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Session Description

Description and purpose: As developers, you support academics in STEM who wish to change their teaching, their classrooms, and their curricula. Your expertise helps them understand how improving pedagogy can transform both student learning and their own academic experiences. Even as these change makers take on this important work, they may encounter resistance to their efforts from others who see pedagogical change as a challenge to the traditions of the department or the college, or they may struggle to communicate about the change they envision with audiences within and outside of their department. The purpose of this distinguished lecture is to introduce you to a change maker’s “toolkit” that you can use to provide additional support to the individuals with whom you work.

Format and content: The format will depart from a traditional lecture and instead provide hands-on practice with two change-maker tools that have been effective with a variety of groups (faculty - teaching track, tenure-track and tenured), department chairs, college administrators, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers).

In addition to the hands-on portions of the talk, I will discuss how equipping individuals with these tools can help them overcome the obstacles that can often derail any pedagogical innovation. The tools I introduce are from my own book, Making Changes in STEM Education: The Change Maker's Toolkit, published by Routledge in 2023. My approach in the book is to present practical tools in support of change makers that are based in research from various fields (e.g., organizational psychology, higher education, etc.). In addition to the hands-on sessions, I will make time to solicit from attendees the challenges they have encountered within their own work to promote change in STEM contexts; from their feedback, I plan to offer additional resources that they can pursue after the lecture is concluded.

Learning goals: As a result of attending this session, participants will:

1. Understand the purpose of the change maker's toolkit as a way to support STEM academics who wish to make change in their specific educational contexts
2. Learn about two change maker tools that have been applied in a variety of academic environments
3. Practice these tools in order to determine their relevance to their own educational context
4. Offer their feedback regarding the specific challenges change makers face on their campus

Speaker

1. Dr. Julia M. Williams

   Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

   Julia M. Williams joined the faculty of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1992, then assumed duties as Executive Director of the Office of Institutional Research, Planning, and Assessment in 2005. From 2016 to 2019, she served as Interim Dean of Cross-Cutting Programs and Emerging Opportunities. Williams is the author of Making Changes in STEM Education: The Change Maker’s Toolkit (Routledge 2023). Her publications on assessment, engineering, professional communication, and tablet PCs have appeared in the Journal of Engineering Education and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, among others. She has been awarded grants from Microsoft, HP, and the National Science Foundation. Most recently she has been named as an inductee into the 2023 American Society for Engineering Education Hall of Fame. Currently, she supports the work of the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (NSF RED) grant recipients, as well as faculty in the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN).