Empowering change: Exploring multiple perspectives on benefits and challenges of an instructional change initiative that engages faculty and undergraduate students in improving STEM courses together

Efforts to improve STEM education now often focus on faculty-driven reforms. However, faculty may struggle to understand how potential instructional changes will be experienced by students. Students serving as near-peer educators can bring insights that lead to more student-centered instructional change. Yet, less is known about how to successfully implement reforms that include both faculty and students.

At Texas State University, the STEM Communities Learning Assistant (LA) Program fosters interactive instruction by supporting teams that include multiple faculty and multiple undergraduate LAs who are teaching the same course. Our program has expanded to new departments over the past several years
with funding from an NSF IUSE-HSI grant (#1928696), and now serves gateway courses in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Implementing this expansion has revealed both opportunities and challenges for this type of change initiative.

In this talk, we will focus on lessons learned from two complementary qualitative research studies that investigate the experiences of participating faculty, LAs, and students in LA-supported courses. The first study focuses on biology faculty and LAs' perspectives of supports and barriers for instructional change and student success. Supports that emerged from our analysis include: weekly preparation sessions and community gatherings, LAs feeling valued and heard, LAs' dual roles as students and educators, and teamwork among faculty and LAs. Barriers include: student mindsets, students' limited academic skills and habits, class size, and physical space. The second study focuses on students' perceptions of LAs. Our analysis shows that as near-peer educators, LAs are uniquely able to foster psychological safety among students by reducing fear, strengthening community, and encouraging academic confidence and engagement in the classroom. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of how to promote inclusive, collaborative instructional change in STEM education – change that values both faculty leadership and student partnership in creating more equitable learning environments.