This interview was conducted remotely on October 27, 2023.
The climate crisis is obviously of global significance and requires international concerted efforts. That is why the ability to engage all people in the pursuit of ecological, engineering and scientific problem-solving and discovery is so important.
However, inequities have been baked into our modern scientific field, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass discusses blindspots embedded in the field of Western science and explains how alternative methods of knowledge production are steamrolled. As of 2020, 98% of academic papers are published in English. This quote from an article out of The Conversation sums up the clear importance of language accessibility. “Scientific work conducted by non-native English speakers has been, and will be, imperative to solving global challenges such as the biodiversity crisis. If indeed, ‘much research remains unpublished due to language barriers,’… we could be missing out on substantial scientific contributions from a number of intelligent minds.”
But, of course, not all hope is lost. Enter the brilliant Greses Pérez—McDonnell Family Assistant Professor in Engineering Education in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Tufts University with secondary appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Education. She received her Ph.D. in Learning Sciences and Technology Design with a focus on Engineering Education from Stanford University. And as an Afro-Latina engineer and learning scientist, she has dedicated her career to investigating the experiences of Latina/o/x and Black students in engineering.
She, and her partner Tim, are also my former Graduate Resident Assistants. In my first and second years at Stanford, they lived two floors below me in Adams House, and I have many cherished memories of evenings spent in their living room.
I was so honored to speak with Greses about her team’s amazing work at Tufts to bridge engineering with community-based cultural practices. I am particularly fascinated by her co-authored paper, “Exploring Conceptions of Creativity and Latinidad in Environmental Education Through the Lens of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy,” and I think it provides some useful context for our discussion, so I’ll leave a few excerpts below:
“Policies and programs in environmental education have traditionally reflected White and middle/upper-class narratives while the voices of underrepresented groups have been comparatively silenced (Bonta et al., 2015)…
“Scholars and practitioners alike have justly critiqued the field for subsequently marginalizing the needs and participation of diverse communities for the sake of ‘mainstream’ (White, middle-class) environmental concerns (Gould et al., 2018; Stapleton, 2020). Today, environmental educators work to democratize their programs by expanding access and focusing on justice, equity, and diversity. Many of these democratizing efforts have involved Latinx communities, who constitute the largest ethnic minority group in the United States at 18.6% of the total population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020).”
“We suspect that environmental education programs of, by, or for Latinx communities that explicitly cite culturally sustaining pedagogy (or the distinct but related terms culturally relevant or culturally responsive) are likely to generate creative experiences.”
“Our vision is that environmental education should not only provide creative educational experiences to youth but also recognize the creative potential inherent in the heterogeneity and richness of Latinx communities. We argue that by doing so, creativity is conceived as already existing within students and communities rather than needing to be bestowed by educators.”
What is your lab working on these days?
I currently have three National Science Foundation (NSF) projects—two of which I’m the co-PI, co-principal investigator, and one that I’m the principal investigator.
One of the projects is around cycling, in black and brown communities in Buffalo, New York. And we’re exploring the idea of using cycling not only as a medium of transportation, but also as a way to learn about the science and engineering in people’s communities, and learn about science and engineering concepts through building a bicycle. So that is a three year project with a bunch of other people, most of which are in the University of Buffalo. So that project is pretty cool.
The second project is for middle school students to learn about climate technologies, the engineering design of climate technologies that are designed to address climate change. But then we are taking a critical lens at that and looking at the challenges, perils and opportunities of climate technologies, and how it may affect or benefit communities that are typically marginalized in these efforts. So we’re working with the Somerville School District, which is a city that is bordering Cambridge, so it’s very known and very urban. And we are going to be implementing these lessons in all middle schools. We’re working with a startup that develops climate technologies around cooling. We’re working with community-based organizations (like Mothers Out Front), with a school district and then with a bunch of other people who are actually experts on climate change.
So that one is going to be pretty, pretty cool. And the aspect of it that is of most of my interest is that students at the end are going to be doing some science communication. So we’re working with an organization that is a science communication network that facilitates training for scientists to share their findings with broader audiences. And they have never worked with children, but they’re working with us for this. And we are going to be facilitating opportunities for the kids to share about the good and the not-so-good of climate technologies to multilingual and multicultural communities in the way that makes most sense to people in those contexts.
