The Association for Women in Science (AWIS) proposes to organize and host the 2010 workshop for the ADVANCE Principal Investigators (PI). This project will feature a 2-day workshop in early November of 2010 that will not only serve as an opportunity to disseminate cutting research and findings gleaned from ADVANCE projects, but also serve to expand outreach efforts of ADVANCE to a broader audience that will include representatives from liberal arts and women's colleges and universities as well as other diversity stakeholders in the STEM disciplines. Specifically, the project will focus on identifying topics for discussion, identifying and soliciting keynote speakers and developing a dissemination plan.
Intellectual Merit: The goals of this organization are well aligned with the mission of the ADVANCE Program. As such, it is ideally suited to host an ADVANCE PI meeting. The proposed project will bring together ADVANCE PIs of institutional transformation, institution transformation catalyst and PAID awards for a workshop that will not only foster networking and dissemination of new knowledge in the social science and organizational change disciplines, but also attract a wider audience to the ADVANCE community. Specifically, this meeting will target individuals from small liberal arts institutions and from women?s colleges. Historically, the ADVANCE Program has not had a significant impact on this cadre of institutions of higher education.
Broader Impacts: The broader impacts of this project lie in its capacity to disseminate information on innovations discovered by all ADVANCE projects as well as the insight gleaned from research to an expanded target audience that includes women faculty from liberal arts institutions and women?s colleges.
Broadening Participation and Inclusion – The 2010 ADVANCE Workshop The meeting on Broadening Participation was held November 7-9, 2010 in Arlington Virginia. Invitees included Principal Investigators of grants from the National Science Foundation ADVANCE program, as well as representatives from women’s colleges and primarily undergraduate institutions, both of which play a prominent role in preparing women students to pursue graduate degrees in STEM disciplines. NSF ADVANCE grantee programs continue to set the bar for best practices in recruitment and retention of female STEM faculty. As such, the dissemination of information and exchange of ideas among a broader, more diverse community of stakeholders is imperative if America's scientific enterprise is to remain competitive. Programming for Day 1 of the workshop focused on topics of broad interest to ADVANCE program Directors as well as to invited guests from 12 Women’s colleges and primarily undergraduate institutions; programming for Day 2 focused more specifically on synthesizing research results gleaned from ADVANCE projects. The feedback received from the 252 attendees indicated that participants appreciated the integration of members from women's colleges and primarily undergraduate institutions to the workshop because it allowed for new kinds of interactions and insights. Participant evaluation results, on a five-point scale, 45% (N=55), said they were "very satisfied" and 32% (N=39) said they were "somewhat satisfied." This project is novel in that it is designed to carry the innovations funded by the ADVANCE program and the insight gleaned from research into an expanded realm, to new audiences that influence the national conversation on how to meet the coming challenge of providing a technical workforce for US industry, higher education, government, and other work sectors.
