Field sciences, and particularly polar field sciences, have long been recognized as scientific arenas that have privileged certain identities throughout their histories, with white men dominating the cultural landscape (Carey et al. 2016; Hulbe, Wang, and Ommanney 2010; M. Seag, Badhe, and Choudhry 2020). Although Indigenous peoples of the Arctic have lived as part of northern ecosystems for millennia, both the polar North and South have been represented in popular discourse and media for the past two centuries as places to be “discovered” and scientifically studied through conventionally masculine and overtly colonial acts of bravery and conquest (Bloom 1993; Carey et al. 2016). These endeavors have occurred to the explicit exclusion of women from research expeditions as recently as the 1980s (Seag 2017), though historically Indigenous women were sometimes employed as domestic helpers in Arctic research camps (Rosner 2009), demonstrating the entangled nature of the colonial and sexist past of Arctic sciences. Today, women continue to be severely underrepresented in polar science fields internationally (Hulbe, Wang, and Ommanney 2010), and barriers for women may be the most widely recognized form of marginalization within the polar science community. Yet while acknowledging barriers for women is important, calls are being voiced to address similar or worse challenges faced by other marginalized groups, including people of color, people across the gender and sexuality spectrums, people with disabilities, and people with caring responsibilities, let alone those who carry multiple marginalized identities (Seag, Badhe, and Choudhry 2020).
Having blazed a similar path, outdoor fields such as mountaineering, sea kayaking, and other forms of recreational travel in backcountry settings have also been criticized for their white, male, middle- and upper-class, able-bodied histories (Stanley 2020; Warren et al. 2014), though these means of travel have been mastered over millennia by Indigenous people moving through their home landscapes (Bhandari and Cavalleri 2019; Noble et al. 1994). Various sociocultural and economic barriers to participation in outdoor fields have been identified that disadvantage women and people of color (Schwartz and Corkery 2011), while privileging hegemonic masculinity (Kennedy and Russell 2021) and centering a white male history of outdoor adventure (Warren et al. 2019). Similarly to polar field sciences, there is a current movement calling for improving outdoor adventure education initiatives to promote inclusion across a broader spectrum of identities (Warren and Breunig 2019).
It is in response to these challenges and calls to action that science and outdoor programs such as those offered by the Inspiring Girls* Expeditions organization came into being. Inspiring Girls* offers unique and tuition-free science, art, and outdoor experiential education programs for 16- to 18-year-old youth with marginalized genders, including several expeditions within Alaska in the US Arctic and Subarctic. Through these tuition-free 12-day immersive expeditions, diverse cohorts of youth and their early-career instructor teams are provided the opportunity to learn and grow together in a welcoming and supportive environment. Using Inspiring Girls* as a model, this article suggests practices for promoting the inclusion of diverse identities within Arctic sciences and outdoor fields, rooted both in the literature as well as in lessons learned in more than ten years of providing educational opportunities for youth in Alaska.
Inspiring Girls* Past and Present
History of Inspiring Girls*
In 1999, author Erin Pettit, Founder of Inspiring Girls*, first began hosting summer field science expeditions for teenagers as a pilot program in the US North Cascades mountains, through the University of Washington. In 2001, Pettit created the flagship Inspiring Girls* expedition, Girls* on Ice, held on Mount Baker in partnership with the North Cascades Institute, as an alpine-focused learning opportunity geared towards building space for girls and women in the male-dominated cryospheric sciences. In 2006, Inspiring Girls* moved to a tuition-free format in order to expand access to participants from all socioeconomic backgrounds and, through the application process, emphasized selecting an ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse team of participants. In 2012, when Pettit was a faculty member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she mentored three graduate students, including author Joanna Young, to launch a second Girls* on Ice expedition in Alaska. Since then, motivated teams of women have launched expeditions at various institutions internationally, and Inspiring Girls* currently hosts expeditions in Switzerland, Canada, Austria, Kyrgyzstan, New Zealand, and in three states in the US.