In the end, all [my projects] boil down to me wanting to bridge engineering and science with the language and culture of communities.
Greses Pérez
The third one is around Black Latinx communities. So looking at Afro-Latino communities in the United States, what are the language and cultural practices and experiences that they have that are not necessarily seen as engineering [but could be]. I want to build that connection with engineering with the [intention] of incorporating some of those examples into introductory undergraduate engineering courses.
So the way I will do that is I’m going to be gathering information from experts. I identify as Afro Latinx, but I cannot represent everybody, and I don’t know everything. So I will actually look for people who dedicate their life to study these things, and try to make the connection between engineering and, and these community practices. And then work with the University of Florida, the University of Texas, University of Massachusetts to incorporate these into some of their design courses. And that’s going to be pretty interesting in the sense that the universities in Florida and in Texas are majority-minority universities, so it’s mostly Latinx people. And Tufts is clearly a predominantly White institution.
There is a project that is led by one of the students in my lab with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado. And it is about energy incentives for the energy transition, focusing on commercial buildings. So looking at renewable energies, and the energy incentives provided by the federal government to commercial buildings and how it’s actually benefiting what they call disadvantaged communities—communities that are typically immigrants, underrepresented, etc. And then we are coming up with a framework to ensure that 40% of the benefits actually end up in the hands of disadvantaged communities. So the big major corporations—the McDonald’s, the Targets of the world—are not the ones mostly benefiting, but also the minority-owned, women-owned [businesses]. So that is a big project with the Department of Energy and the NREL that one of the grad students is working on, and I am also advising.
There’s another project that is also led by another grad student that is designing games to teach engineering concepts to younger kids. They are co-designing board games with undergrads working in the community that are hyper-localized and that are taking engineering problems from the community. They are developing games to teach students about issues of equity and justice associated with these engineering problems and how we can tackle them. So they have created games around heat islands in some of the urban areas here, and also about inequities and transportation efficiency in some of the areas that are densely populated mostly by immigrant communities and the hardest to access. So that is also really fun.
There is a project that is not yet funded, but I’m writing the proposal right now. But the idea is to get seed funding to develop a center that will work to understand how the lack of access to infrastructure and the poor quality of infrastructure actually impact the health outcomes of people. I am mostly on the community engagement side, and then there’s engineers and environmental health experts who are looking at developing computational models on how to account for “If we don’t have this kind of a structure here, what does that mean for the health outcomes of people? And how can we actually measure that? And how can we actually establish those relationships? And how can we understand the adaptability capacity? How do these communities do so much, with so little and why?” So that one promises to be good.
But, to be sincere with you, a lot of these things I have no clue what I’m doing. But you learn on the way, which is fun.
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I’m impressed and inspired right now by all of the different areas that you’re touching and giving your time and energy to! This is so impressive. And I feel like you could spend a whole lifetime and career on each of these projects. So it’s so beautiful and thank you so much for running through that. And I bet that there are so many other things that you’re handling on top of this.
In the end, all [my projects] boil down to me wanting to bridge engineering and science with the language and culture of communities. I’m involved in all of [these projects], but we are a team. [It’s] a team of three grad students, and there’s four undergrads. There is a whole group of people from the Center of Engineering Education who support me, and I will need to hire a postdoc and another grad student. So this is not only me. It’s a big group of people.
Yeah! I think it is obvious that every project you’re taking on has real-world applications and real-world implications. Coming from my department in Earth Systems, a lot of my professors always wanted to see their research have those kinds of applications. And so I wonder, when you’re coming up with these project ideas, are you thinking about the end result already? Or do you go to your partners in the communities and ask, ‘What sort of needs do you have and how can we unite and ally to work together and get that funding and make something happen?’? What’s your philosophy that makes this work?
So right now, there’s four or five undergrads who are running an after school program in East Boston, and sometimes I go too. In that community, they tell me, ‘We would like to see X. We would like to see Y.’ And so sometimes, I keep my ears open to listening to what the community wants to see. And other times I like to imagine things that are not there. It’s fun to imagine something that does not exist.
