

The scene described in the above vignette is from Nuestra Ciencia (NC) (Yep et al., 2021), a university-school program run by an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), a state university in central California in the United States. Jade, who reported that this program redefined the meaning and purpose of a science community, was one of four undergraduate facilitators who felt similarly. Developing a sense of belonging and encouraging asset-based science instruction is a goal of the NC program, and we show how this collaborative process unfolded and its relation to belonging and sense of self for undergraduate partners. Unfortunately, many campus groups and classes provide what undergrads described as “push out” experiences (Galloway & Valadez, 2018), instead of promoting a sense of belonging in higher education or research. During a 2019 internal study at Cal Poly, Latinx students reported one of the lowest perceptions of being valued/belonging at the university (CPX report, 2019). We would like to change the story for marginalized undergraduates, especially in STEM. A first step is examining what increases a sense of belonging and what are the benefits for marginalized undergraduates of participating in a form of research that is collaborative and co-designed.

In Nuestra Ciencia, we hope to impact both elementary and undergraduate students, in regard to understanding microbiology content and learning science in Spanish. At the elementary level, we teach microbiology concepts that impact daily life, provide exposure to science and scientific role models in Spanish, and follow a student cohort to assess how NC affects their view of science and of themselves as scientists. At the undergraduate level, we assess how participation in NC impacts their sense of belonging in STEM and higher education. Therefore, NC addresses simultaneously Latinx underrepresentation in STEM and lack of microbiology literacy in the general population, both of which have been identified as pressing issues (Kafai et al., 2022; NSF, 2017; Timmis et al., 2019) (Fig. 7.1). Latinxs account for >50% of students in California but occupy only 6% of STEM professions (Census Bureau, 2018; NSF, 2017). This underrepresentation is complex and, unfortunately, much of the research focuses on deficit models (i.e. Taningco et al., 2008). Findings from such research include language focused on “lacking English proficiency,” “underperformance,” and “deficits in necessary skills” but also places blame on “cultural issues” and “lack of parental involvement.” For example, a 2006 report for the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute makes the offensive claim that “Young Latinos tend to have poor study habits, critical thinking ability and communication skills. This may be due to factors such as inadequate high school preparation, family and cultural dynamics, shortcomings in institutional policies and practices, or any combination of these” (Taningco et al., 2008, p. 3).

Fig. 7.1

Summary of the parallel sets of challenges and negative consequences in the fields of Latinx retention in STEM and microbiology and the ways in which Nuestra Ciencia addresses them. Originally published as Fig. 7.1 of Nuestra Ciencia: Transforming Microbiology for Spanish-Speaking Elementary and College Students, by Yep et al., 2021, reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press: https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/61/3/1066/6288461

Our work instead acknowledges the resources and disciplinary expertise that is sometimes disparaged and often overlooked. We intend for asset-based Spanish language instruction in NC to influence the local context and generate more wide-scale design principles relevant to other bilingual programs. Research shows that conducting science in students’ home languages, so they feel comfortable expressing themselves and engaging in scientific practices, builds up disciplinary knowledge and positions Spanish in the United States as an asset to science learning and participation in the scientific world (Stevenson, 2015). Most Latinx people in the United States speak Spanish at home (73%) (Krogstad et al., 2015); however, they face bias against Spanish at school, where they view Spanish as less “academic,” and prefer to communicate in English. Communicating in Spanish is minoritized, and even in bilingual schools, the common model is transitional/subtractive. Spanish is viewed as a “crutch” along the path toward mastery in science, which is ultimately conducted in English (Palmer, 2011). Critical scholars call for new, equitable approaches to conducting research and teaching science that disrupt these paradigms and instead center the lives of students and partners with their communities. Nuestra Ciencia (NC) addresses this call.

From the microbiology standpoint, Nuestra Ciencia emerged in part to counteract the lack of public awareness around the impact microbes have on our lives and on the entire world. Even the most basic microbiology concepts such as infection and contamination prevention are absent from the entire schooling of most adults. However, as microbes are very much present in our daily lives, and everybody is aware of their effects, such as rotting food or infectious disease and especially COVID, there is a large trove of vernacular knowledge that is often conceptually incorrect (Briggs et al., 2017). Many of the daily decisions that can have severe impacts on individual and public health, such as the decision to vaccinate or not, breastfeed or not, which house cleaners to use, or what hygiene rules to follow, become clear when informed by basic microbiology concepts (Timmis et al., 2019; Yep et al., 2021). Concurrently, public lack of understanding of the ways microbes impact the world has vast negative consequences for the health of individuals, the public, and the environment. We only need to look at recent years to see the profound impact this lack of public information revolving microbes can have on individual and public health. It is this concern that drives our work within our surrounding community and serves as a substantive context for our chapter.

