Presentations: Session K

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.

Increasing the representation of underrepresented students in STEM is an admirable goal, but it often faces obstacles when it comes to developing a model that can effectively boost diversity among K-12 and undergraduate students. This proposal offers recommendations for institutional leaders and practitioners on how to secure faculty buy-in, funding, and administrative support for a STEM Center that focuses on diversifying the STEM pipeline. The STEM Center for Outreach, Research, and Education (STEM CORE) at Texas Tech University, which is primarily a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), is described, including its origins, development, iterations, impact, and future direction. Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) is used as a theoretical framework to emphasizes the reciprocal interactions between individuals, their environment, and their behavior, and posits that individuals could learn and develop new behaviors through observation and modeling. To create a STEM center using SCT, steps such as establishing a supportive learning environment, using modeling and observation, providing hands-on experiences, fostering self-efficacy, encouraging positive feedback and reinforcement, and using technology can be taken. The purpose of this proposal is to demonstrate how the development of a STEM center can promote diversity, persistence, and representation within STEM fields for K-12 students, undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty. This presentation suggests various ways to gain institutional support and enthusiasm for developing a STEM Center, such as prioritizing K-12, community, and faculty needs, using faculty advocacy for continuous support, leveraging faculty research grants to support programs, engaging with undergraduate students to understand their needs, and developing programs to serve K-12 students, undergraduate students, faculty, and the community simultaneously.

Increasingly, the natural sciences are recognizing the need to address social theories in the study of natural systems. However, postsecondary science education has been shaped by Eurocentric ideologies that depict science as culturally neutral, color-blind, and meritocratic. Institutional change that promotes equity, diversity, and inclusion should include university support for faculty to develop competencies in designing and teaching courses for racial equity in STEM. Our team is designing a 2-quarter undergraduate course sequence that engages prospective elementary school teachers in "Science and Engineering for a Just Society": a project-based, interdisciplinary science content course that incorporates contemporary issues (Flint water crisis, CRISPR and genetic engineering, heat islands and institutional racism/redlining), practices (computational modeling, GIS), and ethics ("should we"? vs "can we"?) of science, situated within the economic, social, and political contexts in which science and science decision-making always live. The proposed course foregrounds anti-racist pedagogies to highlight the ways in which science has been used as both a means of oppression of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) and as a tool for advancement. This course is being co-designed by science faculty from across life, physical, and earth sciences who have themselves studied their pedagogy. Using case study analysis, our work describes how seeking institutional approval for this course involves pushing against multiple institutional barriers, including: (1) The curriculum approval committee, tasked with aligning courses to university standards, which has had members critique the proposed course content in political terms. (2) Deans, who have suggested removing race-conscious language from the course description, even though the course is not offered in their School. (3) Disciplinary faculty who lack positional power and security, and are hesitant to advocate for the course in their departments. These barriers resist movement toward greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in university courses.

After the 2015 annual meeting of the POD Network in Higher Education, leaders from POD and the Network of STEM Education Centers (NSEC) came together to host a workshop called "Collaborating at the Centers." The resulting report, by the same name, concluded that strategic collaborations between Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and STEM Education Centers (SEC) can serve as "levers of change" to improve undergraduate STEM Education. We propose that the inclusion of certain co-curricular activities, such as learning assistant programs, can further improve this lever.

In 2016, the Teaching, Learning & Professional Development Center (TLPDC), Texas Tech University's CTL, created the STEM Teaching, Engagement and Pedagogy (STEP) Program. To date, the STEP Program has continued to provide evidence-based teaching and professional development to nearly 100 STEM faculty from all STEM departments across the university system. In 2019, the STEP Program piloted a one-course Learning Assistant Program, modeled loosely after two STEM faculty members who leveraged experienced undergraduates in their individual courses. Prior to the STEP Program LA pilot, these individual efforts had not gained widespread adoption or financial support by the university. Since joining the Learning Assistant Alliance, the STEP LA Program has grown to serve students and faculty in over twenty courses, with over 120 LAs, thanks to significant investments by upper administration, which in large part, were awarded to the TLPDC because of its centrality and record of programmatic success.

During this presentation, we will describe how STEM-specific efforts within a CTL are best positioned to enhance co-curricular programming. This strategy leverages the convergence of faculty development, institutional resources, and student success. Specifically, CTLs' deep understanding of evidence-based teaching practices, existing networks, learning spaces, and institutional data help engage and incentivize faculty while building partnerships with student success initiatives to improve student persistence and success.