2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

This session explores a two-year professional development experience (PDE) for STEM faculty at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). The aim of the PDE is to provide STEM faculty with resources to advance inclusive classroom environments that support the subject matter learning and academic identity development of minoritized students (MS). For this work, we define minoritized students (MS) as African American and Latinx students whose identities are socially constructed within their specific social and political contexts (Benitez, 2010; McGee. 2020).

The PDE is designed to facilitate institutional transformation by addressing environmental factors that negatively influence STEM degree completion for MS. In year 1, the faculty meet for nine sessions once a month to discuss topics that interrogate their racial understandings, social positionalities, biases, and pedagogy and how all of these impact the MS students they teach. In year 2, faculty will implement what they learned in the program and conduct a workshop for their STEM schools as a way to broaden participation.

Cohort 1 (2022-23 academic year) consists of twelve faculty members. All the faculty have a particular STEM subject matter expertise and are either Assistant or Associate professors with diverse lived experiences and academic/ research responsibilities. Half of these faculty members are White, while three identify as Latina/o, two as Asian, and one as African American.

In the first few months of the PDE, the faculty were asked to complete two Qualtrics five-point Likert-scale surveys. The first survey took stock of faculty’s prior knowledge and experiences in access, diversity, equity, and inclusion topics, and their motivation for participating in a PDE that enhances their teaching and learning practices for MS in STEM. The second survey was distributed four months after the first survey and asked for faculty’s thoughts about the content they have learned so far in the PDE and how it has influenced their work with MS. For both surveys, eleven of the 12 (92%) faculty completed the survey in its entirety.

Results from these surveys show that, prior to their participation in the professional development experience, faculty had limited exposure to the frameworks that could help them shift their curriculum and practices to be inclusive to the experiences of MS. Despite this, the faculty demonstrated that they are eager to enhance their teaching and research practices to be more inclusive and equitable for MS in STEM. Faculty also claimed that, after participation in a few of the sessions, they began to reflect on their social and cultural locations, particularly in relation to the MS experience in STEM. Faculty began to consider their personal biases, and how this may impact the MS students they teach. Additionally, faculty shared that they will begin to utilize some of the ideas they have learned in the PDE to shift their curriculum and practices in order to be more inclusive and equitable to the lived experiences of MS.

These results have important institutional implications for preparing STEM faculty to teach and work with a diverse student population, particularly those from minoritized backgrounds.