PLUS ME: A Novel Professional Development Approach for HBCU STEM Faculty

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities – Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) is designed to enhance the quality of both undergraduate STEM education and research at HBCUs to broaden participation in the nation's STEM workforce. As such, HBCU-UP provides support to principal investigators who are committed to meeting the nation's accelerating demands for STEM talent through a number of priority areas, including, increased research capacity of STEM faculty and evidence-based leadership and professional development of faculty.

Fielding Graduate University, in collaboration with GPRA Strategic Management, Inc., addresses the HBCU-UP’s priority of supporting leadership and professional development of HBCU faculty. More specifically, the PIs’ project seeks to establish a leadership program that supports HBCU and HSI women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The project (1) gives rise to a leadership development curriculum that attends to the projected changes in leadership development; (2) generates a safe, brave leadership development space for diverse academic STEM leaders; and (3) addresses a national imperative for leadership that gives rise to better broadening participation outcomes. It focuses on nurturing publishing habits, culturally authentic leadership, and sources of wellbeing, for leaders at the intersection of race and gender.

The project utilizes a CHAT (Cultural-Historic Activity Theory) evaluative framework to study changes in leader self-efficacy in individual participants while examining enhanced capacity of participants to collectively lead reform in STEM higher education. It will create a leadership development model that will enhance the norms and traditions of conventional leadership training practices to effect broadening participation in the administrative ranks of higher education.

This project not only implements a novel leadership development approach that meets STEM women of color at their level of need, but it also confronts the overarching ecosystem of STEM higher education at its own level of need. By considering implementation of safe, brave spaces, the PIs will create a novel leadership development model that easily crosses into and permeates the norms and traditions of mainstream STEM higher education – advancing and accelerating our nation’s broadening participation agenda to unprecedented levels of success.

This project is supported in part by the NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), that aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Additional funding was provided by the NSF’s Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program. AGEP supports research and collaborative partnerships to increase the number of faculty in STEM who are African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Native Pacific Islanders.

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.