Pre-college urban ecology research mentoring: Promoting broader participation in the field of ecology for an urban future

Abstract

The field of ecology is poised to substantially contribute to the creation of a socially and environmentally equitable urban future. To realize this contribution, the field of ecologymust create strategies that ensure inclusion of underrepresentedminorities so that a broad array of experiences and ideas collectively address challenges inherent to a sustainable urban future. Despite efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented racialminorities (URM) in the sciences, graduation rates have only slightly increased over the last several decades.While researchmentoring programs at the undergraduate level do increase retention of URM alreadymajoring in the sciences, influences that develop before collegemay inhibit URM fromelecting to study the sciences or pursue ecology-related careers in the first place. To increase diversity in the field of ecology, it is, therefore, critical to reach students before theymake decisions about college. Compared with the country as a whole, cities larger than 400 000 tend to have K-12 public school populations that aremore racially diverse. In cities, place-based learning-where students are engaged as participant learners in local community and environmental issues-has been successfully used for out-of-school urban environmental education programming to foster pro-environmental attitudes, foster science identity and teach scientific knowledge. Utilizing a near-peer, relationalmentoringmodel, we argue that pre-college urban ecology researchmentoring provides a place-based, authentic research experience that strengthens URM science identity and intent to pursue ecology-relatedmajors.