We STEM educators often hear that so many of our students fail because they are not college ready. But interventions at various levels, despite the hard work of implementation, have not resulted in dramatic improvements. What if, instead, the problem is that the institutional system – including instructional approaches and policies – is not student ready? The goal of our NSF supported project, called “Eco-STEM,” is to establish a healthy STEM educational ecosystem that allows all individuals within the ecosystem to thrive. The context for our work on STEM educational ecosystems is a Very High Hispanic Enrolling Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) at California State University, Los Angeles, where the majority of our students are also low-income and first-generation college students. Guided by an ecosystem paradigm, the project aims to: 1) create a supportive and culturally responsive learning/working environment for both students and faculty; 2) make teaching and learning rewarding and fulfilling experiences; and 3) emphasize the assets of our community to enhance motivation, excellence, and success.
Currently, many STEM educators have a mental model of the education system as a pipeline or pathway, and this factory-like model requires standard inputs, expecting students to come prepared with certain knowledge and skills [4]. When the educational system is viewed as a factory assembly line (as shown in Figure 1), interventions are focused on fixing the inputs by trying to increase students’ preparedness, which contributes to a prevailing deficit-focused mindset. This not only hinders student growth but also makes educational institutions less inclusive and teaching less rewarding for faculty. Increasingly, equity-minded educators and researchers employing the framework of community cultural wealth suggest that we need an asset-based mindset if we are to help all students achieve success in STEM. Research on ecosystem models offers a new way of thinking. In contrast to pipelines or pathways, which focus on student outcomes, an ecosystem model is centered on the learning environment, communities, and the experiences that diverse students, faculty, and staff have in the system as active agents.
The Eco-STEM project proposes to: 1) shift the mental models of STEM faculty from factory- based to ecosystem-based so that they will intentionally establish healthy classroom ecosystems that facilitate learning for all students regardless of their backgrounds; 2) change the mental models and develop the capacity of department chairs and program coordinators so they can lead the cultural changes needed to create a healthy ecosystem at the department level; and 3) revise the teaching evaluation system to promote faculty development and enhance the student experience, which will help to create a healthy ecosystem at the institution. One fundamental aspect of this project is the Eco-STEM Faculty Fellows Community of Practice (CoP), which is designed to help foster these changes. As a work-in-progress paper, this paper presents the design and structure of the Eco-STEM Faculty Fellows CoP and seeks input from the faculty development community on our approach to fostering a healthy educational ecosystem for the majority marginalized student population we serve.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2024
Inclusive, asset-based instructional strategies in engineering design: empowering faculty with professional development
To better support engineering students and to create an inclusive and welcoming educational context, it is necessary to reimagine instructional methods and approaches. In contrast to deficit educational models that focus on perceptions of what students lack, asset-based practices focus on how students’ lived experiences can be used to enrich and strengthen their educational experiences. There is a need to support faculty in adopting existing techniques or developing new techniques in undergraduate courses, as most existing literature related to asset-based practices is focused on K-12 settings. Engineering design courses provide an ideal context for asset-based practices because the design process requires a diverse set of knowledge, experiences, and skills. Guided by self-determination theory, an understanding of implicit bias and stereotype threat, and the large existing body of research on asset-based pedagogy, we seek to support engineering student outcomes by empowering faculty with tools and strategies to incorporate asset-based practices in their courses. We are engaged in a three-year project focused on assessing the impact of asset-based practices in engineering design courses a large, public, land-grant, Hispanic-serving institution in the southwestern United States, funded by the NSF IUSE:EDU program. Here, we will summarize the design and results from our professional development for faculty, including theoretical frameworks and evidence guiding our work. We share content from our professional development, summarizing learning objectives, presentation content, and activities. Additionally, we present comments shared by instructors related to our professional development, including common barriers to implementing educational innovations in their courses. Our work will provide insights to practitioners interested in promoting inclusive classroom practices in engineering education and researchers who are translating research to practice, especially through professional development.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2215003
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10429104
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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