Since 2012, Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska has grown to host three Arctic and Subarctic expeditions annually in different remote Alaskan landscapes (see Figure 1). Girls* on Ice Alaska, launched in 2012, is a glacier mountaineering expedition in the Alaska Range. It is focused on the mountain ecosystem, including ice and snow, glacial rivers, and the alpine plants and animals that thrive in these environments. Girls* on Water began in 2019 and uses sea kayaking to travel through the nearshore coastal ecosystem of Kachemak Bay in Southcentral Alaska. This landscape features glacial estuaries, abundant fish populations, and a large intertidal zone teeming with marine life. Finally, Girls* in the Forest, launched in 2021, explores the upper Chena River in the boreal forest of Interior Alaska. By foot and by packraft—a packable, single-person raft—participants travel through wildfire-modified landscapes inherent to northern climes, learning about post-wildfire plant succession and the role of rivers within the forest ecosystem. As of 2022, Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska has served more than 120 youth aged 16 to 18 on these expeditions.
Photos from Inspiring Girls* expeditions. Clockwise from top left: Girls* in the Forest participants collect data in Alaska's boreal forest; the Girls* on Water team engages in a science lesson in Tutka Bay; Girls* on Ice Alaska participants collect data on Gulkana Glacier; art created by the Girls* on Ice Alaska team; Girls* in the Forest participants launch their packrafts on the Chena River.
Citation: sibirica 22, 1; 10.3167/sib.2023.220103
While we are familiar with a small number of educational organizations offering related experiences that integrate polar science with backcountry travel (e.g., the Juneau Icefield Research Program and Students on Ice), each is different in one or more aspects, such as target age, science focus, and whether or not art is integrated within the curriculum. Inspiring Girls* is also the only one among these programs to offer tuition-free participation to all students in order to eliminate the substantial financial barrier to access to opportunities such as these, and to focus on offering the experience to marginalized students and allies with the intentional goal of diversifying field sciences and outdoor recreation.
Author Positionality
Author Joanna Young has been involved with Inspiring Girls* in various capacities since 2011, including as co-founder of the Girls* on Ice Alaska program. Young was a seasonal science instructor for Girls* on Ice Alaska five times as well as an informal, part-time coordinator between 2012 and 2017. Young was also a member of the global Inspiring Girls* Steering Committee from 2015 to 2022, and has been the Director of Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska since 2020. Young's graduate degrees (MS and PhD) were in Geophysics and included interdisciplinary elements, including as first author on an environmental education publication on the impacts of Inspiring Girls* programs (Young, Conner, and Pettit 2020), further described below.
Author Sarah Clement has served as a Program Coordinator for Inspiring Girls* since 2018, transitioning to the specific role of Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska part-time Program Coordinator in 2020. Clement holds an M.Ed. in environmental education and is working towards her PhD in science education, expected in 2024.
Author Erin Pettit is the Founder of Girls* on Ice and the now-global Inspiring Girls* Expeditions, and has served as overall organizational Director. She has been a Geophysics faculty member at Oregon State University since 2018. Prior to that, Pettit was faculty at UAF, where she mentored Young and other graduate students in launching Girls* on Ice Alaska based on the original Girls* on Ice model. This mentorship covered expedition aspects such as fundraising, curriculum development, and expedition planning. She also served as academic advisor to several students while at UAF, including as PhD advisor to author Young.
All three authors identify as female and white.
The Participants
Inspiring Girls* strategically selects 16- to 18-year-old participants because they are at a transformative time in their lives, when they are nearing the end of high school and making decisions about their futures. In the earlier days of Inspiring Girls*, the primary audience was young women, in an effort to create space for women in historically male-dominated fields. Research has shown that while girls are often as interested in science as boys in elementary school, they can drift away over time (Brotman and Moore 2008), resulting in the underrepresentation of women in science careers worldwide (Avolio, Chávez, and Vílchez-Román 2020). The expeditions were therefore designed to provide a transformative experience and to increase participants’ connections to female instructor-mentors, factors that are helpful for strengthening interest in the sciences among young women (Halpern et al. 2007; Pugh et al. 2021). Research has also shown benefits specific to outdoor education programs for all-female teams, including promoting feelings of safety and increased connection to others (Whittington et al. 2011) as well as long-term resiliency (Whittington, Aspelmeier, and Budbill 2016).
From these beginnings, Inspiring Girls* has grown in recent years towards even greater inclusivity across the gender identity spectrum. While acknowledging that our name is imperfect, Inspiring Girls* welcomes cisgender girls and transgender, agender, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and genderqueer youth. While this expanded eligibility means grouping together young women and youth with other marginalized gender identities even though their lived experiences are not the same, our motivation is to leave behind the gender binary lens often used to discuss gender inequalities in order to welcome more people into science and the outdoors.