In this chapter, we describe the collaborative process where NC undergraduates co-developed and taught a virtual lesson in Spanish about vaccines’ mechanism of action and safety. We connect this process to the impact on undergraduate students’ views on scientific research, scientific content in Spanish, and sense of belonging to higher education.

Program Context

Nuestra Ciencia (NC) was born as a university–school partnership where Cal Poly undergraduate students visit K-6 classrooms to teach microbiology concepts in Spanish to bilingual elementary students. NC started informally as an outreach activity in 2015. Initially it was only faculty-led, and it started incorporating undergraduate students in 2017. We formalized it as a program and became part of the University-Community Links (UC Links) network (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/) in 2019, when we integrated our observations over the years and designed NC to simultaneously address microbiology misconceptions and elevate undergraduates as STEM role models for Latinx children (Fig. 7.1). Interdisciplinary teams of undergraduates and faculty developed experiments and educational resources, and visited classrooms to lead activities in Spanish. Our partner site was a Spanish–English two-way immersion K-6 school situated in a neighborhood less than a mile from the university. The school was open to all students living in the school district but was selective based on a lottery system. On the school’s website they advertised that, “[Our] School is a wonderful mix of language, culture, challenging standards, arts, and music.” With NC’s small pilot program, we visited one classroom once to twice a year, reaching approximately 25 youth each visit. At any given time, our collaborative team included four to eight undergraduates and two faculty. The undergraduates either received a stipend as a researcher or enrolled in an upper-division research seminar course in elementary education. The undergraduate seminar met every week for a few hours, where students worked collaboratively with the faculty program directors. The undergraduates participated in every aspect, including topic selection, experiment development and troubleshooting, lesson plan development, teaching, data collection and analysis, conference presentations, and publications in peer-reviewed journals. Student researchers in NC not only “learned by doing” but further “learned by being” as they became teachers and researchers. In the long term, it was our hope that NC would increase visibility of Latinx students at Cal Poly as well as recruitment, retention, and student success for the Latinx community. The interdisciplinary team also generated materials that benefited the profession of education such as our repository of K-6 bilingual activities, lesson plans, and other resources for educators, and tools to improve science communication and public scientific understanding.

Key Ideas

In the following section, we present key themes that emerged during the year-long experience of designing and implementing a lesson on vaccines in Spanish. We first describe how undergraduates co-designed and taught the lesson on vaccines in Spanish, to illustrate what we mean by “learn by being” and this collaborative form of research and teaching. Then we present how designing and teaching a lesson in Spanish altered students’ perspectives on Spanish, as Spanish became an asset for teaching content, expressing themselves, mentoring, and connecting with family.

Co-design Process

Nuestra Ciencia has been, since its inception, a true partnership in which all members’ contributions are essential. It is an elementary school/university partnership, an English/Spanish partnership, and it is fundamentally a student/faculty partnership. Our team is composed of two Cal Poly professors and an interdisciplinary group of undergraduates that changes each year as students graduate. While children have not been included in the design process, that is a goal we drive to in the future, to achieve the more intergenerational collaboration seen in other sites such as Community Based Literacies (Chap. 10) or Y-PLAN (Chaps. 14 and 15).

The vaccine lesson was designed and implemented during unprecedented times, in Winter 2021, by the four undergraduates mentioned above, and the two professors who co-authored this chapter. Not only was our society in the midst of a pandemic with immense health, social, and financial implications, plagued by scientific disinformation and misinformation, but also the elementary and the university systems were facing the challenges of virtual instruction. In this context, it was hard to imagine how to implement the kind of hands-on lab activities that Nuestra Ciencia had been developing.

The initial Zoom meeting of the NC research group was, like many at the time, slightly awkward. We started out thinking about new experiments and hoping that elementary schools would be back in person by the time our lesson was ready. We also talked about developing an online presence for Nuestra Ciencia that included the most commonly used platforms by kids, YouTube and TikTok. After a few weeks, since the pandemic was first and foremost on everybody’s mind, we had a meeting devoted to explaining the microbiology of SARS-CoV-2 and what we knew at the moment about COVID-19. The vaccines had been recently approved and the Cal Poly community was expecting to receive the first dose soon. The questions and answers turned toward the topic of vaccine safety and mechanism of action. Fernando, a psychology major without previous microbiology knowledge, was visibly worried. “Everybody in my community is scared of the vaccine. They are worried it will make them sick, and they don’t think they want to get it.” He told us some misinformation his family had heard: the vaccine contained a microchip, it could make you become magnetic, or it contained the virus itself and would give you COVID. The rest of the group chimed in with similar stories. Jade and Julio agreed that what they had learned about vaccines during the meeting was useful information to pass on to their families. Jade and Fernando asked, “Can we do a lesson on this for the kids?” The mechanism of action of vaccines was a topic that undergraduate students in microbiology classes often struggled with, and we wondered how to make the topic accessible for elementary school children. Our research group was keen on taking on the challenge. The undergraduates all expressed a strong feeling that this was an important topic that was affecting their communities and had to be addressed immediately.

