Inclusion in FIRST

[Kimmeh]

In response to a post I made on the Jane Cosmetics thread, I've received more than one request on how to make teams/FIRST/STEM more inclusive. (My apologies for the delay to those who messaged me!)

In the last few months, there's been a lot of talk on how to get more females engaged. I'd hazard a guess to say if we make FIRST/STEM more inclusive for EVERYONE, we'll see more females in FIRST/STEM. No one wants to be the token minority figure. Personally, I don't like feeling like I'm being recruited so I can help meet an arbitrary check mark. (She's female, in STEM, and LGBTQ!? 3x Bonus! New high score!) I'd also wager a guess that I'm not the only one who feels this way.

When I first had this in mind, I had LGBTQ students in mind, but a pm reminded me that it's more than that subset of students. It includes students from other walks of life that fall outside the norm. Maybe your team is predominately made up of members of a specific race or ethnicity. My intent is for more not to be a discussion of how you recruited the non-typical (to your team) students, but what you do as a team to make them feel welcome and included.

I only ask that you don't brush this off because "it doesn't happen on my team". Maybe you are right. But for example, sexism isn't always as overt as saying girls can't do X or boys are better at Y. But maybe instead a team lead directs a group of students the girls end up cleaning/sorting parts or making buttons while the boys' attention is refocused on something directly robot related.* Alternately, LGBTQ youth are more at risk for homelessness, depression and suicide. For many the simple act of having a place where they can be themselves and have support is a live saver. Students that identify as such often aren't obviously apparent.

Many of us mentors work with middle and high school students. We're aware how easy it can be to accidentally crush a student. At bare minimum, I'm sure that many of us can remember being told something particularly hurtful and how long that can stay with you. I'm also sure that we're aware of what being part of a team means for some students. (And some of us as well. There's a reason why we're still here.)

I can offer my suggestions, but I'm just one person, so I figured I'd open it up to CD.

Here's some questions to get you started:

What have you done to be more inclusive?
What worked and what didn't work?
How do you address problems on your team?
Students: Do you speak up if you have a problem?

If yes, how did you go about it? Did you talk to a mentor and have them handle it on your behalf? Did you bring it up yourself? Etc.
If not, why?

If you'd like to remain anonymous, PM me your post and I'll post it on your behalf. (Mods, is that okay? This can be a sensitive subject for some, and I can appreciate the fact that not everyone is comfortable being identified.)


* Actual situation that happened to me, repeatedly. Sure, someone needs to do it. But why did it always end up being me?

[Katie_UPS]

Mentors need to be aware of their students, and I believe that mentors set the standard for teams. I have little experience with bringing in students, but I have experience with maintaining students.

One thing I learned from my mentors was speaking up for a student when they won't speak up for themselves. There are two distinct examples in my mind, the first being when I was a student.

Person: So, [Mentor that Katie worked with], what is the status on the claw?
Mentor: Well, ask Katie... She's the one who did all the work.

You could argue is was a simple mistake on Person's part, and it probably was. But it sucks to have your accomplishments accredited to another person. It was nice that my mentor didn't answer and instead acknowledged my work and passed on the question. I may or may not have corrected Person, but I didn't have to because Mentor did it for me. I learned and used this method for my own mentoring.

Person: The robot needs to be wired up when we get in. One of our pre-loaders needs to be able to wire.
Person 2: Well [male student] could learn how.
Katie: [Female student] has already wired the robot up twice. She can do it.

This resulted in [Female student] being a pre-loader for the event and she became in instrumental player in our pit until she graduated.

Little things have a big impact. I'm sure [Female student] would have been a rock star no matter what, but its important to not let your students be shy about their abilities (or their need for help). And it is important to do this for all students, not just non-male and/or non-white and/or LGBTQ etc. students.