Because the systemic barriers that actively marginalize certain groups at the expense of others are intertwined, Inspiring Girls* also simultaneously takes an intersectional approach to address the underrepresentation of other minoritized groups in science and the outdoors. Ultimately, we aspire to transform the scientific and outdoor fields in ways that actively honor all people. Our approach, rooted in best practices from the literature, is described below.
Educational Model
The educational model of Inspiring Girls* connects exploration and inquiry in three core components: science, art, and outdoor exploration (see Figure 2). The model is built upon exploring the natural world through inquiry and observation in order to reveal the interconnectedness of physical, biological, and human dimensions of different ecosystems. Our approach emphasizes curiosity, creativity, and courage, and challenges participants to step outside of their intellectual, physical, and social comfort zones in a supportive environment.
The three core components of Inspiring Girls* Expeditions: science, art, and outdoor exploration.
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Our expeditions are modeled on professional science expeditions and are led by early-career scientists, artists, and outdoor guides. The 12-day format is scaffolded to give participants progressively more ownership over their own learning. In the first several days, the instructors lead the group: they teach participants the basics of living well in the field, and model scientific inquiry by making observations about the landscape and demonstrating small-scale science experiments. Over the subsequent days, the participants design and conduct their own scientific investigations and deepen their outdoor and artistic skills.
Conducting Field Science
Throughout the expedition, participants get hands-on experience engaging in authentic field science practice (see Figure 3). They are guided by professional scientist instructors, who leverage the sights and features of the landscape for inquiry-based science exploration. The curriculum and activities build incrementally, and include: guided observation activities (e.g., initial drawing and writing exercises to help participants tune into their surroundings); “teachable moments” (i.e., on-the-go lessons from instructors, inspired by interesting landscape elements); instructor-led experiments (small-scale experiments designed to model scientific inquiry); and finally, participant-led research (wherein small groups identify a testable question and design a measurement campaign that they implement during the expedition, and present their findings to a public audience).
Girls* in the Forest participants collect temperature and velocity data on the Chena River. Photo courtesy of Sarah Clement.
Citation: sibirica 22, 1; 10.3167/sib.2023.220103
Through this process of observing the landscape with an inquiry mindset and learning to conduct authentic field science research, participants have the opportunity to “try on” their identities as scientists and imagine future versions of themselves as scientists (Basu and Calabrese Barton 2009). This self-concept forms part of their “science identity,” which includes the degree to which they see themselves as a science person and how connected they feel to a science community of practice (Aschbacher, Li, and Roth 2010). Science interest is largely related to whether girls’ personal identities do or do not overlap with their views of who does science (Brickhouse, Lowery, and Schultz 2000), including for students from minoritized backgrounds (Chang et al. 2011; Hazari, Sadler, and Sonnert 2013). Previous research on the outcomes of Inspiring Girls*, including Girls* on Ice Alaska, showed that the expeditions help promote science identity development among our participants by exposing them to a range of scientific career possibilities, and by making tacit some of the invisible aspects of careers in scientific fields, such as teamwork and perseverance (Carsten-Conner, Perin, and Pettit 2018).
Our expedition science curricula and activities are also designed to reveal the interconnectedness of ecosystems, including people. This framing emphasizes that humans are an integral part of the environment and not separate from it (Chapin III et al. 2009). A study on the outcomes of the glacier-based expeditions hosted by Inspiring Girls* indeed revealed that interacting with the glacier environment helped participants understand humans’ ability to influence the natural world, in turn deepening their sense of connection to the environment and promoting pro-environmental motivation (Young, Conner, and Pettit 2020). These findings are promising given previous research that has shown, for underrepresented students in particular, that the personal relevance of science to students’ lives has a significant impact on their sense of comfort within a science program of study (Hurtado et al. 2010).
Outdoor Exploration
Field scientists and artists must have the skills to safely navigate the environments in which they work. It is from this self-efficacy perspective that we approach outdoor exploration. Similarly to their science learning, participants learn and develop skills incrementally in the early days of the expedition towards tackling a larger objective (i.e., a “peak experience”) at the end. In Girls* on Ice, for example, in order to collect data, participants must first learn to walk in crampons (footwear with spikes for travel on ice), travel on a rope team (a climbing technique for glaciers) (see Figure 4), and use climbing tools on steep snow slopes. Participants practice these skills towards their peak experience, such as by ascending a nearby summit or other objective they decide on as a team, providing an opportunity to test their mental and physical perseverance. While instructors follow the highest standards for safety protocols, ultimately each participant must learn for themselves their own body's ability to navigate through the remote landscape, whether a glacier, coastal environment, or boreal river.