The first challenge was explaining how vaccines work in a way that was scientifically accurate but avoided scientific jargon and did not rely on previous microbiology or immunology knowledge. Several weeks passed as we tried different approaches and analogies that were either too abstract for kids or not scientifically sound. Our initial attempts were mere simplifications of the mechanism of action of vaccines that lacked any analogies and were very dry, if scientifically accurate. We started trying analogies in an effort to make the message more relatable for a younger audience. Other early ideas were more engaging for kids, like trying to “make a vaccine” by mixing baking ingredients that would represent vaccine components, but lacked scientific basis and had the potential to confound the public health microbiology message.

Finally, the group came up with a good analogy: Vaccines are like a “most wanted” poster of a robber—they help recognize who the bad guy is so when he shows up in person, he can be detained before causing any damage. A “most wanted” poster of the robber cannot steal anything though, just like a vaccine cannot cause the disease it is designed to prevent. Through group discussions and personal childhood experiences, the undergraduate and professor team decided that the immune system (the “good” guy) would be best represented by a superhero-like figure. The virus (the “bad” guy) would be a robber, and the “most wanted” poster would represent the vaccine. Initial outlines of the analogy depicted a policeman as a representation of the immune system, but it was replaced by a superhero in the final version after Jade brought up the issue that police might not be recognized as “the good guy” in all communities.

The next challenge was explaining this analogy online in Google Classroom. “I like drawing,” said Julio, a political sciences major, “I could try drawing the superhero and the robber and make something like a comic strip.” When Julio showed the group his first sketches, everybody was impressed. His drawings (Fig. 7.2) were far more detailed and professional than the other undergraduates had expected, since Julio had downplayed his skills. Many rich conversations on our respective childhoods and what we thought kids would find most appealing followed.

Fig. 7.2

Images from vaccine video. (a) Robber (b) Virus (c) Superhero wondering how robber looks like (d) Most wanted poster (e) Vaccine working as a most-wanted poster of the virus (f) Immune system cells training to defeat the virus

Over several meetings, as we simultaneously progressed on our scientific explanation scripts and what each element of the analogy would represent, the idea of using the drawings for a video took form. A video fit with Fernando’s initial idea of using TikTok and other platforms, but it could also work well for a virtual lesson. Once we knew we were making a video, every member of the group was ready to put in as much work as necessary—the day we had set for the online lesson was getting closer. Individual skills started to shine and every member of the group was eager to contribute. Julio was pursuing a career in education policy, but he was also completing an art minor. Fernando’s elementary schooling in Mexico made him a skilled translator and a perfect voice for the Spanish version of the video. While Marina did not speak Spanish, she was an excellent video and sound editor. Jade was especially attentive to wording, tone, and representation as we wrote and modified the script, as she knew first-hand how reinforcement of certain stereotypes can push a kid out of STEM.

As we thought about the actual lesson, the team tried to accomplish all of our multiple goals from Fig. 7.1. Nuestra Ciencia activities always have a hands-on component, how would that look like in a virtual lesson? We decided to keep the comic book feel of the video and prepare a blank storyboard where kids could draw their own superheroes and villains and connect their roles with the virus/robber analogy (Fig. 7.3). To foster family engagement, we prepare pre-activity questionnaires (Fig. 7.4) that always include at least one question requiring family involvement. In this case, we decided that there would be a question about previous vaccines, as that would require asking an adult in the household, and it would also remind students and their families that they had already safely received multiple vaccines, since the state of California requires five different vaccines for enrollment in the public school system. We want to know how the kids’ attitudes toward science and scientists evolve during Nuestra Ciencia activities, so our post-questionnaire had to include some questions pertaining to that as well as questions directed at gauging the kids’ understanding of vaccines’ mechanism of action. All materials had to be available in the home language, which meant developing everything in Spanish and English simultaneously.

