This project aims to serve the national interest by scaling up an effort to transform STEM education so that it “meets students where they are.†To this end, the project aims to establish a resilient teaching and learning ecosystem that nurtures students, faculty, and staff. A key outcome of this STEM education ecosystem will be students, staff, and faculty who achieve their individual professional and personal goals. Currently, many STEM educators view the educational process as a factory that requires students to first possess standard knowledge and skills before they can function well. The “factory-like†model does not serve students’ educational needs, particularly when the strengths and knowledge expected for undergraduate student success are narrowly defined. Guided by an ecosystem model, this project aims to shift the paradigm of teaching and learning in STEM by shifting the mental model of STEM faculty to a view of education as an ecosystem. In this STEM education ecosystem, all students and the assets they bring are valuable and matter. This new mental model will allow the faculty to intentionally establish a supportive and resilient STEM education ecosystem that facilitates learning for all students regardless of their backgrounds. The project will also simultaneously address the mental model and capacity of department chairs/program coordinators, so they can lead the cultural change needed to create a STEM education ecosystem at the department level. Finally, the project intends to reform the teaching evaluation system to promote a culture of reflection and self-improvement, thus helping faculty develop their teaching skills in a sustained way that reflects the assets they bring to teaching. Taken as a whole, achieving these goals is expected to remove institutional barriers and create a structure that can sustain a supportive and sustainable STEM education ecosystem.
The project will be led by California State University at Los Angeles, a Hispanic Serving Institution, and is designed to implement the proposed transformations using the Community of Practice (CoP) framework and Kotter’s organizational change strategies. Both are evidence-based approaches to achieve organizational and systemic change. The change of faculty members’ mental models and departmental cultures relating to STEM teaching and learning will be cultivated through various communities including the Action Research Teaching Fellows Faculty Learning Community, the Leadership Learning Community, and the Facilitators Learning Community. The STEM education ecosystem communities are intended to recognize, understand, and value the cultural wealth of students, faculty, staff, and administrators, and leverage these assets to create a supportive and culturally responsive environment. The STEM education ecosystem communities will also help to form a powerful coalition of STEM faculty and leaders who embrace the ecosystem model, thus extending the scope of change. The reform of the teaching evaluation system will anchor the institutional changes by aligning faculty recognition and advancement with their assets, goals, and improvements over time. The project will use a mixed methods research design to study the effectiveness of the proposed change process, the impact of asset-based teaching and learning, and to develop more complete metrics for measuring a healthy STEM education ecosystem. The research findings may also lead to valuable guidelines for institutional change that can be used at other institutions. The proposed project has the potential to create a model of STEM education that leverages the assets of students, faculty and staff, thereby leading to greater equity and inclusion in STEM education and the STEM workforce. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