So for the Latinx project, I went through (my engineering coursework), and I didn’t see anything that I could relate to in terms of the ethnic or cultural background of the people or my community. So I think that project was born of maybe my own personal need of imagining a possible future. There’s a researcher that talks about utopia, and I wanted to construct that utopia, and sometimes you have to get out of the structures that are in place to create that.
But I would not do that if I don’t, at the same time, have my ears close to what people need.
When I spoke with one of my partners who’s also an advisor for this project, he told me about these Afro Latinx people who are speaking Indigenous languages from Amazonia. And I’d never heard of them. I was concentrating on Spanish. But after that conversation, now all I can think about is that there is someone that speaks Garifuna who may be coming from South America and identify as Afro Latinx. And I need to make sure that in my work I imagine something for someone like that person.
Yeah, that’s great! I’m sure it’s time-consuming, but it seems very worthwhile to dedicate a portion of your time to making those relationships and building trust to make these fruitful projects.
One thing I thought of while you were speaking was your project designing Afro Latinix culture into [science and engineering] curricula. As you said, there’s so much diversity within this one category to go back to your point about people who speak languages from Amazonia. There’s so much culture within just that one category. And so how are you able to start putting in pockets of culture within science education? I’m thinking of maybe there’s songs or pop culture references that people might understand or foods. What does it look like to have pieces of culture in science education? And how do we make it accessible to so many different people?
The answer will disappoint you. And the answer is, I don’t really know. I think every time we have done it, we do it differently.
When I was a PhD student at Stanford, my advisor incorporated cultural elements into virtual reality technologies to teach science to kids in the Bay Area, in Oakland, San Leandro. And we came up with a draft, and we showed it to the teachers. And then the teachers gave us the input. Then we show it to the kids. And the kids told us, ‘This really sucks.’ And so, it is hard to isolate one thing that is important for a particular group of people from an outsider perspective.
So in that regard, your prior question of ‘Do you listen to the partners?’ In this regard, you need to listen to the partners.
Same with the design of the games that one of our grad students is doing. They have to listen to what the students think is relevant, that it makes sense.
Once you find elements that you would like to incorporate, knowing that we have limitations in the number of things that we can incorporate. It is a never-ending project almost because people change, and cultures evolve, and languages evolve. And we need to be in tune to that.
Like I feel every time that I’m teaching, I am from the cave era! I think I am a dinosaur! I’m not that old, but I see the generational differences. I asked my students to put together a Spotify list, and I knew almost none of the songs, which is great.
But yeah, just to answer your question, that is difficult. There’s not a one, single answer. I feel that every time you are engaging with a community, different things matter to them. And we just need to listen and evolve with it and not think, ‘Oh, once we do these three things, then there’s an easier way to do it.’ But that’s not the best way to do it. The best way would be to listen to them and to know that whatever we come up with is going to be imperfect. And that whatever we come up with, will have to evolve if we want to be current with the times and with people.
[My] students are really brilliant, and they come up with their own ideas. And, I feel that my role is to make sure they have all the resources they need to be successful and to support them.Greses Pérez
Yeah, it sounds like rather than, ‘Here’s a checklist of what to include in the lesson.’ It’s about making it more cyclical. Like the students are also creating the class as the class is going.
What sorts of factors are you looking for in your science education research?
We are looking at a theory of language that is called translanguaging, which is this political and social justice theory to look at language as social constructs and to invite different varieties of language to be legitimized in explaining ideas in science and engineering. That’s the gist of the situation.
So we’re incorporating aspects of that because we want the students to connect with the people in their communities for the climate and be able to speak back to their community about what they have learned [about] the opportunities and the dangers of some of these climate technologies. And we thought that the only way that they could do that effectively and meaningfully to the people in their local context is by being able to express their ideas in ways that they will understand in the community, that they will resonate with.
