I Was A Kid

STEAM careers lack diversity in undergraduate school (and onward) and in advancement for careerists. Underrepresentation ranges through gender, sexuality, race, socio-economic background, learning style, and physical ability. Once students close their minds to the world of science, technology, engineering, related arts, and math, they have shut the door on a world of career opportunities. Some short takes on the research: 

• Fewer than ten percent of earth sciences doctorates go to people of color. 

• LGBTQ people were underrepresented in government STEM careers and were found to be disproportionately “closeted” within the field.

• The development of “science identity” in middle school is seen as key to developing the persistence needed to overcome systemic obstacles to advancement for minoritized populations, particularly for girls. 

• The most common reason for a college student switching from a STEM to a nonSTEM major is the perception that they lack the required competence or skills to be successful. 

• The more students know about STEAM careers, the more likely they are to pursue them. 

I work with a lot of scientists, doing education and outreach activities and creating materials they can use to explain their research and findings to the public and inspire the next generation to join them. Knowing that I work in publishing as well, a few minority scientists have reached out to me over recent years to ask me to consider ways to help inspire more kids from underrepresented communities to enter the sciences. For a while our ideas did not go beyond the “This Is What a Scientist Looks Like” poster/hashtag idea, but in 2019 I had a series of experiences that made me dig deeper — experiences that ultimately led to I Was a Kid. 

I took part in an expedition to Antarctica aboard a research ship of geoscientists, mostly white. Upon my return home, I was invited to speak at a traveling exhibition involving this ship. At the exhibition, I met a cohort of docents who had been hired by the venue, the New Rochelle Public Library.  These high school juniors and seniors were knowledgeable, flexible, and not white. This was the cohort that geoscience was looking for, but what was in place to draw these fantastic kids into the STEAM fields? I began considering the problem, and went back to a moment I’d had when visiting colleges with my son — an admissions presentation at which local minority high schoolers were led off a bus and into the front row, where they slouched, awkward and resistant.  

It took me back to my own high school experience, when I knew nothing about geology, and where my cohort — girls, 51 percent of the population — were actively discouraged from STEM fields, including medicine. Uninformed, unconfident, and unencouraged, I drew back too easily from my scientific ambitions.

These are just a few of the opportunities that I Was A Kid addresses: the sticking points, barriers and blockages of understanding and point of view that stand between young people, advanced education, and STEAM work.    

How does an adolescent  — past, present, or future — channel childhood pursuits and passions into lifelong studies and professions? How does a young person develop skills, match with mentors, investigate internships, target schools, finagle finances, and juggle personal life? The answers are in these personal experiences of people acting as living mirrors, windows, and doors. Too often science appears to be the realm of the white, the privileged, the male. 

I Was A Kid is designed to bridge the gap between enthusiastic middle grade to high school students and the science, technology, engineering, arts, math/medical (STEAM) careers they may target, by demystifying the unknown territory and presenting strategies and programs to pave and light the way.

The I Was A Kid website is populated by comics-based profiles of diverse STEAM professionals. Through each profilee’s story of how they got from “there” — childhood — to “here” — a STEAM career, young readers see the demystification of the process of growing up and finding their place. 

The growing website (which currently contains 28 full profiles and 43 brief ones) has received a continually increasing number of visitors and subscribers, adding to its own analytics as well as to the KarenRomanoYoung.com website.  In April 2023, the National Science Teachers Association recommended the materials there to its vast list of educators. Profiles on the website include a full-size comic showing the profiles, with pull-out quotes from the interview;  a baseball card with just one quote; a signpost indicating turning points along the person’s pathway, accompanied by text stories that show their response to problems or obstacles; audio excerpts giving longer discussion of key points (in some cases, audiograms, providing closed captioning); and links to other materials, including podcasts and video events hosted by partners such as Exploring by the Seat of Your Pants, Solve It for Kids, or the National Writing Project.    

In addition, capsules (groups of profilees supported by different institutions, labs, and expeditions) now number five, including Nautilus Live/Ocean Exploration Trust (Dr. Robert Ballard’s science research program), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the University of Southern California’s Young Scientists Program, which serves Los Angeles Public Schools.  