Girls* on Ice Alaska participants trek down Gulkana Glacier on a rope team after climbing a nearby summit for their peak experience. Photo courtesy of Hannah Perrine Mode.
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The extensive benefits of outdoor education and recreation for the general population have long been recognized, including numerous social (Burt and Brewer 1971), psychological (Brown 1981), and health benefits (Breitenstein and Ewert 1990). However, few studies to date have examined additional benefits that likely exist for marginalized groups other than women. In one of these studies, Indigenous participants in an outdoor leadership program in northern Ontario, Canada, described how traveling through nature by canoe made them feel more connected to a holistic life rooted in physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health (Ritchie et al. 2015). Another qualitative study on the northern sport of dog mushing identified that, despite being seen as masculine, mushing can be empowering for people of all genders, including those who reject the gender binary (Beyer and Caron 2022). Overall, the scarcity of research on the benefits of outdoor recreation for marginalized groups both underscores the severity of past and present exclusion of different identities from participation, and points to the need for approaches to creating a welcoming outdoor adventure culture.
Artistic Inquiry
The Inspiring Girls* educational model intentionally integrates scientific and artistic observation. In the early days of each expedition, art and science are framed as parallel forms of inquiry, and guided observation activities in both are used to help participants take notice of the landscape (see Figure 5). Lessons in both art and science are then interwoven throughout the expedition, such as introducing the scientific concept of albedo (an object's ability to reflect light) in parallel to a lesson on the artistic element of value (darkness or lightness of an object). Participants are also encouraged to integrate a creative art component into their science research projects, and the public presentation at the end often includes a display of participants’ field art.
A Girls* on Water participant practices sketching sea stars. Photo courtesy of Laura Jackson.
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Our purposeful integration of art and science keeps with a long tradition of expeditionary art, which carries the goal of documenting observations and improving public understanding, including on many past and current scientific expeditions to the Arctic (Beans 2021). Though art and science are sometimes viewed in opposition to one another, the two disciplines share common elements, including the necessity of creative thinking and sharp observational skills (Fulton and Simpson-Steele 2016). Teaching science and art together is one strategy to make science more accessible and welcoming to youth who might not otherwise be drawn to it (e.g., Reis et al. 2015). As such, there is a growing movement to promote STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) learning because of the potential benefits science-art integration affords a diverse group of youth (Carsten Conner et al. 2017).
Practices for an Inclusive Science and Outdoor Community
Motivated by the findings in the literature above, Inspiring Girls* aspires to reimagine the inclusivity of science and the outdoors in Alaska and beyond using the following approaches.
Building diverse participant teams
Inspiring Girls* selects expedition participants through an essay-based application process designed to get to know each applicant as a whole person. Questions are crafted to learn about their personalities, potential, and passion, rather than the traditional focus on past achievements or school grades. Letters from teachers or mentors also illuminate each applicant's daily lives at home and at school. Once we have narrowed down to a group of top applicants, we intentionally build teams of participants with a diversity of interests and identities.
During this team selection process, we take additional steps to ensure our expeditions are as accessible as reasonably and safely possible for potential participants with mental or physical health challenges or disabilities. At Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska, after identifying any potential challenges in the application, we discuss with the applicant and parent(s)/guardian(s) whether and how we may best accommodate them on their expedition. We take a similar individualized approach to accommodating specific clothing, food, or other traditions for participants from diverse religious backgrounds.
In addition to using this two-stage approach for selecting teams with varying interests, abilities, and beliefs, at Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska we have successfully built teams from a wide range of cultural, racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and family backgrounds. For example, to date, 30 percent of our participants have identified as Alaska Native, and 30 percent as other non-white. Previous outdoor adventure education research has shown the benefits of learning in groups that vary racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically. For example, one study indicated the potential benefits of increasing diversity within a group (e.g., increased feelings of belonging), while also highlighting the need to have explicit conversations about how the diversity within the group impacts the group experience (Paisley et al. 2014).
