Project Voces: Establishing Student Voice to Drive STEM Education Transformation

Florida International University's (FIU's) Project Voces aims to amplify student voice and agency as a key institutional change mechanism in our campus' ongoing STEM education transformation. Project Voces (Voices for Organizing Change in Educational Systems) is a five-year NSF HSI Institutional Transformation project that launched in Fall 2022, and recognizes that student perspectives are usually an untapped resource that have the potential to transform educational systems. Thus the project embeds student voice and promotes student agency through a coherent collection of activities that directly impact students as well as facilitates faculty professional development and institutional policy changes.

Project Voces' core innovation is establishing an undergraduate Voceros program, developing their leadership skills, and integrating their agency into a comprehensive engagement of students, faculty, departments and the institution. This work buids upon existing successful FIU student leader models, including Learning Assistants that facilitate learning in STEM classrooms and JEDI Ambassadors who conduct Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion research in Engineering and Computing. Voceros will impact classroom instruction for all STEM students by partnering with STEM faculty through professional development institutes and co-designing asset-based curriculum that embraces student experiences. They will also engage in STEM education research to gain a wider perspective of institutional practices as well as lead a sequence of curricular reviews to improve transparency of STEM degree programming. These elements lead to an annual Student ComPASS event, paralleling an existing institutional accountability process, where Voceros will review institutional data and share insight on addressing concerns. As part of the communication mission, they will impact our South Florida community by unmasking student experiences through storytelling. Combined, these efforts intentionaly counter the norm that student outcome data is the domain of the administration. The presentation will highlight the project design, share initial outcomes and solicit insight from attendees.