Assessing the Success of a 14-Institution Collaborative Undergraduate STEM Education Inclusivity Initiative

The SCIENCE (Student-Centered Institutional Enhancement and Co-Learning Exchange) Collaborative, a 14-institution network focused on inclusive excellence in STEM education, seeks to improve student belonging for marginalized students in STEM through multiple campus-based initiatives and cross-institution projects. Initially funded by an HHMI Inclusive Excellence 3 grant, the Collaborative is made up of 14 institutions of varying student and faculty demographics, size, and settings. These differences are assets in collaboration, allowing the institutions to create a diverse portfolio of sustainable processes to support inclusive excellence; the differences may also provide challenges in designing and implementing projects. The Collaborative is based around three equity principles: Courageous Conversations, With Us Not For Us, and Power Sharing. This study examines team member perceptions of the collaboration's success in reaching its goals to improve student belonging for marginalized students in undergraduate STEM education through the lens of these principles, including the implementation of equitable collaborative principles and through projects involving students as change agents and multiple avenues for actionable change in STEM classrooms. This study uses the Four Frames framework for organizational change in conjunction with Queer Theory, thinking critically about how the intersection of these unique perspectives may be used as a theory of change for understanding the SCIENCE Collaborative. This presentation will offer insights based on a Collaborative-wide survey examining member perceptions of the equity principles in action and individual interviews with team members from each of the 14 institutions. The poster will describe how the frameworks have been utilized in both the development of data collection protocols and in the analysis of data. Based on current efforts within the Collaborative, collaboration amongst members from different institutions and across disciplines has resulted in multiple in-progress projects and indicates a strong member commitment to Collaborative equity principles and critical shifts.