Design. Her research interests include the education of Black and Brown students, especially those from immigrant communities, in the fields of engineering and science. In addition to her ongoing work on culturally relevant VR science teaching, Greses seeks to understand issues of diversity and inclusion in engineering. Specifically, she investigates how language influences who engages in the technical fields. She was recently awarded the Stanford DARE fellowship. Globally, she is part of the Galapagos research-practice partnership that seeks to improve the teaching of science for underserved communities through education for sustainability. Before coming to Stanford, she was a bilingual educator at Plano ISD. In Plano, she served in the Gifted and Talented Advisory Committee and the Elementary Curriculum Design team. Prior to starting her career in education, Greses was a project manager for engineering programs funded by the European nonprofits in the Caribbean. She holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Santo Domingo Technological Institute, a M.Eng. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, and a M.Ed. in School Leadership from Southern Methodist University.

This mixed-methods study examines the implications of using the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) to design an elementary science lesson grounded in four virtual reality (VR) videos. Given the need for additional understandings of how elementary science educators can infuse cultural relevance alongside content development, this study illuminates how designing for CRP can utilize VR as a pedagogical platform to bridge science instruction and students’ lived experiences. Using pre- and post-attitudinal surveys (n=145) and post interviews (n=48), we examined students’ perceptions of a single virtual reality lesson about energy and food chains. The data suggest that learning through a CRP-based VR design (CRP-VR) enhanced students’ perception of the connection between the science content and its socio-political application to social justice issues. Implications highlight the potential of leveraging VR technology as a means to provide science instruction that explicitly affords students the opportunity to connect content learning and social action.

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Environmental education seeks to foster meaningful connections to local and global environments through creative nature experiences. Responding to critiques of historical inequities, practitioners are prioritizing equitable access for historically marginalized youth, particularly from Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities; this identity-centered prioritization, while essential, generates questions of normativity, diversity, relevance, and engagement within identity groups. Drawing on creativity as meaningful person-world encounters characterized by pluriperspective, future-oriented, nonlinear, and open-ended qualities, this chapter uses culturally sustaining pedagogy to explore how environmental education studies (a) operationalize Latinidad and associated constructs, (b) enact creative experiences in environmental education, and (c) qualify the roles of Latinx communities in shaping these creative experiences. We review studies of environmental education with Latinx youth in the United States that explicitly employ culturally sustaining approaches to engage these communities. We bring together these frameworks as a strategy to move beyond discrete notions of Latinidad in environmental education and toward nuanced conceptions of what it means to acknowledge and cultivate environmental literacies in these diverse comunidades.