SEISMIC Recent Events
“Black women and belongingness: An interrogation of STEM education as a white, patriarchal space”
November 19th, 2020 at 3 pm EDT
Speakers: Luis Leyva (top) & Nicole Joseph (bottom), Vanderbilt University
This interactive research presentation engages audience members with empirical data to deconstruct ideas of Black women’s belongingness in STEM education as a white, patriarchal space. Statistics from recent National Science Foundation reports of advanced degrees in mathematical sciences are used along with Black women’s narratives of experience in STEM majors as well as perceptions of instruction in introductory courses. Please come prepared for an engaging discourse and critical reflection to inform more equitable, socially conscious practices in STEM education.
Zoom Link: https://asu.zoom.us/j/94696434185
Mind the gap: Active learning improves equity in STEM classrooms
November 17th, 2020 at 12 - 1:30 pm EST
Speakers: Dr. Elli Theobald, University of Washington
Despite widespread efforts to increase access to and inclusion in STEM, minoritized students remain excluded from both STEM majors and STEM professions. Our institutions need to change, but instructors can play an active role in disrupting these inequities. For example, active learning techniques have been shown to improve student performance on average, but can active learning also be a partial solution to achieving equitable student outcomes? In this talk, I will share recent work demonstrating that opportunity gaps—differential performance between PEERs (Persons Excluded due to Ethnicity or Race) and over-represented students—were reduced by 75% in college STEM courses when instructors incorporated active learning strategies, but only when active learning was implemented in a majority of class time. I find these data hopeful, albeit demonstrating only a partial solution to inequity in higher education.
Zoom Link: Find out more and register HERE
“Supporting Student Equity by Supporting Faculty and the Instructional System”
November 5, 2020 at 12 pm EDT
Speaker: Marco Molinaro, University of California Davis
At UC Davis we are focused on supporting systemic change to improve undergraduate student outcomes. We are using a locally generated Cycle of Progress for sustainable change that consists of 4 cyclical phases – Awareness, Understanding, Action, Reflection, and repeat. Realizing there have many efforts focused on students but far fewer focused on helping faculty and departmental faculty leaders, we saw a need to help faculty better understand who their students are. In our efforts, we developed an approach to communicating student outcomes that looked at the intersectionality of first-generation, low income and race/ethnicity variables on student short term and long term outcomes globally at our university and at partner institutions. We are now extending the approach to course sequences in departments and individual faculty in their classrooms as part of our Know Your Students core data plus survey and discussion tools, as well as through our Pathways Course Innovation (PCI) initiative. These approaches are guiding us in working collaboratively with faculty while enhancing the use of existing resources to improve equitable learning outcomes for students who have had limited opportunities prior to coming to our institution.
Please feel free to share it with others. Full details on this event and many other ones are on our events webpage. Click here!
August UC Davis SEISMIC Meetup
We had our first UC Davis SEISMIC Meetup via Zoom on August 27th, 2020. Tiffany Johnson summarized the summer meeting and we discussed how to build and coordinate participation here at UC Davis. We hope to continue having meetups via Zoom approximately once a month to share information about ongoing projects, help new members get involved, and learn about topics of interest to the group. This meeting was recorded; if you would like to access the recording, please email one of the listed contacts for UC Davis SEISMIC.