Removing Financial Barriers to Access
Extracurricular science educational activities can be expensive, both in terms of financial and opportunity cost for youth operating within their family's socioeconomic circumstances, in turn serving as a barrier to access that inhibits inclusive participation (Fouad et al. 2010). Similarly, tuition, travel, and expensive technical equipment for multi-day expedition-based outdoor education programs is notoriously costly, once again impeding participation (Schwartz and Corkery 2011). Simply removing the financial barrier is not, itself, enough to make outdoor programs inclusive, though research has shown it may pave the way for more diverse groups of students to come together (Paisley et al. 2014; Rose and Paisley 2012; Snellman, Silva, and Putnam 2015).
Inspiring Girls* is one of very few organizations to offer programs tuition-free, including access to our complete technical equipment library at no cost. Though we offer travel stipends to every participant who requests one, we encourage our participants to pay for some or all of their travel costs to the expedition launch site through fundraising or other means, in order to help instill both a sense of commitment and ownership over their experience. We rely on various funding sources to offer expeditions tuition-free. Support has been sourced from science funding agencies, private and corporate philanthropic foundations, and individual financial and in-kind donations. Leadership staff at each global Inspiring Girls* location devote substantial time each year to securing funds.
Intentional Hiring Practices for Instructors
Inspiring Girls* instructors are critical to the success of our expeditions. The model instructor team includes at least one professional scientist, artist, and outdoor guide, and comprises a mix of experienced and new instructors. This ensures balance between our three core educational components, continuity of institutional knowledge through seasoned instructors, and novel expertise and approaches through new instructors.
Previous research has outlined recommendations to foster welcoming and equitable work environments in environmental- and outdoor-focused education organizations, including within hiring practices (Romero et al. 2019). At Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska, we recently instituted many of these recommendations. For example, we provide position descriptions with: 1) a high level of detail for each position, to empower applicants with knowledge of expectations; 2) separate minimum and preferred qualifications, to broaden eligibility; 3) the option of requesting a professional development scholarship, and; 4) up-front salary transparency. We also implemented standardized interview protocols, including questions aimed at discovering an applicant's commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Though we believe that examining our hiring practices is an important starting point for welcoming future instructors, we also acknowledge we must not fail to examine underlying programmatic structures that may reinforce the oppression and exclusion of instructors from marginalized communities (Romero et al. 2019; 2022). For this reason, as a community we engage in the following learning activities.
Instructor Training and Community Learning Opportunities
As well as providing a powerful learning opportunity for participants, Inspiring Girls* aims to support a professional development network for our instructors, who are often early-career. Our goal is to provide instructors a sense of community and the opportunity to learn and collaborate in community-directed ways.
Our monthly community meetings serve as a space to engage in growth-oriented and sometimes difficult conversations to inspire reflection and change. Previous discussions have surrounded topics such as navigating our organization's imperfect name, handling bias incidents in the field, and creating and continuously updating our diversity statement. These discussion topics, which can be proposed by any community member, have led to several organizational improvements.
We have also contracted expert facilitators to lead inclusivity-related workshops. In the past two years, Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska has hosted workshops on LGBTQ+ allyship and traditional land acknowledgement, and provided financial support for mental health first aid trainings. The wider Inspiring Girls* community has also offered workshops on culturally responsive teaching.
Finally, Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska offers scholarships to instructors who seek to build skills in specific areas, in line with recommendations from Valeria Fike Romero and colleagues (2022) that encourage more comprehensive compensation packages. To obtain this scholarship, instructors provide a brief rationale for why the workshop or training would benefit them as individuals and Inspiring Girls* as an organization. In the past three years, Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska has funded wilderness medical certifications and boating skill certifications, and instructors report increased confidence while teaching.
Areas for Improvement
While we celebrate our successes, Inspiring Girls* has many areas for growth towards becoming a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable organization. First and foremost, while Inspiring Girls* has had success at building diversity into both our participant teams and our organization-wide leadership body (i.e., Steering Committee, 2015–2022), as of the time of writing, our instructors and staff—those who interact most closely with participants—remain mostly white, middle-class, and heteronormative. This lack of representation has implications for our expeditions’ inclusivity. Our instructors serve as mentors and role models, and research has shown that engaging with self-relevant or “ingroup” role models can counteract stereotype threat for underrepresented individuals in any domain (Steele, Spencer, and Aronson 2002), including for students in science fields (Lawner et al. 2019; Shin, Levy, and London 2016). It can also lead to increased academic performance and goal-setting among students of color (Zirkel 2002) and sense of school belonging in Native American students (Covarrubias and Fryberg 2015). Without representation of more varied identities among our instructors, many of our participants from marginalized groups are missing this potential source of connection to the science and outdoor fields. We recognize that this lack of representation indicates a need for Inspiring Girls* to deeply examine our history and actively decenter whiteness and heteronormativity such that people who hold minoritized identities will feel as welcome. One approach we are taking is to advertise our open positions specifically among STEM and outdoor professional affinity groups (e.g., for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals), and another goal is to create opportunities for our alumni to grow into instructor roles themselves.
