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Much of the ISEE Professional Development Program (PDP)’s long-term value arises from participants transferring teaching approaches they develop in the course of designing and facilitating a PDP inquiry activity to other contexts throughout their careers. PDP participants encounter frameworks such as the inquiry framework and the equity and inclusion focus areas, and are encouraged explicitly to become informed consumers of further scholarship on teaching and learning. Many participants resonate especially with the PDP’s emphasis on equity and inclusion in STEM teaching, and meld lessons from the PDP with their lived experiences as well as other scholarship on equity-minded or culturally responsive educational practices. Our panel shares four perspectives on extending lessons from the PDP to new contexts: mentoring students and developing interactive lessons in molecular biology, designing astronomy activities from a culturally relevant and culturally responsive standpoint, incorporating inquiry activities into a large astronomy lecture course, and helping academic programs across a university adopt equity-minded practices for assessing learning outcomes. 

Research suggests that developing an identity as a person in STEM is necessary for learners from marginalized groups to persist in STEM education and careers. These learners may perceive that their race, gender, or other characteristics make it difficult for their peers and supervisors to recognize them as scientists or engineers, thus disrupting their ability to maintain successful degree progress and to pursue their STEM career aspirations. Here we discuss the specific ways we designed inquiry workshops to not only clarify difficult core STEM content, but to also promote learners’ competence, performance, and targeted recognition as scientists. Our workshops were designed for students interested in chemistry, climate science, physics, and toxicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), Workshops for Engineering & Science Transfers (WEST) 2019 program. In designing our workshops, we focused on promoting the scientific identities of our learners by incorporating authentic ways for students to receive recognition from both peers and instructional facilitators, as well as allowing students to tap into their own personal interests and values. Insights from our designed assessments for learners’ understanding of our content demonstrate the success of our initiatives and provide further areas of improvement. Our goals are to create inclusive workshops to support students from all backgrounds, with emphasis on underrepresented backgrounds (community college, first generation, students of color, women, and LGBTQ+ students, etc.) as well as support them in other contexts, such as when mentoring STEM students in academic laboratory settings.