2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Mentor Perspectives of Apprenticeships for Community College STEM Careers

Presented at STEM Education at the Two-Year College

The National Science Foundation’s Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Aspire Alliance has established several RC (Regional Change) Collaboratives of two-year and four-year higher education institutions, focused on preparing a diverse and inclusive future community college faculty. Each RC collaborative recruits graduate students enrolled at research-intensive or comprehensive universities to participate in semester-long apprenticeships under the mentorship of community college professors. In Texas, two of these RC collaboratives have been operating continuously since 2019 with the participation of institutions that serve diverse student populations from urban and rural regions and are advocates of organizational change that impacts their ecosystem and fosters equity. Both RC collaboratives have implemented their own successful apprenticeships adapted to regional needs. In recent work, we described one of these RC collaboratives, shared its emerging mentoring model, and discussed the significance of assessment data gathered through end-of-apprenticeship surveys. In this paper, we provide and conduct a comparative analysis of the work conducted at both RC collaboratives. We also provide demographic data of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics) faculty from the partnering community colleges and compare ethnicity/race rates to those of community college students and state-wide population. In addition, we provide the perspectives of faculty mentors collected via surveys that probe into the merits and challenges of apprenticeships. The responses provided by the faculty are supportive of the idea of sustaining the efforts of the two regional collaboratives.

Authors

Ms. Sara E. Rodriguez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5211-8594 University of Texas, El Paso
Dr. Benjamin C. Flores University of Texas, El Paso [biography]

Dr. Benjamin C. Flores joined the faculty of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in 1990 after receiving his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University. He is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Dr. Chandra Anne Turpen University of Maryland, College Park [biography]

Dr. Chandra Turpen is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. She has expertise in physics education research and engineering education research. Her work involves designing and researching contexts for learning (for students, educators, and faculty) within higher education. Her research draws from perspectives in anthropology, cultural psychology, and the learning sciences to focus on the role of culture and ideology in science learning and educational change. Her research interests include how to: (a) disrupt problematic cultural narratives in STEM (e.g. brilliance narratives, meritocracy, and individualistic competition); (b) cultivate equity-minded approaches in educational spheres, where educators take responsibility for racialized inequities in student success; and (c) cultivate more ethical future scientists and engineers by blending social, political and technological spheres. She prioritizes working on projects that seek to share power with students and orient to students as partners in educational transformation. She pursues projects that aim to advance social justice in undergraduate STEM programs and she makes these struggles for change a direct focus of her research.
Agniprava Banerjee University of Texas, El Paso [biography]

Research Associate for NSF EBJ INCLUDES Aspire West Texas Regional Collaborative and doctoral candidate in Materials Science and Engineering.
Jana Foxe University of Washington
James P. Grover
Gigi N. Delk

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