[safiq10]

Now exclusion is something our team unfortunately has a history with before our 2013 season, our captains were mainly boys through voting. They somewhat abused their powers and made girls have the unfair jobs (Handling funding, outreach, really anything but the robot) then the robot was just all guys.
In our 2013 season a member of the team said, " So I know we made it to finals last year and lost against the future world champs that all swell and dandy but this whole guys build the robot and girls do the clean job has to stop...." He went on talking about how it is unfair and by being upfront with the team ans straightforward we have seen more girls join the team (we went from girls making up 16% to girls making up 56% in a single year.)
The girls still feel a little shy to join the engineering side of our team so we have started a girls engineering club at school so that girls can feel more comfortable engineering and if they chose can start co-ed engineering in FRC. So far it seems to be working since they are going to be competing in FTC next season.

In summary our team has had success with just being upfront with our team about the problems we face.

[Carol]

Check out this TV ad - you may have seen it on TV. It speaks directly to the cause of the problem.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_5526236.html

[TogetherSword8]

Something that our team does for our "recruiting" is we advertise when we are meeting. Then when the season starts, we will give jobs to people that are there, but arent doing anything at the time. The experienced people turn into managers, but the non-experienced do the "grunt work" of measuring the correct distance, and drilling holes, making the cut, etc. We will include everyone that is in our shop, starting with the people that are the closest, and as the leaders find things that they are doing that could be completed by less experienced, we hand them out. It gets everyone involved, and helps to get the jobs done faster. This work basis of if you come you are helpful helps us to retain many people that would be shy or unincluded elsewhere, and as a result, our team is a collaboration of many people that in almost any other place, would be a clash of personalities.
I feel that our organization really helps with how to mesh people that come from different backgrounds, are of opposite genders, have contrasting ideals, etc.

[asid61]

We don't have as many girls on the team as I would like, but of the girls there are they are the most accomplished people on the team. Most of them become team leaders. I have to say that one freshman girl's accomplishments blasted mine out of the park.

[thatprogrammer]

My team currently has 3 *4 if you count a brand new recruit* females on our team, out of about 14 people. All of them have pretty major roles, and one is the leader of our chassis team. We really just let anyone join and work equally

[Carolyn_Grace]

I'm sure that I'll be coming back to this thread often, but I want to start with one thing that has worked in keeping cleaning a gender/race/minority-neutral job:

1. Make a cleaning schedule. Using a calendar that is large and visible for all, assign students days that they are responsible for making sure the shop is clean at the end of the day.

2. If making this a public schedule results in assigned students not showing up on their cleaning days (yeah, it happens), then have one mentor keep a list, and randomly assign students that day. Once students have taken their turn, cross their name off and use new students until you need to start over.

3. Lead mentors and student leaders should emphasize that doing tasks like cleaning, helping with menial tasks, and doing the "grunt" work that no one really wants to do is the way to actually get recognized. The students that consistently do these tasks without complaining should be the ones who receive recognition. I know of some teams who have rules like, "You can be a driver or on pit crew unless you demonstrate consistency in taking care of the small tasks like cleaning."

To add, I also know of a couple teams who SAY they have that rule, but then have chosen a driver or pit crew member strictly because they were a good driver or programmer. I have seen how detrimental this can be. So, if you say that is a team rule, then follow through on it!


This is a good thread! Thanks for starting it.

[thegnat05]

Keeping a team inclusive, from my experience, is challenging in all activities. From Quiz Bowl to Theatre to Speech there always seems to be an imbalance of some sort. My robotics team is not an exception to this. My freshman year there were 4 girls (including me) and my sophomore year there was 1. Being the only girl on the team that year really drove me to step up to the plate. I felt like in previous years the girls on the team would do the 'stereotypical' jobs such as marketing and nobody really asked them to help out with building the robot. Although I did design my teams t-shirts and buttons that year I also tried to help out my teammates with things like attaching an actuator to the robot or switching out a jag. After that year they started including me when making decisions about the robot or team in general. It was a really great year for me and my team as a whole.

This past year we had 6 new females join our team. I believe that we did it by showing our school when we were presenting that it wasn't just boys. I tried my best to talk to every girl that would come up to look at our robot and show them that girls are in robotics too. Our head mentor and team facilitator also tries to recruit girls. Well, he tries to recruit everyone he meets but girls especially.

I was one of our 4 captains last year and I am now the head captain of my team. I am not the captain because I am a girl, I am captain because I love FIRST and I put every ounce of my soul into the team. Having a girl captain has shown the other females on our team and in the community that engineering is not just a boy thing.