As an organization we are also exploring pathways to better include Indigenous knowledge in our expedition curriculum alongside mainstream science. This is especially important in the Alaska context given the ongoing legacy of colonialism, including the scientific exploitation of Alaska Native communities by Western scientists (Davis and Keemer 2002) and threats to subsistence ways of life and traditional ecological knowledge (Thornton 2001). Studies have shown that Indigenous students often experience tension between their traditional knowledge and school science (Sánchez Tapia, Krajcik, and Reiser 2018) and that science education often privileges Western scientific knowledge over Indigenous ways of knowing (Jin 2021). As such, recommendations for effective engagement of Indigenous students in science include rooting curriculum in Native ways of knowing and ensuring content is culturally-relevant (Jin 2021; Mack et al. 2012) or, in other words, Indigenizing curriculum (Korteweg and Russell 2012; Ragoonaden and Mueller 2017).
To date, instructors have incorporated traditional land acknowledgments and Indigenous place names into their teachings, as well as working to make mainstream science lessons individually and personally relevant for participants. In order to deepen the inclusion of Alaska Native traditional knowledge into our curriculum, at the time of writing, Inspiring Girls* Expeditions Alaska is also actively pursuing funding pathways to hire a Fellow with expert knowledge of Indigenous values, beliefs, ways of life, and ways of learning to lead this effort. One possible conceptual framework to help guide interweaving mainstream scientific and Indigenous knowledge may be “two-eyed seeing,” a guiding principle from Mi'kmaw Elders in Eastern Canada that emphasizes inclusive, creative, visual, and values-driven learning that weaves together worldviews (Bartlett, Marshall, and Marshall 2012). However, identifying the best framework for our context is a step that would most appropriately be undertaken by the Fellow with expertise in Indigenous ways of knowing, or by the Indigenous knowledge holders with whom the Fellow connects as part of this effort. The work will also be guided by findings from a research project we are currently undertaking in partnership with the Alaska Tribal Resilience Learning Network that will engage local Elders and Indigenous alumni to help identify areas for growth in honoring Indigenous ways of knowing and learning on our expeditions. We also continue to seek Alaska Native instructors, both for their expertise and for serving as ingroup role models for our approximately 30 percent Alaska Native participants.
Overall, Inspiring Girls* continues to work with experts to review and revise our practices, language, and curriculum regularly, towards being ourselves a diverse, inclusive, and equitable community, such that we can support the same among our participants.
Conclusion
The relative scarcity of people who hold marginalized identities in science and outdoor recreation is a pressing social and ethical issue that is well-documented in the literature and through lived experience. Given an ongoing legacy of exclusionary practices and systemic barriers to access, many calls have been issued for improving diversity and inclusion in these fields, both in the Arctic context and beyond. Fortunately, both experiential knowledge and scholarly research into effective strategies for achieving these goals continue to grow. Leveraging our own research and best practices from the literature, Inspiring Girls* Expeditions intentionally builds diverse participant teams, offers a tuition-free format, and provides learning opportunities to create space and community for minoritized youth and early-career professionals within field sciences and outdoor recreation. We also continue to take active steps towards our goals of improving the demographic diversity among our instructors to better reflect the diversity we host among participants, and better interweaving Indigenous knowledge alongside mainstream science in our curriculum. We acknowledge that reimagining real inclusivity and equity is a complex reality requiring ongoing vulnerable conversations and reflection as well as numerous intentional approaches to continue dismantling systemic barriers and supporting new members in the scientific and outdoor spheres.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank past and present participants of Inspiring Girls* Expeditions, who inspire us to grow and learn. This work was supported by the Department of Interior Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center under Cooperative Agreement G17AC00213 and by the National Science Foundation under award OIA-1757348 for the Established Program for Stimulating Competitive Research—Fire & Ice award.
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