Recently I Was A Kid was chosen by two Connecticut agencies -- Sea Grant and the Department of Economics and Community Development -- and supported to create two profiles of Connecticut STEAM professional women, and to print out and distribute the resulting comics posters to Connecticut science teachers.  This small push will allow me to give them to the 200 Connecticut Science Teachers Association active members.  It's the kind of thing that I can offer, along with the partnerships described above, and that is much more likely to happen if I can carry financial support in -- not always having to rely on partners to apply for grants. Students, their teachers, and their parents can be reached through schools, libraries, and museums -- and the windows can open on worlds where they can make unique contributions with greater confidence and understanding. 

Upper middle graders, middle schoolers, early high schoolers, and their teachers and parents.  

As Mesmin Destin, psychologist who studies the impact of experiences and interactions on middle schoolers' and high schoolers' sense of science identity, personal worth, and motivation, says, seeing oneself reflected in someone seen as successful is eye-opening and long-lasting; just hearing praise for kids' own personal struggles is highly motivating. 

My solution serves kids of underrepresented minorities in race, religion, socioeconomic background, gender, sexuality, mental and physical ability by demonstrating how others from these communities have found their way. It also helps diminish the impression that STEAM fields are occupied only by white men of privilege.  And it has the potential to increase visibility of minorities and women in these fields for those already there, whose own experience may range from privilege and acceptance to being the only one there. 

Still in the early, proof-of-concept days of I Was A Kid, I've reached out to the science, education, and arts communities through partnerships such as 

• a capsule of STEAM professionals from the University of Southern California community who visited the Los Angeles Public School classrooms served by the Young Scientists Program, which created video of them and developed a curriculum for using I Was A Kid in upper elementary classrooms. 

• a cooperative effort with the video event organization Exploring By the Seat of Your Pants, which opens cameras remotely to classrooms for live interactions with STEAM professionals. 

• a presentation to a children's science museum to an audience of hundreds of students from a diverse surrounding community 

• profiles centered on specific communities, for example, the Navajo nation, Puerto Rico, and an organization for those with obsessive-compulsive disorder. 

My approach is to invite participating profilees to share what they wish they had known, or think today's kids of their communities should know, about going into advanced STEAM education and professions. This includes, but is not limited to, organized activities that they were involved in growing up, and also to organizations and opportunities open now -- including many that the profilees themselves have been or are involved in. 

In addition to opening their hearts and experiences on the page (and webpage), the profilees share these materials through their own education and outreach channels, using them to tell their own stories and make their institutions more familiar and welcoming to the next generation. They even translate their comics for use by Spanish-speakers, and offer additional materials in the form of autobiographical writing, graphics, and videos. 

Links to all of this are provided on the website, which has the goal of becoming a clearing house for opportunities available to today's kids and their teachers. 

I'm an award-winning children's book author with 30 books published, mainly having to do with science. In recent years, I added illustration to my skills, and am the creator of three comic series now, including I Was A Kid's comics. I've worked in many areas of educational publishing, creating teaching materials at every level and almost every subject. A former Scholastic editor, I became accustomed to creating classroom materials that would speak to every part of the country and its many communities, approaching learning through an understanding of learning differences and styles, and drawing on my experience as a formal and informal educator. 

And, for the last 20 years, I've been involved in science communication, education, and outreach, working with scientists in the field and in the lab. This has involved a dozen expeditions, from the deep ocean floor to Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean.

I Was A Kid sits at the intersection of all of my interests, passions, and skills --plus one more thing: it speaks to the regret in my own heart that I didn't have enough formal science education to develop a strong enough science identity of my own to pursue it professionally. I want to demystify the fields involved in science so that kids understand that it's more than biology and chemistry and maybe physics, so that they see where they and their own curiosity and passions fits, and so that they can envision themselves moving forward in these fields, while allowing themself the stops and starts, ups and downs, of pursuing these careers. 

Several thousand, including all those who have viewed or had access to materials on the website. 

1. I am alone. I have developed I Was A Kid to this stage with much advice from interested parties, but really would value the attention and interaction to the project from someone knowledgable, wise, and objective. I am at the throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks phase, and need to carefully choose my direction and focus. 

2. Many people have encouraged me and partnered with me.  I wish to better understand how to serve teachers, students, and parents and the organizations that work with them, in order to get them the materials that are most likely to have the desired impact. I also need to sharpen the focus of my efforts in order to produce materials and content that will best serve a wider range of people, and to figure out how to work this in a businesslike manner. 

3. Yes, I do need funding, but even more I need to build knowledge and understanding of how to sustainably fund this work. While the Challenge will help with financing, I'm hoping that the cooperative work involved will assist me as I develop a stronger base for this project. 