The best was to recruit new females is to show them inspired, excited, and involved females on the team and in FIRST!

[Ivan Helmrich]

I also think this needs to be largely mentor driven. Personally, I dislike the cosmetic approach of putting up "You go girl" posters or the like. I understand it can help initiate a change, but I'm more in favor of just making changes head on.

I will admit that we have it easy on the Tigerbytes. We draw our team from a very diverse student population that looks like a United Nations group photo. All of our kids will spend some portion of just about every day as part of a minority in one activity or another, we don't have any one dominant group and the students are are used to that.

So, to answer the questions:

What have you done to be more inclusive?

What 1775 has done to be more inclusive is to make inclusion a core value of the team. We talk about it, we compare ourselves to other teams, we address any issues that come up rather than letting them slide.

What worked and what didn't work?

The only thing I can think of that we've done that hasn't helped was in our early years we thought inclusion would just happen. It didn't. It wasn't until we addressed it as a team and made it a topic of conversation that it became habit.

How do you address problems on your team?

If it isn't blatant, I like the approach Katie mentioned above. As a mentor, I try to redirect a conversation that's going the wrong way. I think the kids pick up where I'm going pretty quickly. In blatant cases, I will address it with the student (or mentor if needed) directly. Since inclusion is a core team value, it's fair game for a discussion.

I think the biggest mistake to make is to think that this topic will take care of itself. It won't. If you want an inclusive team, inclusive behaviors need to be modeled and reinforced. If you aren't where you want to be, have a team conversation and make a it clear about where you want to go.

Ivan

[ehoyla]

As a female on a robotics team I want to say THANK YOU for this post. I hate being "a girl in robotics". I want to be just "a student in robotics". I will never understand WHY there NEEDS to be more women in STEM. In reality, we just need more of EVERYONE in STEM. Our team works to recruit anyone and everyone that crosses our path without any kind of regards to what they look like or what their background is.

[Jon Stratis]

I don't do much with my team's recruitment efforts, so I can't contribute to that portion of the conversation. There are a few things I want to say, though:

There are a couple of posts about being assigned to clean up or sort things... My team has never had that problem. Everyone helps clean up at the end of the night - each subteam cleans up their area (with everyone on that subteam helping out), and when needed helps other subteams. Every year we spend some time organizing, which invariably leads to sorting bolts and nuts and such... Usually there are several students assigned to that (typically younger students), while others are doing other organization tasks. There is no "I'm going to build the robot while you sort the bolts" going on.

As a mentor, the hardest part of the job is to assign tasks appropriately. You want to reward those who work hard and have talent, but at the same time you don't want to be pushing aside others. You want to give the responsibility to the more experienced members of the team (juniors and seniors), but sometimes you'll have a younger member who is just better at it, or an older member who just isn't capable of being a leader. It can be extremely difficult to balance all of the competing demands and keep everyone happy. You have to put an amazing amount of effort into keeping things balanced and respectful to everyone, or you end up with someone feeling left out or neglected.

[RoboChair]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

As a mentor, the hardest part of the job is to assign tasks appropriately. You want to reward those who work hard and have talent, but at the same time you don't want to be pushing aside others. You want to give the responsibility to the more experienced members of the team (juniors and seniors), but sometimes you'll have a younger member who is just better at it, or an older member who just isn't capable of being a leader. It can be extremely difficult to balance all of the competing demands and keep everyone happy. You have to put an amazing amount of effort into keeping things balanced and respectful to everyone, or you end up with someone feeling left out or neglected.

I have always found that I have a hard time as a mentor properly engaging more than a small handful of students at a time. I primarily teach students how to use the power tools, heavy machines, and general fabrication skills. There is a reason most things in fields like that are done via apprenticeship. Every year I do everything I can to let everyone have a shot at touching the machines and make sure all the girls have a chance to step up and try it out. But simply put there is a VASTLY insufficient ratio between my time, students, and total available machine time. So I use the first go around of training to find the kids that catch on quickly and then train them until they can start learning on their own. Then I have those well trained students as my go-to problem solvers, but there is always room for an extra set of hands and eyes. So every time I have someone working on something I will try to find someone not busy and have them go help and at the same time that student gets a chance to be taught too! This way the skills I am passing on are in turn passed on from student to student. Additionally that first student gets the chance to be a teacher as well, reinforcing their skills further through teaching and building their communication skills.

