What did we START? Three Years Supporting Intergenerational Department Change Teams to Build Anti-racist Courses and Curricula

In the summer of 2020, three Brown University faculty (2 STEM, 1 humanities) and three staff from Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning began developing the Seminar on Transformation around Anti-Racist Teaching (START) program, a longer-term educational development initiative focused on empowering departmental intergenerational teams (faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and staff) to create departmental change. START aims to address all three levels of anti-racist pedagogy: (1) critical reflection of ourselves as learners and teachers, (2) course content and teaching approaches, and (3) institutional change (Kishimoto, 2018). Teams work together to examine their own positionalities as instructors and learners, engage in core concepts and frameworks in inclusive and anti-racist teaching and academic change work, enhance the syllabus and learning activities for a course taught by a faculty team member to enhance equity and students' sense of belonging, and collaborate with departmental leadership to identify a feasible project that the team can carry out collaboratively.

The third iteration of START's semester-long program is currently underway. To date, 20 departmental teams have participated in the START program. These departments include 9 STEM departments (biology; chemistry; computer science; earth, environmental and planetary sciences; mathematics; neuroscience; and three biomedical departments). This presentation will offer an overview of the START curriculum, best practices and revisions to the facilitation process that we have made along the way, and outcomes from the completed START cohorts. The program evaluation includes end-of-program learning gains and measures of course changes and departmental projects one year after completion.