Please come and see Dr. Tanya Josek, a post-doctoral researcher at ISU’s CeMaST, present her study entitled “Including Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Community Developed Teaching Resources” at the virtual conference of the Ecological Society of America, which occurred online August 3–6, 2020.

Logo for Project EDDIE (Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration), a collaborative project between Illinois State and the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College that seeks to foster quantitative reasoning among undergraduates.

Project EDDIE seeks to foster quantitative reasoning among undergraduates.

Josek completed this study while working on Project EDDIE (Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration), a collaborative project between Illinois State and the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College that seeks to foster quantitative reasoning among undergraduates. Project EDDIE is developing a series of comics to teach statistical concepts, and Josek’s study focused on the creation of the characters depicted in the comics, to make sure they are inclusive of a diversity of cultures, races, and abilities, and to make sure they do no reinforce negative stereotypes.

Josek created a survey to solicit feedback on the initial characters, which was then used to improve the characters before incorporation into the Project EDDIE teaching materials.