From 2007 to 2009, the University of Washington?s ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change (UW ADVANCE) promoted the advancement of women and other underrepresented faculty in STEM departments across the nation by annually creating and delivering in-person Leadership Excellence for Academic Diversity (LEAD) workshops. The success of this initiative has prompted many more institutions in the U.S. to request LEAD workshops; however, it is not financially feasible, sustainable, or desirable for UW ADVANCE to continue to curate and offer in-person LEAD workshops. To meet the national demand for LEAD workshops, UW ADVANCE will create LEAD-it-Yourself! (LiY!), an online open source toolkit of planning and instructional materials to enable institutions to run their own local or regional LEAD-inspired workshops. LiY! will contribute to ADVANCE goals by disseminating LEAD planning and instructional materials to STEM departments across the nation. The online open source LiY! toolkit will provide UW ADVANCE leadership development content and best practices, customizable event planning guides, content guides (e.g., speakers suggestions, workshop topic ideas, leadership briefs with key tips and best practices, and sample presentations), and communication and evaluation templates that each institution can use as models. LiY!?s sustainability will be ensured by a leadership community that uses the online toolkit to engage in ongoing sharing, commenting, adapting, and rating of content and through an extensive iterative evaluation process.
The goal of the LiY! project is to disseminate UW ADVANCE LEAD content to a widely dispersed community of leaders in higher education so as to support independently-run academic diversity leadership development workshops across the country. We will create a website to host the online open source LEAD planning and instructional materials, and we will evaluate both the materials and the website in diverse institutional contexts. We will engage a diverse group of seven institutions in iterative evaluations to ensure that (1) the LiY! toolkit enables institutions to independently run fully customizable and successful leadership development workshops; and (2) the LiY! website supports usable and sustainable open source content dissemination. Pilot institutions will receive small amounts of seed funding for participating in the iterative evaluations.
LiY! will empower department chairs and faculty across the nation with rigorously evaluated and customizable materials for promoting the advancement of women and other underrepresented faculty in STEM. LiY! will encourage a community of leadership among geographically dispersed institutions through online dissemination and sharing.