[CLandrum3081]

Originally Posted by Kimmeh

She's female, in STEM, and LGBTQ!? 3x Bonus! New high score!

ULTRA KILLER COMBO!

2/3 for my whole life, 3/3 since coming out. Do I get bonus points for being 2E?

In all seriousness, I'd like to write a pages-long rant about this, but it'd get a little too personal, and since I'm female the internet will assume my wish to rant has something to do with the nonexistent relative rationality of my (perceived) gender. ("But women ARE irrational! A sitcom told me so!")

Anyway, I'll truncate the ranty part of my personal experience and list some things that did and didn't work for me as a student in FIRST. I absolutely love my old team and the mentors, and would love to give back someday, and my pointing these things out is in no way meant to herald 3081 as the best team in the universe or make it out to be the worst thing that's happened in the 21st century.


Things that work:
-Inclusion of each individual: Ask the student what they're interested in, or if they'd be interested in exploring XYZ if they're unsure.
-Identifying when it's other students doing the excluding. If one kid out of the twenty present is sitting off in the corner sulking and not participating in activities, it usually means something's wrong. It's not always that the other kids are being jerks, or, if they are, it's not necessarily because the student is "different", but it's a possibility worth ruling out.

Things that don't work:
-ANY COMMENT EVER relating quality of work to (insert minority status here). "Oh, you did a great job on that, especially considering you're a girl." Replace "girl" with (insert race here) or (insert perceived or actual LGBT status here) and you've left yourself open to criticism. It should be this way with "girl", but we'll leave that rant for another day.
-Delegating students to particular tasks because of their gender/minority status/you get the drill. Getting girls that are interested in the robot to work on it or sparking that interest in students is one thing. Telling girls they need to work on the robot even if they're not interested because "we need representation from this minority in this role" is not going to be effective. It makes students feel like their only worth is whatever minority status they have, which can be confusing if that has been a subject of ridicule for years (as being a girl with non-girly interests, perceived or identifying as LGBTQ, and not being the majority ethnicity can bring).

I was going to say more, but I started getting even MORE babbly so I just deleted it. The point is, we need to make less of a mission about "WE NEED MORE GIRLS BECAUSE STATISTICS" or "WHY ARE ALL MY TEAMMATES WHITE" and more about including each individual student - "minority" or not.

[jds2001]

Originally Posted by CLandrum3081

ULTRA KILLER COMBO!

2/3 for my whole life, 3/3 since coming out. Do I get bonus points for being 2E?

Well, congrats! I for one am a LGBT mentor, however I'm male so I don't count for the trifecta . My team really doesn't know about my orientation (well, I guess they do now if they're following me around on CD!), not because I keep it a secret, but rather it's wholly irrelevant to whether or not I can help them build a great robot. Equally, a student's sexual orientation (or race, sex, gender identity, or any other label that you can think of) is wholly irrelevant to them building an awesome robot.

In all seriousness, our team is one of the most diverse around I think. I mentor a "second chance" high school where kids that for whatever reason couldn't survive in the normal NYC school system. I'd say 50% of our students are Chinese immigrants, some are Latin American, and actually the middle-class white student is the minority in our team. We foster diversity in every aspect of our team, and I think we do fairly good at it. Could we do better? Very likely, saying that there's no room for improvement would be arrogant. The captain of our team is female (and was profiled by CBS News), and she did an awesome job hands on with the robot. Our entire CAD design team is Chinese females. Is communication an issue (with me, the lead mentor, being a white guy who only speaks English, while our team speaks Mandarin, Spanish, and English at least? ) with the team? Sometimes. However, I've made an effort to recruit bilingual mentors, understanding my own limitations in this realm - by making an active effort, we can foster inclusion and diversity in FIRST. But as many in this thread have said, the effort has to begin with the mentors.

One by one, we can improve the world!