In 2017, two successful NSF programs decided to collaborate with the aim of joining the strengths of each other's approaches. The primary goals of the collaborative, HSI ATE Hub, were to build capacity and leadership at 2-year Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) for developing competitive ATE proposals and to elevate 2-year HSIs as drivers of their community's economic success via technician education. One program, Mentor-Connect, established in 2012, had worked with annual cohorts of up to twenty-two 2-year technician colleges nationwide. Their strong mentoring approach provided a team of two faculty at each of these institutions with guidance from an experienced ATE grantee as the faculty developed an ATE proposal in the Small Grants for Institutions New to the ATE Program track. This ATE track increases the incentives and opportunities for community colleges that have little or no previous experience with the ATE program to undertake projects to improve science and engineering technician education programs or teacher preparation programs that focus on technological education. Although faculty were the direct participants in two Mentor-Connect face-to-face workshops with mentors, an expanded campus team that included the grant writer and administrative leaders contributed to ongoing proposal development conversations with the mentors between face-to-face workshops. These additional team members could join the workshops if funded by their institutions to travel. Through early conversations with KickStarter (introduced below) in 2016, Mentor-Connect and KickStarter began discussing submitting a joint proposal (prompting Mentor-Connect to seek out how many HSIs they had previously worked with. At this time differences in ATE proposal award rates began to be noticed among HSIs and non-HSIs in the annual M-C cohorts. Award rates were lower for HSIs compared to non-HSIs. Mentor-Connect began collecting more data about institutional and faculty characteristics to inform their mentoring processes.
Meanwhile, in 2014, the other NSF program, KickStarter, was funded outside of the ATE program to focus on improving competitive proposal development at 2-year Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and in 2016 the first two ATE grants were submitted and awarded. This was two years prior to the release of the initial NSF HSI program solicitation (NSF-18524) in early 2018. Cohort sizes for KickStarter were smaller, about 5-6 HSIs, and included teams of up to ten faculty (STEM, CTE, non-STEM), grant writers, administrative leaders, student support staff, and institutional research. Partners in K12, university and industry were also encouraged to join the team. The main goal for institutions in KickStarter cohorts was to strive for two proposal submissions to any NSF program with at least one award, and campus teams continued to receive technical assistance until this goal was met. Prior to proposal development, each KickStarter team performed a STEM-self assessment and developed a STEM plan, out of which research proposal concepts were identified and matched to the appropriate NSF program, e.g. S-STEM, ATE, and later HSI. In 2016, HSIs in KickStarter cohorts began to acquire grant awards, initially in S-STEM and ATE. When the HSI program solicitation was announced, HSIs in KickStarter began switching from pursuing the Small Grants for Institutions New to the ATE Program track to the equivalent track in the HSI program, quite successfully. A total of eleven HSI awards were earned by 2-year HSIs participating in KickStarter for an 85% award rate. In 2019 the KickStarter program ended and no new candidates to the pool of HSI ATE Hub Cohorts became available.
In the next two sections, this paper will describe the extent to which the collaborative, HSI ATE Hub, has met its original objectives and the responses to the research questions explored in the collaborative. Sections 3 and 4 will discuss how activities surrounding Community Building and Resource Utilization informed the research direction during the project and future endeavors. Section 5 presents data across the three HSI ATE Hub cohorts and the overall pool of HSIs served by Mentor-Connect and KickStarter. The paper finishes with overall Lessons Learned in Section 6, the Conclusion in Section 7, and Implications for Future Research in Section 8.
