A 2019 report from the National Academies on Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) concluded that MSIs need to change their culture to successfully serve students with marginalized racial and/or ethnic identities. The report recommends institutional responsiveness to meet students “where they are,” metaphorically, creating supportive campus environments and providing tailored academic and social support structures. In recent years, the faculty, staff, and administrators at California State University, Los Angeles have made significant efforts to enhance student success through multiple initiatives including a summer bridge program, first-year in engineering program, etc. However, it has become clear that more profound changes are needed to create a culture that meets students “where they are.”
In 2020, we were awarded NSF support for Eco-STEM, an initiative designed to change a system that demands "college-ready" students into one that is "student-ready." Aimed at shifting the deficit mindset prevailing in engineering education, the Eco-STEM project embraces an asset-based ecosystem model that thinks of education as cultivation, and ideas as seeds we are planting, rather than a system of standards and quality checks. This significant paradigm and culture transformation is accomplished through:
1) The Eco-STEM Faculty Fellows’ Community of Practice (CoP), which employs critically reflective dialogue[ ][ ] to enhance the learning environment using asset-based learner-centered instructional approaches;
2) A Leadership CoP with department chairs and program directors that guides cultural change at the department/program level;
3) A Facilitators’ CoP that prepares facilitators to lead, sustain, update, and expand the Faculty and Leadership CoPs;
4) Reform of the teaching evaluation system to sustain the cultural changes.
This paper presents the progress and preliminary findings of the Eco-STEM project. During the first project year, the project team formulated the curriculum for the Faculty CoP with a focus on inclusive pedagogy, community cultural wealth, and community building, developed a classroom peer observation tool to provide formative data for teaching reflection, and designed research inquiry tools. The latter investigates the following research questions:
1) To what extent do the Eco-STEM CoPs effectively shift the mental models of participants from a factory-like model to an ecosystem model of education?
2) To what extent does this shift support an emphasis on the assets of our students, faculty, and staff members and, in turn, allow for enhanced motivation, excellence and success?
3) To what extent do new faculty assessment tools designed to provide feedback that reflects ecosystem-centric principles and values allow for individuals within the system to thrive?
In Fall 2021, the first cohort of Eco-STEM Faculty Fellows were recruited, and rich conversations and in-depth reflections in our CoP meetings indicated Fellows’ positive responses to both the CoP curriculum and facilitation practices. This paper offers a work-in-progress introduction to the
Eco-STEM project, including the Faculty CoP, the classroom peer observation tool, and the proposed research instruments. We hope this work will cultivate broader conversations within the engineering education research community about cultural change in engineering education and methods towards its implementation.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2024
Developing a Leadership Community of Practice Toward a Healthy Educational Ecosystem
Student success in educational ecosystems is a primary goal of leadership efforts. Yet, power and privilege affect the racial, classist, and gendered implications of STEM education work in K-12 education as well as higher education. Interventions have been done at various levels, but despite the hard work of implementation, this has not resulted in dramatic improvements to STEM educational ecosystems or student engagement within them. Often, these implementations are done at the faculty/student level or institutional level but not at the departmental leadership level. The NSF-supported Eco-STEM Project proposes to establish a healthy educational ecosystem that supports all individuals (students, faculty, and staff) to thrive. Project activities are guided by ecosystem paradigm measures that support a culturally responsive learning/working environment; make teaching and learning rewarding and fulfilling; and emphasize community assets to enhance motivation, excellence, and success. For this work-in-progress paper, we describe the development of a leadership community of practice, comprised of department chairs of science and engineering departments, at [university name redacted], a large state-funded comprehensive majority minority master’s granting institution in the Southwest United States. In the year-long Leadership Community of Practice (L-CoP), the Fellows work on unpacking issues of power and privilege in their roles as STEM leaders and educators. During the Fall semester of 2022, the Fellows participated in four sessions. They engaged in readings, videos, active-learning activities, and critically reflective dialogues to facilitate discussion and reflection on identity, agency, the culture of power in STEM, and interventions and change in higher education. The L-CoP starts with Fellows reflecting on their social and professional identities and how their identities influence their teaching and leadership philosophies. Then Fellows are introduced to the framework of the culture of power in science--where they explore the social, cultural, and political impacts of preparing for a STEM college education. Finally, they explore theories and models of change for STEM higher education spaces. Through this curriculum, we aim to examine mental models to deconstruct notions that uphold the culture of power in science by instead building counternarratives with faculty and students in their departments. Through dialogues within the L-CoP, leaders discuss classroom/program climate, structure, and vibrancy to better support healthy educational ecosystems, as well as their participation in these systems. We are currently in the middle of our first implementation of the L-CoP. The first cohort consists of six L-CoP Fellows with highly diverse positionalities; there is racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, and all Fellows are full professors in the tenure line and chairs of their respective departments. We present details of the L-CoP, including the formation of the Fellow cohort, training of the facilitators, structure of the sessions, and initial results of our mid-program survey. The survey results provide insights into potential improvements to our tools and program. We also share some of the Fellows’ and facilitators’ reflections demonstrating a shift toward an ecosystem mindset. We prefer to present this work as a poster at the 2023 ASEE Annual Conference.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2013630
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10434425
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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