Fig. 7.3

Storyboard activity in Spanish where children were provided a storyboard recapitulating the main points of the analogy explained in the video. Children later drew their own villains and superheroes on empty storyboards

Fig. 7.4

Ahead of the lesson, pre-activity questionnaires were distributed in the main language of each household. These pre-activity questionnaires allow us to collect information on children’s views on science and scientists and also spark conversation with their families about the upcoming lesson

When we develop a new lesson at Nuestra Ciencia, the activity itself and the way the scientific concept is explained through the activity are always worked out as a team process, which can be slow and sometimes feel a bit disconcerting and devoid of direction for new members. Because Nuestra Ciencia team members come from many different backgrounds and microbiology is absent from most undergraduates’ education, it is extremely important that everyone understands and internalizes the scientific concept themselves before trying to explain it to young kids. It is not uncommon for the undergraduate researchers to express that they truly understood the concept only as we were working on the activity, but it also comes up as one of the most challenging parts of the project. Fernando, who was not a STEM major, explained: “As we were teaching to them, I was learning myself about this so that was challenging”. Even biology/microbiology majors like Marina find it hard to distill a complex concept into an engaging activity for elementary school kids without losing scientific accuracy.

You have to kind of dial it back and help them understand the material and in a way that helps you understand it better too. Which is good, but it is challenging because you don’t want to overcomplicate it or you don’t want to oversimplify it and lose the message of what you’re saying, so I think that was something that was challenging: to kind of gauge that right balance between the two.

Once the vaccine activity was outlined, and a script written, specific parts of the lesson were taken up by individual members so we could work on our own and bring completed tasks to group meetings. In this phase, the pace picked up quickly as the tasks were much more clearly defined. Members felt more confident and free to contribute their individual creative process to the project. For example, the script of the video and what action should be depicted for each part of the script were decided collectively, but Julio had complete creative freedom in his drawings, Marina edited the video to her personal satisfaction, each of the members made individual decisions on what to say and how to say it for their portion of the lesson.

As the lesson day approached, deadlines became more pressing. The hard-copy materials like the pre- and post-activity questionnaires, and the blank storyboards, had to be finalized early to allow for distribution to the kids, who would be at home, or at their families’ place of work, during online class. Nuestra Ciencia team members would be in our own home offices, or bedrooms, during the presentation. We had to smooth out any technological glitches stemming from each of us: teacher, kids, Cal Poly faculty, and undergraduate students being in our own separate physical spaces but sharing a virtual room together. Would we be able to keep the kids engaged? Would they understand the mechanism of action of vaccines as we were explaining it? Would they participate, would they have questions at the end? Even for the elementary classroom teacher and the Cal Poly faculty, this was entirely new territory that felt simultaneously daunting and exciting. In the last few days before the lesson, we rehearsed the whole lesson several times, adding and modifying small things every time. It was hard to match schedules, and on the last day, we had an 8:00–10:00 pm rehearsal. “I don’t think I would have ever accepted an 8:00 pm meeting if it hadn’t been for this project,” joked Fernando.

After leading the lesson, the team reflected on the six months working together. We had published a paper together, given a talk, and developed and piloted the vaccine mechanism lesson, which had left us with an easily shareable video that we could further use. Besides the dual goals shown in Fig. 7.1, Nuestra Ciencia also has the additional goals of promoting a sense of belonging both at the elementary and the college level. For the undergraduate students that participated in the development and implementation of the virtual vaccine lesson, a few aspects of their participation were highlighted as promoting a sense of belonging during our end-of-year focus group. We found that NC undergraduate students felt ownership and pride in what they had created, realized the importance of collaboration in research, and felt they could bring their whole self rather than only focus on a narrow view of what counts as science.

It is worth mentioning that Spanish played a role in belonging and bringing their whole self into the research group. Designing and teaching a lesson in Spanish influenced students’ perspectives on Spanish as an asset for teaching content, expressing themselves, connecting with family, and mentoring. When designing the program, we hoped that teaching science in Spanish would be transformative for elementary learners, but did not fully grasp the impact for undergraduate students. Analyzing the focus group interview revealed how Spanish was transformative for undergraduate learners, as they shifted from viewing Spanish as a home language used for “day to day things” to “a tool” that empowered them and their communities.

Discussion

In this chapter, we described the design and implementation of a Nuestra Ciencia lesson explaining the mechanism of action of vaccines, and how the interdisciplinary team tackled challenges. This lesson is both a good representative of the NC program in that it truthfully reflects our co-design process and the effect it had on university students, and also an unique outlier in that the creation and the implementation were conducted entirely in virtual spaces. The undergraduates’ reflections on their experience also revealed the affordances of teaching science in Spanish for undergraduates, and how it shaped their perspectives on research and themselves.

