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Expectations for faculty members in the 21st century are high: Early career STEM faculty are expected to establish a sustainable research trajectory, a teaching practice, and a leadership role all while pursuing tenure success. Many colleges and universities have established faculty development programs, but there remains a deficiency in holistic professional support that integrates these disparate professional activities and aligns them with desired individual and institutional goals, especially for faculty in STEM. This paper will summarize an NSF funded workshop (NSF grant #EEC-1638888) designed to bring together multiple stakeholders in academia, government, and industry to begin to establish a research agenda for holistic STEM faculty development. This workshop was held February 17-18, 2017.
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Collaborating at the Centers: Report from a STEM Education Transformation Workshop Involving Leaders of Centers for Teaching and Learning and STEM Education Centers
This report details how universities can pair the work of STEM Education Centers and Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) to improve teaching and student success in STEM fields. The Collaborating at the Center report, written by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the POD Network in Higher Education, presents key recommendations on ways these two distinct types of campus-based centers can work more closely to further national STEM education improvement efforts. The report is based on some of the key findings of 46 leaders from SECs and CTLs who gathered at a November 2015 workshop that APLU, the POD Network, and the Network of STEM Education Centers (NSEC) convened with support from the National Science Foundation. The workshop was designed to introduce these communities to each other, discuss areas of synergy, and explore ways that these communities could most effectively collaborate to improve student success on their campuses and nationally as networks. Some of the key recommendations from the report include: -Approach cross-unit collaborations by inviting everyone to the table, creating relevant leadership groups, and keeping stakeholders informed. -Map the "territory of collaboration": identify common elements of mission, differentiated strategies, shared goals, strengths, stakeholders, expertise, resources, roles for each center, and benefits from participating in shared projects. -Acknowledge stretched staffing and resources by articulating different possible modes of collaborating at various levels of commitment and normalizing different responses as helpful and not damaging to the centers' relationship. -Record progress and make success visible.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1524832
- PAR ID:
- 10302949
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Collaborating at the Centers Workshop
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Although institutions of higher education have placed a large emphasis on increasing the number of underrepresented minority (URM) students matriculating in higher education, the disparities in STEM retention and graduation rates between URM and non-URM students emphasize the dire need for increased support to help URM students navigate challenges including stereotype threat, impostor phenomenon, and lack of social connectedness that disproportionately affect URM students in majority-dominated fields. Prior research has demonstrated that structured mentoring has the potential to generate substantial improvements in academic, social, and career outcomes for URM STEM students. In particular, network-based mentoring approaches that allow for students to receive both professional and peer mentoring, as well as the opportunity to mentor other students, have demonstrated success in this realm. In this article, we discuss how the current state of academia often fails URM STEM students and faculty, review literature regarding the ways in which structured mentoring approaches can alleviate barriers to success among URM groups in STEM fields, and offer recommendations regarding how academic institutions can successfully implement holistic student and faculty mentoring programs.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/pknbf