So that is one of the elements that we are paying a lot of attention to. So we piloted some of the items that we were going to use with a group of grad students here. And the activity was around keeping cool and how different people in the community keep cool. And we did it in different languages. We had an Arabic group, a Mandarin group, a Spanish group and an English group. And then it was interesting how they spoke about practices, like things that people in these particular Arabic countries did in terms of attire, or in terms of technologies that they all knew. But it was hard for them to explain to someone [raised in the U.S.] because there’s not a precedent for them. They shared with us that if they were to explain this to people on this side of the world, they would just not do it because it would take them so much effort. But among them there was this understanding, ‘Oh, yeah, we do X,Y and Z.’ And same thing with the Mandarin group.
So there is something in there that I have found in all of my papers that I’m trying to publish at this time that we want to uncover. And it is this thing about people’s experiences, people’s cultural understanding, understanding of the world that is derived from living day-to-day with a community, and the language that is connected to those experiences, that we want to understand. We think [this is] the link that we need to find to make sure that the academic side [of climate science] connects with the people’s side.
Absolutely! That was so interesting. I studied abroad with Stanford and went to Jordan. And the way that the houses are designed, they take advantage of the wind, and it blows through the house and cools it down. Or, I went to Malaysia at one point, and we went to this house where the bottom floor would be flooded with water. And the wind would come through, and that was like a natural cooling system. And so I’m wondering, what sorts of unfamiliar examples were the participants giving to stay cool?
So we recorded this pilot this week. Other than that particular attire that they were mentioning, I don’t remember anything else. I can get back to you once we look at that.
Yeah, that’s super cool. Wow, it’s like fresh off the fresh off the plate.
How is life outside of your research, like being a professor and speaking with students? I know that you really value mentoring students in engineering. So how has that been for you?
I really liked them. And I think the students are really brilliant, and they come up with their own ideas. And, I feel that my role is to make sure they have all the resources they need to be successful and to support them.
I remember my adviser would tell me, ‘You’re going to be the world’s greatest expert on language and culture in engineering.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, this guy’s bananas! He is crazy.’ But now I tell that to my students, and I do believe that. I see them presenting, and I’m like, ‘Wow!’ I know that in a few years they’re gonna be my colleagues, either if they go to industry, to government, to academia. And I just see a bright future for them. And I say, ‘You’re not going to have any shortage of opportunities.’
And it’s so funny, because most of the time, they don’t see, they see more of the struggle that they’re going through, and all the things that they don’t know.
So I think it’s fun to have that kind of community and to be able to support other people, hopefully I do it okay or right. I try! So that is really fun.
Most of the time, I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. Am I doing the right thing?’ And there’s nobody to turn to say, ‘Hey, Am I doing the right thing?’ You just got to follow your intuition and trust that. You’re doing the best that you can. And even though a lot of times, I feel overwhelmed with the amount of things that I have to do, I feel lucky to be able to just explore these esoteric ideas, to have resources to do all of these projects I share with the faculty here.
I want to do some of this work on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. My first job as an engineer was there. I’m Dominican, and I know you know there’s a lot of tensions between Dominicans and Haitians currently. They’ve closed the border, and the international relationships are eroding because of this perceived nationalist agenda that I don’t get. So I want to do something to bring people together around science and engineering ideas and to find their humanity that they share instead of focusing on the other stuff. And I pitched that idea to someone. And suddenly the funds are there for me to do it. And I thought that I was going to do that after I got tenure.
And so I think this is a very fulfilling job that is very demanding. And sometimes I want to pull my hair out. But most of the time, I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, it’s great to see people thrive, flourish.’ And it’s great to be there to do my little thing that I can do and hope that they will multiply that forward, like others did for me.
Wow, that was such a beautiful passage that you just said. Yeah, it’s so hopeful. And I think that you’re a very special professor to say all those things. I think not all professors keep the students in mind and in their hearts like you do. That’s so beautiful. And thank you for sharing that.
I think you are seeing me with your heart. Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, this is all really fascinating and really makes me excited. So thank you so much for this time and for sharing so much.
More resources on the intersection of language and science learning:
Non-native English speaking scientists work much harder just to keep up, global research reveals
Why English as the Universal Language of Science Is a Problem for Research – The Atlantic
English is the language of science
The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
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