4. Organizational stuff: While I've determined that I don't need to be a nonprofit organization currently, I need to factor future decisions into my plan. I need to determine whether I need to establish a board of advisors, and/or board of directors, as I realize the goal of professional respectableness and reliability in the eyes of the public as well as science. 

I'm a woman working with other women in the sciences, and privy to their experiences, struggles for recognition, space, pay, and privileges.  I've sat in those rooms discussing those things while men stay in their labs and offices getting work done, listened to the MeToo stories in giant auditoriums filled mostly with women, and participated in work groups trying to strategize about programs to increase diversity as well as gender equity in colleges and laboratories.  And I've been involved in creating materials for classrooms where teachers and students struggled to see girls' abilities on an equal level with boys. 

These experiences, and my experiences as an outreach coordinator for science missions, has admitted me to conversations and opened doors to new understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion in science professions and schools, and to a renewed commitment to working to help science mirror society in representation. 

Again, as a white woman, my connection is often indirect, as a partner with those who do have a direct connection and/or lived experience. 

As an author, illustrator, comics creator and science communicator, I often find myself talking to children, parents, and teachers about my adventures, from diving on coral reefs; to exploring the deep-sea floor; to getting grumbled at by walruses in the Arctic; or being chased by leopard seals in Antarctica.  I tell them that entering STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math/medical) careers, or adding the A to STEAM through bringing arts to the field, is open to them — but, more often than not, I see disbelief in response.  Not only do many kids still see scientists as boring or nutty white people in white coats, but  they see STEM as the realm of people who are brilliant or rich — and who don’t represent the fullness of society. Too often, kids don’t see themselves in STEAM — so they back off from the opportunities that await them. 

And so I’ve gone looking — and have not found what I was looking for: a book, project, or program that is immediate, concrete, practical, enabling, and affirming, as well as inspiring and engaging. My solution to this problem? I built I Was A Kid.

Profiles on the website include a full-size comic showing the profiles, with pull-out quotes from the interview;  a baseball card with just one quote; a signpost indicating turning points along the person’s pathway, accompanied by text stories that show their response to problems or obstacles; audio excerpts giving longer discussion of key points (in some cases, audiograms, providing closed captioning); and links to other materials, including podcasts and video events hosted by partners such as Exploring by the Seat of Your Pants (adding video events), Solve It for Kids (adding podcasts), or the National Writing Project (adding a workshop on science notebooks based on the work of profilees, and on video interviews with them). I Was A Kid is also in proposal as a book series for kids, adding to the scope and usership of the project. 

NEXT YEAR: 

1. Continue creating profiles of STEAM students and professionals, expanding the community representation, and the fields, including artists, technicians, educators, and more STEAM disciplines. 

2. Complete a special project with state of Connecticut and Sea Grant support involving the creation of a Connecticut capsule and distribution to state teachers, parents, and students. 

3. Advance the website through developing further resources, including curriculum materials, more informal education, and recommendations of organizations, activities, and research. To include presentations at AGU and National Science Teachers Association, if accepted. 

4. Continue writing grants for basic funding. 

5. Work with Cape Cod Children's Museum, Mystic Aquarium, Stepping Stones, Connecticut Science Center, and other museums to create exhibits and outreach events for I Was A Kid (these are already underway). 

FIVE YEARS: 

1. Create book series. 

2. Increase reach to educators, visibility to students, and resources for parents. 

3. Develop further relationships with partners to create content or build capsules of profiles. Involve more undergraduates in profiles. 

4. Partner with one or more mentor-matching programs, as with other strategies for succeeding in STEAM professions that come highly recommended by profilees. Or create one of my own? 

5. Increase interactions with museums for exhibits and presentations. 

6. Continue to develop packages and capsules with field expeditions with scientists. (They're under proposal.) 

Feedback from profilees, teachers, and students is positive. 

Use of the website is increasing. 

Downloads of free digital materials and sales of at-cost print materials is increasing. 

I have a proposed project in the works with a national science institution that will involve metrics to determine I Was A Kid's effectiveness in the classroom. 

Social media platform. 

Receptivity of science institutions and professional groups such as the American Geophysical Union and the National Science Teachers Association. 

Requests from STEAM professionals to be profiled. Recommendations of others from the targeted audience. 

