When Greses Pérez started out as a teacher, working mainly with students of color in Title I elementary schools, she was alarmed to see many of her students missing out on opportunities to engage in STEM topics.
“The population I taught was made up of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous students, many of whom were bilingual,” she explained. “They were perceived by some teachers and school administrators as not speaking the right way and therefore lacking the competencies they needed to be successful. My students, most of whom were born in and raised in the United States, received extra language support-but then there wasn’t time in their schedules for them to learn science and engineering.”
Pérez’s students yearned for exposure to those subjects, however. “They would ask me if they could come in on the weekends and do engineering and science,” she said.
Now the McDonnell Family assistant professor of engineering education at Tufts School of Engineering, Pérez recognized her students’ interest, enthusiasm, and capacity to learn and began to explore nontraditional modes of teaching them. One time, for example, she translated an English-language U.S. Department of Agriculture soil classification chart into Spanglish and added pictures to make it more accessible.
“The students followed along, learning exactly what they needed to learn,” she explained. “They were connecting ideas with meaningful implications for their communities, engaging with the material, and getting really excited about the subject.”
Moments such as that one led Pérez to her current field of research, focusing on the interdisciplinary study of language and cognition for students who experience a cultural and linguistic mismatch between the practices of their communities and those in engineering and science.
“I look at virtual and physical learning environments and consider the role of language and culture in facilitating learning,” she explained. “How can we invite people to bring their background into whatever they are learning? And into engineering and science? How can we expand the ways we communicate in science and engineering-and the ways we value and legitimize communicative practices?”
Her interests in such questions emerge partly from her own experiences and her professional background. When she worked in civil and environmental engineering, Pérez was aware that, as a Spanish-speaking Black Latina, she didn’t fit the traditional image others have of an engineer.
It was difficult enough being a woman in a field that largely lacks female and minority representation-and, in particular, women leaders-but the way she spoke also seemed to play a role, she said. Pérez observed people hearing her speak and automatically drawing conclusions about her competencies-whatever those conclusions were.
