Reflections on the SMTI/ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion
Inese Berzina-Pitcher Western Michigan University Inese Berzina-Pitcher
Last month in partnership with the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) we organized SMTI/ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion. × One of the major objectives of the workshop was to advance a dialog on diversity and inclusion in undergraduate STEM education between practitioners transforming institutions and researchers who are studying systemic change at higher education institutions. The workshop featured case studies of institutions that are making progress on increasing diversity and inclusion on their campuses. These case studies were used to stimulate small group discussion amongst all participants on what is working or not on their campuses. In addition, small group discussion by ASCN working groups also were offered. With a great interest we read reflections offered by the workshop participants and in turn

Writing a proposal? Here are some great resources from ASCN!
Stephanie Chasteen, University of Colorado at Boulder
For many of us, it's proposal writing season. If you are submitting an NSF-IUSE proposal, there are increasing expectations that the proposal will include a theory of change for how the project aims to achieve its outcomes, and a well-developed evaluation plan for assessing progress toward those outcomes. As an evaluator, I am often asked to help people flesh out these objectives and metrics, and I have found several of the resources on the ASCN site very useful. I was lucky enough to be helping out with the ASCN project when these resources came in, and acted as a temporary librarian to create the list of resources on the site, and so am quite familiar with the breadth of resources. This blog post is to point you toward some of my favorites that have been useful when writing a proposal aimed at institutional change.

Four frames for systemic change in STEM departments
× Four frames for systemic change in STEM departments Aimed specifically at change agents operating at the department level, this short article outlines four areas that change agents should focus on -- ...

Do you need a change theory?
Tessa Andrews, University of Georgia; Daniel 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.

Shared leadership for student success at UW-Whitewater
Susan Elrod, Indiana University-South Bend; Jodie Parys, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; Meg Waraczynski, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Colleges and universities across the country are facing increasing pressure to enroll, retain and graduate more students at a time when the environment for higher education is competitive and often contentious. In order for institutions to be successful in these student success endeavors, everyone must work together. We are all familiar with shared governance as a central tenet of higher education but those processes apply primarily to policy development and decision-making. We argue that shared leadership is required as a holistic approach to goal development and implementation of strategic priorities that foster student and institutional success. In this model, both administrators and faculty/staff leaders play key roles that are essential to the long-term success and sustainability of student success initiatives. Administrators provide a framework for initiatives as they relate to the broader campus community; foster connections between individuals engaged in similar work; provide strategic support and remove barriers to progress; and hold the campus accountable for achieving shared goals. Shared leaders capitalize on their discipline expertise and commitment to student success and program outcomes to fill in the pieces of the framework. They utilize their classroom and program experience to design, test, and apply proposed solutions and also retain ownership of the initiatives and solutions.

Leading Change
× Leading Change This book describes the process of leading change in any type of organization. Suggested Citation Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard business press.

Building on the BOSE Report of Indicators for STEM Education
David Bressoud, Macalester College
As everyone probably knows by now, the National Academies have released their Indicators for Monitoring Undergraduate STEM Education. There clearly is much overlap with the charge to the Working Group on Demonstrating Change. We would appreciate informal discussion around two questions: Is there anything left for us to do? Assuming the answer to #1 is "yes," how can we shape our work so as to build on this report?

Beyond the Diversity Status Quo
Stephen Secules, Florida International University
The arc of history is long but it bends towards freedom. - Martin Luther King Jr. Most of us who work in equity and inclusion have an orientation towards wanting to make progress towards systemic change. There is a shared acknowledgement of past injustice, present struggle, and persistent hope. Consistent with the ASCN, those who work in equity and inclusion in higher education are often seeking long term, sustainable transformations of their institutions. And yet, higher education institutions also prize stability and can be remarkably slow to change. Equity and inclusion concerns get framed as issues for committees and task forces, which eventually become standing entities rather than forces empowered to make radical change. Diversity work feels at risk to budget cuts and to voicing unpopular truths. Overworked and underfunded, the point people for equity and inclusion in an institution can take up somewhat conservative goals: retaining individuals who are underrepresented in a discipline can turn into a standing effort to at least not lose the little bit of diversity left in the department. Although its proponents are often oriented towards transformation, it can seem like higher educational diversity work is far removed from the work of systemic change. In my dissertation I made calls for going "Beyond Diversity as Usual" in undergraduate engineering work, using new research approaches and new ways of conceptualizing institutional practice (Secules, 2017a). Here are a few directions from my work and others' that may help move towards systemic change in the institutional diversity landscape:

Achieving Systemic Change; a sourcebook for Advancing and Funding STEM Education
Achieving Systemic Change; a sourcebook for Advancing and Funding STEM Education The sourcebook from the AACU 2014 workshop discusses how best to effect systemic change in undergraduate STEM, including the ...

Learning from Evaluation of Effective Teaching Event: Change Leaders Perspectives
Madhura Kulkarni, Northern Kentucky University; 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.