Enacting Rightful Presence to Promote Students' Belonging

Posted: Feb 24 2022 by

Ruthmae Sears
University of South Florida

Ken Griffith
Texas Tech University

Alec Cattell
Texas Tech University

Alec Cattell, Texas Tech University, Ken Griffith, Texas Tech University, and Ruthmae Sears, University of South Florida

As we educators pursue equitable and just practices in STEM education, we acknowledge our students' diverse experiences and challenges, and we recognize the importance of their sense of belonging in our learning communities. Too often, we focus on quantifiable differences without considering how our actions and policies can impact the ways our students' voices and presence are valued and the extent to which their beliefs and dispositions are respected within our community. By enacting rightful presence (Calabrese & Tan, 2020), we can foster the sense of belonging that is essential for all students, particularly underrepresented groups, to succeed in our classrooms (Rainey et al., 2018 ). More

Learning from Evaluation of Effective Teaching Event: Change Leaders Perspectives

Posted: Sep 27 2021 by

Rachel Renbarger
Western Michigan University

Madhura Kulkarni
Northern Kentucky University

Madhura Kulkarni, Northern Kentucky University and Rachel Renbarger, Western Michigan University

At the end of August, three ASCN working groups came together to put on an event called, "Evaluation of effective and inclusive teaching: How can teaching and learning center professionals be involved in change for social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion?" (We will refer to social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion as JEDI for ease throughout this post.) We recommend that people interested in the event watch the recording and access the resources on the event page, but the purpose of this blog post is to highlight what we learned from this event so that other change agents can implement the findings into their work immediately.

Big questions that we wanted to focus on included the who, what, and how of transforming teaching. To understand how change happens, and how we might help create teaching evaluation change on our campuses, we asked Dr. Susan Elrod to describe her work modeling institutional change. More

Transforming Institutions Takeaways

Posted: Jun 24 2021 by

Rachel Renbarger
Western Michigan University

Rachel Renbarger, Western Michigan University

Last week concluded the 2021 Transforming Institutions Conference that marked the 10th year of convening like-minded change leaders. The event was a rousing success; we had over 250 participants from at least 3 continents with over 40 concurrent presentations, 60+ posters, and 4 workshops containing research-based strategies for improving higher education. What did we learn from such an amazing event? More

Departmental Change: Sustaining Impacts

The Departmental Action Team (DAT) Project supports departments as they make changes to their undergraduate programs. In previous posts, we described the principles that underlie the DAT Project, the initial stages of DAT formation, and how DATs accomplish change initiatives with the support of facilitators. In about 70% of cases, departments that host DATs continue to catalyze change after external DAT facilitation ends, and sometimes even after the DAT itself ends. In this final post, we explore several ways DATs catalyze sustained impacts. More

Do you need a change theory?

Posted: Apr 6 2021 by

Daniel Reinholz
San Diego State University

Tessa Andrews
University of Georgia

Tessa Andrews, University of Georgia and Dan Reinholz, San Diego State University

Do you have an innovative new approach to teaching? Are you an educator who is frustrated by the lack of support for new teaching methods? Are you an administrator trying to improve education on your campus? Although research has taught us a lot about how to improve teaching and learning, actually making these improvements a reality can be much more challenging. That is where change theory comes in. More