Whenever Tamara L. Battle taught middle and high school students as a member of the Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education program — or GK-12 — she always made it a point to talk about her previous struggles in math and science.
“I always tell students what my background is to let them know that I know what I’m talking about,” says Battle, who served as a GK-12 fellow at the Cesar Chavez Charter Schools for Public Policy in Washington, D.C. from 2006 to 2008.
“But I always tell this story about me failing my first physics class [in college], and now I’m teaching [physics],” Battle says of the time when she earned an F in physics at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the 1990s.
Battle says the idea behind sharing her personal story was to help students at the mostly African-American and Hispanic school overcome the fear of failure in what is often unfamiliar terrain.
“I try to reduce the fear … because I know sometimes as minority students, that has already been infused at an early age,” says Battle, who now helps manage the GK-12 program as a Science Assistant within the Division of Graduate Education at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va.
Battle’s perspective echoes a plethora of emerging reports that have been probing the reasons behind disparate participation and completion rates in STEM majors among underrepresented minorities.
“This apprehension may, at worst, create barriers to entry or, at a minimum, create barriers to the information needed to be fully successful,” states a 2011 landmark report from the National Academy of Sciences titled Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads.