The primary program goals for HSI ATE Hub were to build capacity and leadership at 2-year HSIs for developing competitive ATE proposals and to elevate 2-year HSIs as drivers of their community's economic success via technician education. Table 1 lists the program objectives under these goals and the program's performance to those objectives: See also Sections 2 and 5. Each institution has its own unique opportunities and challenges based on the following factors:
• Size: Smaller institutions may not have centralized grant writing departments or infrastructure and resources for institutional data collection and analysis. • Location: Remote rural locations may not have pervasive reliable high speed network connectivity or a variety of local business and industry resources to drive economic mobility in the community. Depending upon their location, urban HSIs may or may not have access to thriving businesses and industries that are sources of economic prosperity. • Institutional culture: Typically 2-year institutions of higher education are not research institutions, faculty are there to teach and they have overloaded schedules. It is difficult to obtain faculty release time to perform research, let alone write research proposals. • New to HSI Status: To achieve HSI status, the DOE requires 25% FTE Hispanic undergraduate full-time enrollment. The number of HSIs has grown 93% in the past decade. Educators at Institutions with newly acquired HSI status do not necessarily have explicit goals nor do they know how to serve students from underrepresented minority groups beyond enrollment. • Faculty Representation: Existing faculty have limited awareness or experience in culturally responsive pedagogy and applying it to other methods, such as project based learning, that are proven to successfully engage and retain students of color. Compounding this gap, faculty, staff and administrator demographics do not match in proportion the demographics of the student population, which contributes to a sense of isolation and self-doubt for whether the student belongs in the training program and/or the career trajectory. • Demographics of Student Population: HSIs enroll 67% of Hispanic undergraduates, 39% of all Asian American and Pacific Islanders, 21% of all African Americans, and 18% of all Native Americans, making them an important player in broadening participation in higher education and middle skills jobs.
RQ 2. How do we build capacity to pursue the opportunities and address the barriers/challenges?
Strategies for building capacity to address the above gap areas include: The HSI ATE Community likes to hear from people like themselves and from people who are like the students that they reach. Types of resources most asked for in live conference sessions include: translation services, pronunciation guides, and listings of agencies/resources that address basic life needs of students, e.g. housing, transportation, food. Types of HSI-relevant resources that were most frequently viewed from the repository are culturally responsive practices that are either research based and/or include examples from other HSI practitioners with NSF grants and proposal development aids.
Community building in year 3 of the project was conducted entirely virtually. This contrasts with years 1 and 2, where conferences were the primary mechanism for engaging with the community of educators from 2-year HSIs with advanced technological education programs. These live conference sessions in years 1 and 2 provided excellent feedback and indicators of engaged participation, whereas the virtual technologies used by conference hosts did not track the number of visits to pre-recorded materials for the HSI ATE Hub program which might have served as proxies for attendance and participation during live events.
A spring 2020 virtual webinar hosted by the HSI ATE Hub project was highly successful: Fifteen agreed that their confidence level for implementing strategies to foster an equitable STEM/CTE learning environment improved. All participants agreed that some or many of their questions were answered. The Chat commentary was highly engaged, with several comments and additional questions about the Kudo Cards and Journaling. The webinar recording was uploaded to the HSI ATE Hub Resource Repository.
The project also has an active web presence via a microsite provided by ATE Central. The HSI ATE Hub microsite is linked to the Mentor-Connect website and vice-versa. Both websites guide 2-year college HSIs and others to HSI ATE Hub project activities and the HSI ATE Hub Resource Library which is a designated subset of HSI-specific resources within the Mentor-Connect Resource Library. Additional virtual communications and community engagement occurred through a July 20, 2020 article in the Community College Daily, a news publication of the American Association of Community Colleges. The article urged a more proactive approach to meeting Latinx students' STEM needs. The authors recommended embedding culturally responsive practices into ATE proposals to engage and retain Latinx students and to make those projects more competitive with NSF reviewers. They also made the case that introducing culturally responsive practices into innovative STEM initiatives has the potential to inform practices throughout the college.
In February of 2021, HSI ATE Hub was the featured project in the ATE Central Connection, a communication channel that disseminates information to and about ATE Centers and Projects on the first Tuesday of each month. The article also included a resource from the project, Culturally Responsive Instruction in HSIs: Specific Instructional Strategies that Work, that created an uptick in resource views.
