“The Work I Do Matters”: Cultivating a STEM Counterspace for Black Girls through Social-Emotional Development and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In the introduction, consider including (a) a statement of rationale of need for the study, (b) naming of the intended audience, and (c) how the intended audience will benefit.

It would helpful to begin your literature review with an introduction statement (related to your research question), then consider giving your reader a map of your arguments in order, before a section to each argument of your research question.

Please explain every step of data generation and collection and provide a rationale for each of your research decisions (please cite the literature that you used as a guide). Make sure to tell us exactly what constitutes data in your study.

Please provide a statement of third-party approval that you secured to conduct this study (e.g., Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects) or if your local context does not require such oversight, then please indicate this and describe how you ensured ethical research practice to protect participants’ safety, privacy, and confidentiality. If the study was deemed to be exempted or excluded from IRB review, please make note of it. 

Please describe how you secured the participants’ informed consent.        

When discussing your study's participants please consider using composite descriptions rather than providing multiple identifying characteristics of each person. Such individuation can jeopardize the confidentiality of your participants and can detract from the composite orientation of your study.

Minor grammar check would be beneficial. 

Author Response

Response to Reviewers – education-2436103

REVIEWER #1:

In the introduction, consider including (a) a statement of rationale of need for the study, (b) naming of the intended audience, and (c) how the intended audience will benefit.

We opened the paper discussing the need to create spaces for Black girls and how they experience racism and sexism in formal schools. We also discussed the underrepresentation of Black women in the STEM workforce. We don’t have a specific audience for this study that will be named in the introduction. Instead, we share implications of the work in the conclusion. 

It would helpful to begin your literature review with an introduction statement (related to your research question), then consider giving your reader a map of your arguments in order, before a section to each argument of your research question.

This proposed structure does not work for our paper. We made the introduction section clearer to state that we discussed culturally sustaining pedagogies and social emotional development at length in the conceptual framework section and chose to focus the literature review on informal learning contexts (especially those serving Black and Brown girls).

Please explain every step of data generation and collection and provide a rationale for each of your research decisions (please cite the literature that you used as a guide). Make sure to tell us exactly what constitutes data in your study.

 We explained that we used critical discourse analysis and all data sources on pages 9-10 – “data sources were audio transcripts from several classroom discussions as well as written artifacts from reflection exercises. We uploaded the transcribed sources to NVivo to begin the analysis process. Using an inductive approach, we first reviewed the tenets of CSP and SEL competencies toward adolescent development that made up our conceptual framework. Before conducting the coding process, we engaged in discussions to ensure that everyone involved had a mutual understanding and consensus regarding the meanings of each tenet. Once the tenets and their definitions were set, we created a codebook inclusive of initial codes to help guide the process (See Appendix A).”

Please provide a statement of third-party approval that you secured to conduct this study (e.g., Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects) or if your local context does not require such oversight, then please indicate this and describe how you ensured ethical research practice to protect participants’ safety, privacy, and confidentiality. If the study was deemed to be exempted or excluded from IRB review, please make note of it. 

We added our IRB approval number through Georgia State University at the end of the paper.

Please describe how you secured the participants’ informed consent.        

We indicated that informed consents were received for each participant at the end of the paper.

When discussing your study's participants please consider using composite descriptions rather than providing multiple identifying characteristics of each person. Such individuation can jeopardize the confidentiality of your participants and can detract from the composite orientation of your study.

Composite descriptions do not make sense for our methodological approach. Each participant’s background is critical to understanding how they showed up and engaged in the counterspace. This was important to mention for readers to follow each girl’s development during the course of the program.

REVIEWER #2:

This paper focuses and develops itself broadly on how Black and Brown girls developed knowledge and skills to manage their emotions, achieve goals, show empathy, and maintain healthy relationships within the context of a single-gender summer STEM program. It is an interesting approach to how they can engage and manage to learn, unlearn, and relearn while showing up as their full and authentic selves are not often afforded in traditional STEM classes. There are 2 major outcomings from this study (1) the importance of cultivating trusting and intentional learning spaces for Black and Brown girls to engage in open dialogue to critique and challenge oppressive discourses, and (2) the significance of leaning into pluralism and difficult conversations to help adolescent girls realize the complexities of culture while also promoting the joy and social-emotional development.

Thank you for providing this overview of the study and paper.

REVIEWER #3:

This is an extremely well-written paper that draws upon theory in a comprehensive manner and presents an analysis that is well-executed methodologically. The authors clearly know the CSP literature and other related literature very well and are skilled methodologists. 

Thank you for this positive feedback.

The authors do an excellent job of answering the big picture "So what?" question of the study, but my primary critique is I wish the authors would engage more with what can be learned from this specific paper that is not already suggested by the theory they describe, or other empirical work that has been carried out by other scholars. I think the paper could be improved substantially if the authors highlighted the unique contributions of their paper and clearly (and in some places concisely) answered what they are doing new or better in this paper. Essentially all academic papers need to be doing something "new" (making an entirely novel contribution), or something "better" (innovating in an improved way on an already-existing theory/method), and that contribution should be clear. I think the authors need to make the contribution clear in the abstract, introduction, discussion, and conclusion in order for this article to be appealing to a broader set of readers. Otherwise, I worry this otherwise-excellent paper will be relegated to a smaller subset of scholars. I think if the authors are able to make the unique contribution of this paper very clear to readers, it will be extremely improved.  

