Dr. Maria Olivares is a research assistant professor in the Language & Literacy Education program at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. She is affiliated with the Earl Center for Learning & Innovation. She is an artist, poet, and research scientist whose work explicitly acknowledges and challenges the role of race and racism as obstacles for achieving equity in STEM through research, practice, professional development, mentoring, and outreach activities for youth and communities of color.<\/p>\n
Through design-based research, Dr. Olivares works with youth, teachers, and researchers to design formal and informal learning environments that support expansive understandings of STEM. Her research includes examining forms of attunement toward intercultural ways of knowing and being, and reconceptualizing representation and dissemination of scholarship to include multiple forms of art and humanistic expression. Her work sits at the intersection of critical relationality, social justice, equity, intellectual authority distribution, making cultures and practices, and the role of computation and new learning technologies in STEM identity development.<\/p>\n
Dr. Olivares is originally from South Central Los Angeles, the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants, and the first in her family to gain access to higher education.<\/p>\n