Recognition from and involvement of organizations that are likewise dedicated to increasing DEI in the sciences. 

Invitations such as the one from Smithsonian Institution to launch my project there!! 

It's going to be indirect. Who knows how to account for the impact of a comic on a middle schooler who may one day become a videographer who makes a film about a scientist, or who becomes a scientist herself, or who decides that it's okay to be a girl in engineering -- based on having seen these jobs, or people who occupy them, on the I Was A Kid website? 

Who can envision what it will mean to a gender-queer kid who encounters a science student teacher with they/them pronouns... or a kid who works illegally for his migrant parents and reads about how someone like her worked toward a Ph.D... or a kid in a violent home (or marriage) who reads about someone who got out and moved up. . . or a kid with chronic illness who sees a comic about an Antarctic scientist who has dealt with never seeing "the ice"? 

For parents and teachers, and for students themselves, I Was A Kid profiles can create opportunities to 

• see people like oneself 

• to increase a sense of the broadness of society and the range of people working in STEAM 

• to unravel the puzzle of how to apply to, get into, finance, and get through advanced education. What are the majors? What are the methods? 

• to increase one's conceptual vocabulary -- student, teacher, or parent -- about STEAM fields and what's done there. (Once I asked a classroom of middle schoolers living along the Hudson River to name some water-related careers. They were seriously stumped.) 

• to develop empathy for the troubles profilees have endured and the problems they've solved -- and thus to better understand and accept their own hardships and find solutions. 

The internet is the primary way that I Was A Kid appears. It is also available as a digital download (also from the internet) that can be printed out, and by print. Links within and outside the website take the audience to audio, video, and other visual experiences. 

1

2-3 years. 

I think I've covered this pretty thoroughly, but to reiterate, increasing DEI in STEAM fields is the whole reason for this project. 

In addition, I've worked with the Cultural Alliance of Western Connecticut to better understand how to approach communities that may be involved with or impacted by my work, and have sought the advice of several of my profilees whose own work is strongly linked to DEI concerns within their organizations or the sciences in general. 

My goal is to provide my materials for free to those who can use them, whether they are home-schooled students and their parents, formal or informal schools, museums, libraries, etc.  

This requires my work to be supported not by revenue, but by grants, donations, and partnerships. 

Goals include finding a permanent distribution partner and ongoing funding to complete the triangle of creation - output - audience use, without cost to the audience. Efforts to these ends are multipronged, including 

- partnering with nonprofit organizations to secure grant funding 

- working with science organizations to fund capsules, sometimes through their own research and education/outreach budgets

- writing grants for my own funding 

- supporting my work through presentations, workshops, and other teaching about visual storytelling and multimodal learning 

I believe that an angel will come along who wants what I want: 

• to increase representation in STEAM fields 

• to increase visibility of those representing diversity in STEAM fields to kids who will benefit from their stories

• to provide concrete examples to kids of fields, jobs, and the paths of individuals holding these positions 

• to clarify and demystify pathways into higher education 

• to increase science identity, a wish to become involved in the topics about which one is passionate, and a positive self-image among historical underrepresented groups 

This person (this angel) will see that I Was A Kid is there to tell these stories, and that I know where my audience is. This angel will fund the production and free distribution of this effort's physical output, and will support the ongoing creation of the materials on the website. In return, they will increase their own public image as a supporter of the next generation, as well as STEAM fields and increased diversity as a public good. 

Here are examples of my efforts, during and after funding my initial proof-of--concept first 15 profiles myself. 

The Harvard/Girguis Lab capsule was funded by their Moore Foundation grant.

The International Ocean Discovery Program capsule was funded by their own outreach/education budget. 

I bartered content (science comics) for audio editing with a colleague at a national science institution. 

I bartered profile creation for curriculum materials and video production with the Young Scientists Program at the University of Southern California. 

I was paid to present I Was a Kid at Smithsonian and at schools, libraries, and museums. 

I've applied for and received grants from Sea Grant and the State of Connecticut Department Economic and Community Development programs. 

I worked under contract with the National Writing Project to develop curriculum content and a workshop with several profilees. 

I was hired to go on an ocean expedition and create comic profiles of the participants, OECI. 

I've traded contacts and content with partners such as Exploring by the Seat of Your Pants and the podcast Solve It for Kids. 

Efforts underway include grant applications, an invitation to propose creating  a capsule with another national ocean research organization.  

And don't forget the book proposal!