Thank you for this critique. This is now addressed in the conclusion.

Additionally, I noticed some minor grammatical errors throughout the paper. Please proofread carefully.

We tried to address any grammatical errors that we could find.

In addition to addressing the feedback by reviewers, we took the paper out of APA and made it in ACS (in-text citations and the reference section). We also added author contributions, funding, IRB statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, and conflicts of interest. Author information was added to the beginning of the paper.

Thank you!

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper focuses and develops itself broadly on how Black and Brown girls developed knowledge and skills to manage their emotions, achieve goals, show empathy, and maintain healthy relationships within the context of a single-gender summer STEM program. It is an interesting approach to how they can engage and manage to learn, unlearn, and relearn while showing up as their full and authentic selves are not often afforded in traditional STEM classes. There are 2 major outcomings from this study (1) the importance of cultivating trusting and intentional learning spaces for Black and Brown girls to engage in open dialogue to critique and challenge oppressive discourses, and (2) the significance of leaning into pluralism and difficult conversations to help adolescent girls realize the complexities of culture while also promoting the joy and social-emotional development.

Author Response

REVIEWER #2:

This paper focuses and develops itself broadly on how Black and Brown girls developed knowledge and skills to manage their emotions, achieve goals, show empathy, and maintain healthy relationships within the context of a single-gender summer STEM program. It is an interesting approach to how they can engage and manage to learn, unlearn, and relearn while showing up as their full and authentic selves are not often afforded in traditional STEM classes. There are 2 major outcomings from this study (1) the importance of cultivating trusting and intentional learning spaces for Black and Brown girls to engage in open dialogue to critique and challenge oppressive discourses, and (2) the significance of leaning into pluralism and difficult conversations to help adolescent girls realize the complexities of culture while also promoting the joy and social-emotional development.

Thank you for providing this overview of the study and paper.

Reviewer 3 Report

This is an extremely well-written paper that draws upon theory in a comprehensive manner and presents an analysis that is well-executed methodologically. The authors clearly know the CSP literature and other related literature very well and are skilled methodologists. 

The authors do an excellent job of answering the big picture "So what?" question of the study, but my primary critique is I wish the authors would engage more with what can be learned from this specific paper that is not already suggested by the theory they describe, or other empirical work that has been carried out by other scholars. I think the paper could be improved substantially if the authors highlighted the unique contributions of their paper and clearly (and in some places concisely) answered what they are doing new or better in this paper. Essentially all academic papers need to be doing something "new" (making an entirely novel contribution), or something "better" (innovating in an improved way on an already-existing theory/method), and that contribution should be clear. I think the authors need to make the contribution clear in the abstract, introduction, discussion, and conclusion in order for this article to be appealing to a broader set of readers. Otherwise, I worry this otherwise-excellent paper will be relegated to a smaller subset of scholars. I think if the authors are able to make the unique contribution of this paper very clear to readers, it will be extremely improved.   Additionally, I noticed some minor grammatical errors throughout the paper. Please proofread carefully.

I noticed some minor grammatical errors throughout the paper. Please proofread carefully.

Author Response

This is an extremely well-written paper that draws upon theory in a comprehensive manner and presents an analysis that is well-executed methodologically. The authors clearly know the CSP literature and other related literature very well and are skilled methodologists. 

Thank you for this positive feedback.

The authors do an excellent job of answering the big picture "So what?" question of the study, but my primary critique is I wish the authors would engage more with what can be learned from this specific paper that is not already suggested by the theory they describe, or other empirical work that has been carried out by other scholars. I think the paper could be improved substantially if the authors highlighted the unique contributions of their paper and clearly (and in some places concisely) answered what they are doing new or better in this paper. Essentially all academic papers need to be doing something "new" (making an entirely novel contribution), or something "better" (innovating in an improved way on an already-existing theory/method), and that contribution should be clear. I think the authors need to make the contribution clear in the abstract, introduction, discussion, and conclusion in order for this article to be appealing to a broader set of readers. Otherwise, I worry this otherwise-excellent paper will be relegated to a smaller subset of scholars. I think if the authors are able to make the unique contribution of this paper very clear to readers, it will be extremely improved.  

Thank you for this critique. This is now addressed in the conclusion.

Additionally, I noticed some minor grammatical errors throughout the paper. Please proofread carefully.

We tried to address any grammatical errors that we could find.

In addition to addressing the feedback by reviewers, we took the paper out of APA and made it in ACS (in-text citations and the reference section). We also added author contributions, funding, IRB statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, and conflicts of interest. Author information was added to the beginning of the paper.

Thank you!

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for addressing my comments.