Incorporating Civic Engagement in Undergraduate STEM: Working to Enable and Sustain Transformation

This project aims to serve the national interest by propagating an effective and innovative faculty professional development program and leadership model that supports faculty at two-year colleges in creating curricula that will broaden the participation of women and racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in STEM as well as prepare students to face the 21st century challenges of global and environmental change that intersect with societal inequities. Using course modules designed by faculty and integrated into their 100- and 200-level courses, across any STEM discipline or field, this project will equip students with the scientific knowledge and practice, as well as the systems thinking skills, equity ethic, and civic engagement tools needed to leverage STEM to create societal change and improve their communities.

This Track 2 project, focused on Leveraging Institutional Strengths and Innovation, will propagate the professional development program from Washington (WA) state, where it is well-established, to community colleges in Oregon (OR) and California (CA). Five faculty leaders from WA, OR, and CA will co-develop strategies for institutionalizing the curriculum and expanding its use by STEM faculty beyond enthusiastic “early adopter” faculty, as well as build the capacity of faculty to be change agents for STEM reform at their colleges and develop strategies to support the eventual nationwide expansion of the program.

This project will directly benefit a significant number of two-year college STEM faculty (41) and students (2,050) over three years, with changes to STEM teaching made during the project expected to remain indefinitely.

The project goals are to propagate the effective and innovative faculty development program and leadership models to support practical and scalable STEM reform through course modules focused on climate and civic engagement as well as provide an innovative STEM education that promotes student persistence, broadens participation of groups underrepresented in STEM fields, and prepares citizens and scientists to address climate-change in the 21st century. To meet these goals, the project will create a community of transformation to propagate and institutionalize the faculty professional development program and curriculum change models in three new regions; refine the curricular framework and pedagogy and create more online-published examples of course modules that situate STEM content in climate themes, civic engagement, and climate resilience; and develop a mentoring model to support adoption of existing course modules by faculty in a way that fosters systems thinking and critical consciousness for structures and systems change.

The impact of the project will be assessed and evaluated using student and faculty surveys and case study analyses, as well as other institutional metrics such as course success, student retention, and persistence. Project results will be disseminated through the creation of reports, websites, annual conference presentations, papers published in peer-reviewed journals, online publication of new curricula, and other resources that support the curation and effective sharing of strategies for institutionalizing the professional development program, developing faculty leadership capacity and facilitation skills, broadening the use of the curriculum by new faculty, and create new knowledge about how this type of teaching impacts students' experiences at two-year colleges.

The NSF IUSE: Innovation in Two-Year College STEM Education (ITYC) Program seeks to accelerate the impact of and advance knowledge about emerging and evidence-based practices in undergraduate STEM education at two-year colleges.

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.