Creating culturally responsive STEM learning environments through community building at an HSI

As a Hispanic Serving University (HSI), Texas State University is working towards not only to graduate students but also to provide culturally enhancing educational experiences to minoritized learners. Our STEM Communities Project, a 5-year NSF-funded project, strives to implement sustainable student-centered instructional changes in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses. Our approach consists of providing College of Science and Engineering (CoSE) faculty with opportunities to engage in professional development events, assess historical student outcomes in target courses, and redesign those courses by incorporating culturally relevant instructional practices. These activities are designed to create communities among faculty and students within and across the CoSE departments. We will present the progress and challenges of the early stages of the project. In particular, the talk will focus on a component of our project called department instructional assessment (DIA), which is a first step to transforming classrooms based on course-level student data. The DIA process involves analyzing historical data of student outcomes in several STEM courses, spanning from introductory to major-level, to understand inequities across various student demographics. Through the sharing of these course-level data, we encouraged faculty teams to engage in discussions regarding students' learning outcomes and course experiences to recognize areas of instructional improvement with an equity cognitive frame. We recorded and analyzed these faculty discussions to gain insights into the supports that bring about equity thinking. We will share some preliminary findings of this analysis as well as an update on the course redesign workshops.