Diversifying steam
Children's Books Aren't Diverse Enough
The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published 2018 statistics on diversity in published children’s books. While 50% of the characters were white and 27% were animals/other, a small margin was left for racial minorities in the United States. Only 1% of the characters were Indigenous and 5% were Latinx. Even then, the largest portion of minority characters were Black characters, and there were only 10%. This showcases a pervasive problem, one we care about working to solve from a student's perspective.
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how we do it
Who are you?
Students & parents
Teespring
We recently opened a Teespring store with the lowest prices possible so that the young girls in your life could have apparel and stickers with characters that represent them. We do not make a profit.
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Teachers
Illustrations
A core value of ours is to provide representation for minorities in STEAM, something that really doesn't exist right now. We want every little girl who sees our art to feel proud of herself for her interests and passions and to know that she belongs. All of our art is by our founder, Danielle Boyer, and is provided to you for noncommercial use.
Listen to our Podcast
STEAM Strong Posters
Diversifying your classroom or home with our creative and diverse STEAM posters, created by our founder, Danielle Boyer, for free with non-commercial use. Every child deserves to see themselves represented in STEAM.
15,000+ Free Books Distributed
STEAM Cultural Connection Series
We decided to tackle the problem of diversity in children's books by creating five free diverse STEAM books for grades K-3 in January 2019. In the Continuing Culture version of the series, their absence of words and numerals allows children from any culture to enjoy learning about everything from environmental conservation to robotics. They feature empowering children of different ethnicities, with different religions, and with disabilities. Children's books shouldn't be isolating or unrelatable, and we are eager to continue to see more changes like this being made in the children's book community.
Upcoming Work
We are currently developing a second version of our books with improved graphic design and longer captions. They are specifically geared toward girls. They are due to be released for free on our website in mid-2021.
Earth Books
Our founder, Danielle Boyer, is an environmental activist and wanted to make sure that the robotics teams that she mentors were equipped to handle the environmental issues around them and could use their unique STEAM skills to become innovators and changemakers, so she wrote a series of activity books just for them.
For the first time ever, we have made our Earth Books available to all youth robotics teams beyond just Danielle's 35 teams. Contact us and let's bring Earth Books to your team!
Indigenous Book Recommendations
License our Art
Your support of our diverse illustrations not only enables more children to see characters who look like them but also enables us to fund the work that we do here at The STEAM Connection. We are a charity that offers all of our content for free to youths and greatly appreciate your support.