Session II

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) established the Inclusive Excellence (IE) program to create higher education communities engaged in the continuing process of increasing the inclusion of all students, particularly first-generation students, 2-year transfer students, and students from groups underrepresented in science. Competitive grant proposals were solicited from four-year institutions in 2017 and 2018, from which 24 institutions and 33 institutions, respectively, were selected to form the IE 1.0 and IE 2.0 cohorts.

In January 2020, competitive proposals were again accepted with the intention of developing the IE 3.0 cohort, informed by the successes and struggles of IE 1.0 and 2.0. Proposers were instructed to focus on one of three Challenges:

1. The introductory science experience
2. Meaningful evaluation of effective and inclusive teaching
3. Effective partnerships between 2- and 4-year institutions

During the IE 3.0 proposal review period, the COVID-19 shutdown occurred, and racial justice protests spread nationwide, leading HHMI to reevaluate its Inclusive Excellence imperative juxtaposed against an exclusionary model of competitive funding. In response, HHMI invited a group of IE 3.0 applicants to participate in multi-institution learning communities. 104 institutions accepted this offer and were arranged into seven Learning Community Clusters (LCCs), each consisting of 14 to 16 four-year institutions (and partners, as applicable). Each LCC has gone through an 18-month development and planning period and is now embarking on a 6-year grant period, with a budget of $8.7 million dollars awarded to the LCC (rather than to individual institutions).

This symposium will examine the development and planning of each LCC with reflections on their initial information sharing and co-learning, development of organizational structure, leadership and communications, decision-making processes and budget negotiations. We will reflect on commonalities and differences in our developmental processes.

University institutional change efforts have increasingly focused on supporting, recognizing, and rewarding engaged research– processes by which policymakers, researchers, community leaders, and others work together to identify evidence needs, bring together different kinds of knowledge and expertise, and use evidence to accomplish shared goals – and other forms of societally impactful scholarship. Ongoing projects aimed at building institutional capacity for this work include aligning faculty hiring and promotion policies with the needs of engaged research, development of professional homes for the engaged research workforce, and innovations in metrics to assess research impact. Increasingly, a diverse generation of scholars is entering academia with hopes of affecting societal change, including through policy or community partnerships, and this movement to broaden institutional capacity meets the need to support and reward these scholars. A growing number of organizations are building national coalitions to understand institutional change efforts in this space and support universities in implementing promising models of supporting engaged and societally impactful research. This panel brings together the leaders of several of those efforts, as well as an engaged scholar who has led institutional change efforts and is studying promising work around the country, and a funder that supports institutional change work. Panelists will discuss lessons learned from their efforts and promising opportunities for coordination across the academic ecosystem to drive progress. The panel is hosted by The Pew Charitable Trusts; Pew has convened the Transforming Evidence Funders Network, a cross-disciplinary network of research funders working together to address structural barriers for a more effective, equitable, and impactful research enterprise.

Institutional change efforts to diversify faculty can be disparate, uncoordinated, or lacking in buy-in from the people closest to the work. In this symposium, team leads at three SEA Change member institutions will share their strategies for alignment of established institutional change efforts across campus and their approach to getting faculty buy-in. Each campus is unique; thus, each approach will be context-specific—how did the teams determine a method of engagement that would be effective? How are the teams conveying to stakeholders that their programs aren't being replaced, but rather are being aligned? Finally, participants will hear how faculty are being engaged in change team efforts during SEA Change self-assessment and action planning, including the range of roles represented on the team and how the institution is compensating them for their efforts.

In this symposium, we will introduce a Higher Education Instructional-Workforce Framework, authored by members of the National Academies Roundtable on Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education. With principles of justice, equity, inclusion, and diversity at its core, the framework supports institutions seeking to advance their educational missions by helping them enact coordinated change across multiple institutional levels and with three intertwined aspects of instructional work: governance, professional development, and evaluation and reward systems. Participants will leave the symposium with an understanding of the instructional workforce framework for coordinated change in undergraduate education.