Mountain Region Research

The Mountain Hub research focused on the unique experiences of STEM students with disabilities at their universities and colleges. Additionally, Mountain Hub researchers are capturing students with disabilities perceptions and feelings around shifting from STEM college student to early STEM professional. To fully capture the multi-faceted experiences of people with disabilities, Mountain Hub researchers employ photo elicitation interviewing/photovoice methods, inviting student participants to take photos of their everyday lives and discuss those photos with a researcher.

In the initial pilot project, 6 students from 3 different state funded universities submitted 5-6 photographs each and participated in a 60-minute interviews. Participants juxtaposed photographs and stories of social support systems, mobility aids, and self-accommodation measures against images of professor communication exchanges, inaccessible public bathrooms, and chaotic or impoverished private lives. Overall, students disclosed that STEM learning environments did not often align with their learning needs and university policies and procedures exacerbated or failed to account for the realities of life with a physical or cognitive disability. Despite these circumstances however, students showed tremendous resilience, self-discipline, and creativity – applying engineering design principles to the fashioning of accessible clothing, overcommunicating with professors to ensure their accommodations were honored, strategically choosing classes with professors with reputations for fairness and kindness, waking up early to ensure they made it to class on time because accessible buses ran less frequently than regular buses, caring hand sanitizer to ensure reduce the spread of disease when they could not wash their hands in inaccessible sinks.

The second phase of research launched in Spring 2025, with the goal of recruiting more TAPDINTO-STEM students to add more photos, experiences, and stories to the initial dataset and to expand the scope beyond STEM classrooms to student perceptions and feelings about their future inside of STEM workforces.