The resource library includes webinar recordings, peer-reviewed publications, videos, presentations, and success stories covering topics such as:
• How to develop competitive ATE proposals at your HSI Based on feedback from HSI ATE community stakeholders and a seminal resource [3] in year 2, refinements to improve ease of use, searchability, and access to resources included critical focus areas for STEM education in HSIs: advising, mentoring and non academic support systems; STEM academic structure and related support systems (STEM A&S); evidence-based pedagogies (EBP); equity, diversity and culturally responsive practices (CRP); research experiences and high impact practices (HIP); or All. The resources in Table 3 are itemized by these categories and critical focus areas, along with the total views per resource.
The metrics for HSI ATE Hub resource usage shown in Table 4 tells us that Faculty Professional Development Research Papers (Category 4 = F) are on average viewed more than the other categories of resources (Category 1 = R, Category 2 = P, Category 3 = S).
Table 4 also shows that resources that focus on culturally responsive practices are receiving the highest total views while the other critical focus areas are receiving significantly less traffic. These data reinforce the recommendations of our advisory council and the research direction that we are pursuing moving forward.
A bibliography of resources in the HSI ATE Hub resource library is included in the references [3] to [41].
Table 5 compares the characteristics of the HSIs that applied to HSI ATE Hub Cohorts 1, 2, and 3 based on data collected in their application to Mentor-Connect, assessment of their applications, assigned mentors, the mentoring relationship, ATE proposal submission, and award status. The Mentor-Connect and KickStarter programs operated under different approaches as summarized in Table 6. Primary differences included 1) cohort sizes (Mentor-Connect >= 20 2-year colleges, both non-HSIs and some HSIs and KickStarter 5-6 HSIs); 2) one annual submittal cycle (Mentor-Connect) vs. try until you succeed over multiple years (KickStarter); 3) Focus on mentoring for ATE proposal writing and developing faculty leadership (Mentor-Connect) versus focus on mentoring competitive proposal writing across multiple NSF programs and developing institutional leadership through strategic STEM assessment and planning.
Although the resources about culturally responsive practices are widely viewed by the public, it is not clear that they are being effectively absorbed into the proposal development processes. For example, one of the proposals from Cohort 2 was criticized by a reviewer because there were no "culturally responsive recruitment techniques" in the plan for recruiting high school students. This comment could serve as a reminder for PIs and Mentors that there is a need to address this issue.
Transitioning a team of players from one proposal development program to another has its unexpected challenges. The first set of challenges occurred during recruitment to join the Mentor-Connect cohort for mentoring during proposal development. Among these initial challenges were inability to meet the two STEM faculty team requirement for Mentor-Connect instead of one faculty or dean and a grant writer, concern about switching to a different mentoring process and forming new relationships, and competing priorities to meet the deadline to apply for Mentor-Connect with other larger, and/or different grant programs, including the Department of Education. Other challenges occurred after absorption into Mentor-Connect. For example, the faculty from KickStarter HSIs that participated in Mentor-Connect were not necessarily on the original KickStarter team that went through the strategic assessment and planning activities although their ATE proposal idea could be traced to the STEM plan for their HSI. Strong ties to the STEM team at their HSI were not always maintained. One KickStarter HSI failed to submit their proposal. A second KickStarter HSI had a declination due to lack of industry letters of commitment and a third KickStarter HSI's declination showed wide discrepancy between the two very positive reviews and the two quite negative reviews and was not funded.
More HSIs were being served by the Mentor-Connect program before creating the HSI ATE Hub program than realized. Until the HSI ATE Hub program was conceived (which was coincident to the newly formed NSF HSI Program), there was little to no recognition of HSI as an identity or as a significant asset-based contributor to diversifying the STEM workforce. The HSI ATE Hub program learned as much about HSI participation in Mentor-Connect during the years prior to the HSI ATE Hub program as it did during the HSI ATE Hub program: these institutions offer a highly diverse student body, and yet the faculty representing these HSIs are primarily caucasian and do not reflect the demographics of the student population. In many cases, as college Latinx populations exceeded the threshold for HSI classification, faculty were unaware of the change or classification. There is little evidence that colleges are modifying infrastructure or support systems as a result of becoming increasingly Latinx-serving institutions.