Undergraduate Shifts in Views on Research Based on Co-Design Process

Undergraduate students joining a research group often expect to simply execute the faculty member’s ideas. Cal Poly’s motto is “learn by doing” and undergraduate students are eager to “do.” In the context of research they tend to interpret “to do” as “to proficiently follow instructions and protocols.” At Nuestra Ciencia, we purposefully keep initial instructions general and open-ended. As we design together, we simultaneously acknowledge individual contributions while making sure they blend into a communal purpose. By the end of the process, it is often hard for individual members, including faculty, to pinpoint whose idea any given aspect of the project was originally. However, everybody’s contributions to the final product are recognized. This deemphasizing of who came up with a certain idea versus emphasizing whose contributions actually turned ideas into reality helps new members feel more comfortable since time and experience within a project are often needed in order to come up with new ideas. As NC members gain experience, they also become more vocal and confident, espousing new ideas that are added into our brainstorming document to be worked on as we progress. We rarely discard ideas entirely—instead, they are put into a back burner to be revisited later.

NC members participating in this co-design process come away with different views on research. Undergraduates often have a preconceived notion of research, or a very vague idea of what research can be. Fernando said, “Honestly, I had no idea what research was” and Fernando, Julio, and Marina all described a researcher’s main task as “reading articles.” Students came away viewing research as more diverse and “collaborative.”

Another aspect that influenced NC members was the tangible application of their work and its impact in the world outside academia. As Fernando puts it, “I never really had the chance to put together something in real life, you know because it’s not a class it’s like for the world, I guess, you could say it like that, so this is different than just what I’ve been used to. So I feel like it’s been one of the first real-world experiences because publishing the paper was definitely real and then just the presentation and the whole putting the video together it was like all new to me, and it was very professional, I think.”

Bringing Undergraduates’ Whole Selves into Research and Co-Design

Co-designing and teaching the vaccine lesson collaboratively influenced undergraduates’ views on research and real-world impact. Additionally, they saw new connections between Spanish, science, and their communities, which allowed them to bring more of their “whole self” into the process. For example, selecting a topic that was important for the communities of all NC members. At the beginning of this particular year, the faculty members of NC had some ideas of topics that could be turned into lessons. During the process, none of those topics was selected; instead, the topic of vaccine safety, which was directly impacting their friends and families, was chosen. In addition to choosing an impactful topic, students from Spanish-speaking families started to bring into the process aspects of themselves that did not typically bring into the college setting.

For most NC members, Spanish has not been the language of science instruction, and they need to practice certain scientific vocabulary ahead of lessons. During the preparation for the vaccine lesson, this afforded them an opportunity to talk to their own families about the correct vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and so on, and engaging them in their college education in ways that they are not typically able to. For example, Jade, who participated heavily in the design of pre- and post-activity surveys, often asked her mom for help translating or deciding what way of saying something was most common in Mexican Spanish. Through this lesson, Spanish language skills became an asset, and family members were utilized as a resource by our undergraduate members. NC members almost invariably report telling their families about the lessons they are developing, showing them the materials, and often bringing to the group suggestions and encouragement from family members.

We know, both from research (Kiyama et al., 2015; Witkowsky et al., 2020) and personally from student confidences, that language, educational, and societal barriers prevent many Latinx family members from fully participating in their student’s college experience. Many past and present Nuestra Ciencia members have commented on the yearning to talk to loved ones about the new concepts learned in college but struggling to do so in Spanish. Julio commented, “I want to talk to my parents about things like climate change or any science stuff, even the vaccine, it’s hard to translate it and to talk about it.” At Nuestra Ciencia, we have always been acutely aware of how learning science exclusively in English can stop the flux of knowledge and ideas between Latinx children and their family in the US. We have purposefully designed all NC lessons to foster family involvement of the elementary school kids and ease the language barriers by providing all materials in both English and Spanish. However, an added benefit was the connection between undergraduates and their family members when designing these materials. Many undergraduate students report family being proud of them for their role in Nuestra Ciencia, and feeling grateful they could help by translating or clarifying points. Students have also commented that being able to bring in their passions for teaching, research, community concerns, and science in Spanish and make a real-world impact was rewarding and a “pull-in” experience in comparison to the majority of spaces at Cal Poly.

The multiple goals of Nuestra Ciencia summarized in Fig. 7.1 revolve around increasing children’s microbiology literacy and especially focus on children growing-up in Spanish-speaking households. However, the observed impact of our co-design process on undergraduate students shows that, as we work on designing and implementing Nuestra Ciencia lessons, it also has positive effects on undergraduate students and their families.