The goal of this project has been to increase capacity to assist more CC-HSIs across the nation in developing competitive ATE proposals and to encourage and elevate HSI community colleges as the drivers of their community's economic success via technician education. Strategies to accomplish this goal included providing two-tiered mentoring of KickStarter participants to leverage the strength of the STEM planning completed through KickStarter with ATE proposal development mentoring provided by Mentor-Connect. This strategy, had it been successful, would have produced as many as 12 new 2-year college HSI ATE grantees, with a proposal success rate greater than that achieved by HSIs working with only one or the other mentoring initiative. Another strategy was community building that would connect HSI ATE grantees with one another for learning and sharing. The third major strategy was to identify or develop and make readily accessible resources specific to two-year college HSIs to support their work in meeting the needs of Latinx students and crafting competitive ATE proposals to advance technician education programs at their colleges.
While providing valuable insights for developing and implementing mentoring programs, the first strategy did not achieve desired outcomes. For a variety of unforeseen reasons, the anticipated number of KickStarter participant colleges did not choose to transfer to Mentor-Connect to develop ATE proposals. Few among those that transferred succeeded in submitting proposals and/or receiving grant awards. A number of contributing factors have been discussed throughout the paper. Teams were more successful when they followed through to proposal submission with their original mentoring initiative. The other two strategies have proven successful. Measurable positive impacts are resulting from curating HSI-specific resources and providing faculty development designed to guide use of the resources and broaden educator understanding to enable them to adjust to the changing demographics of their student population in positive ways. Community building activities initiated in years one and two of the project (reported in previous papers) quickly gained participants and momentum. This strategy would have likely been even more successful in year 3 had activities not been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
These conclusive observations led to the development of a follow-on proposal that builds on the success of the webinar on culturally-responsive instruction. The research proposal is titled, HSI ATE Hub 2-Theory to Practice: Professional Development for Culturally Responsive Technician Education, and was submitted to the NSF ATE program. With input from experts in Culturally Responsive Instructional (CRI) methods, community college technician educators, students, and industry, the HSI ATE Hub team and Westchester Community College (WCC) teamed up to propose a faculty professional development model designed to improve outcomes for Latinx students in technician education programs. WCC, the first HSI in the State University of New York (SUNY) 64 campus system, will pilot the model using virtual learning methods mastered through previous NSF ATE work and the COVID-19 context. Over 20 WCC technician educators will benefit directly from piloting the model and developing leadership skills in CRI methods, building capacity within its STEM technician programs to better support the diversity of students, industry demand for a diverse workforce, and WCC's capacity for future development of technician education programs within NSF and other grant-supported programs. The tiered PD model features a series of educational modules to incrementally enrich the instructional practices and mindset of HSI STEM educators and strengthen their repertoire for engaging culturally diverse students. The tier to tier scaffolding starts with Tier 1: Tier 1, Bienvenidos, welcomes HSI STEM educators and support personnel who recognize the need to better serve their Latinx students, but are not sure how to do this. Tier 2, Transformation through Action, immerses HSI STEM Educators in activities that introduce CRI practices in their technician training and collect evidence about impacts and outcomes for students. Participants will also learn about and be encouraged to seek NSF ATE grant funding to expand the impact of their work. Tier 3, Engaging Community, builds STEM faculty leaders as they disseminate lessons learned and contributions completed in Tiers 1 and 2 via synergy sessions and spotlight presentations at conferences or similar virtual events that attract technician educators. These leadership activities contribute to achieving broader impacts in the ATE Community.