Inclusive Excellence Teacher-Scholar Workshop Materials

The Inclusive Excellence Teacher-Scholar Workshop (IETSW) program was developed to support Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) faculty to create inclusive and equitable (IE) spaces. The goals of the program included increasing faculty awareness, providing practice-based strategies, and supporting faculty as they make equity-minded changes in their classrooms to support students historically marginalized by higher education, including students of color, students who identify as LGBTQ+, and first-generation students.

Developed as a year-long, cohort-based program, IETSW was piloted in early 2018 and implemented and evaluated for four faculty cohorts between 2018-2022. The program reached 35% (n=40) of the College of Natural and Health Sciences full-time faculty across 11 departments with a 90% completion rate. Using an equity-minded approach, the IETSW program emphasized faculty’s personal growth given the necessity for individual cultural competence for long-term change and explicitly challenged the notion that higher education and STEM content are culture, race, and gender-free (or neutral).

Rethinking equity in terms of institutional and faculty change rather than perceived student deficits was an essential assumption and strategy of the program with the goal of addressing equity disparities in higher education. Bensimon and colleagues at the USC Center for Urban Education called this approach equity-mindedness.  IETSW focused on how faculty can positively impact student experiences and covered the mainstays of academia, including the syllabus, classroom participation, course content, and grading and assessment strategies.

EXPLORE AND DOWNLOAD IETSW MATERIALS

Contact Us

If you want to learn more about the Inclusive Excellence Teacher Scholar Program, have questions about the materials, or are curious about co-facilitating options, contact us via email at STEM.IEC@unco.edu 

Susan M. Keenan, PhD

Susan is a computational biologist who now serves as the Associate Dean for Student Success. Susan identifies as a White, cis-woman and is a first-generation college graduate. She has a decade of experience offering professional development for STEM faculty.

Jodie Novak, PhD

The IETSW materials are freely available for you to use. The overview of the IETSW program lists the topic covered in the program.  For each topic, we share the materials for the workshop, including a detailed facilitation guide, a PowerPoint presentation, and materials associated with workshop activities. We have also included any pre- and post-workshop assignments.

The IETSW program highlighted the work of several amazing authors. To avoid copyright infringement, we did not include copies of the chapters we used with our materials. Rather, we encourage you to purchase the books.

Creative Commons License
When using the materials, please cite us  and indicate the license the work is under. Our creative commons license allows you to make derivatives and changes but does require that the materials, and any new materials developed using our work, must be made available under the same license, and cannot be used for commercial purposes.   

Citation for Materials: ​Keenan SM, Novak JD, Bergstrom C, Reinsvold LA, Shellito L, Romulo C, and James A. (2020) The Culturally Inclusive STEM Classroom: Professional Development Materials for Faculty,. STEM Inclusive Excellence Collective, University of Northern Colorado

Key Findings

• Over the course of the four years, 40 faculty participated in the yearlong workshops…Throughout these sessions, faculty demonstrated commitment to the program through attending and engaging in conversations at workshops, reading, articles, and completing reflection assignments.
• The knowledge faculty gained stretched beyond theoretical and practical understandings of race, racism, and other biases to include understanding themselves.
• Data from across measures indicated that participants were making changes in their courses such as making syllabus revisions, increasing communication with students, and indicating that they would continue to implement equity-minded practices.

More on project evaluation and outcomes

Challenges

Challenges included 1) shifting faculty’s perception from a student-deficit lens to an equity-minded lens that requires looking at the institution’s responsibility for inequities; 2) helping faculty understand equity and IE as a journey that involves a multitude of ongoing actions rather than a one-and-done approach; and 3) shifting our perception of our work from primarily offering evidence of inequities and strategies to address them to centering faculty’s personal growth and cultural competence as necessary for faculty to engage in this work authentically during and after their participation in the IETSW program.

Publications

Revisiting the Syllabus--Tips for Creating a More Inclusive Syllabus

STEM Faculty Development for Creating Learning Environments that Promote Inclusive Excellence 

Funding

The IETSW project was funded by a five -year Inclusive Excellence (IE-1) Grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

General Format

The IETSW topics were organized into four categories. With a foundation of faculty cultural competency (who we are), IETSW participants explored the content of their courses (what we teach), pedagogical approaches (how we teach), and evaluation paradigms (how we assess). Given the complexity of teaching, some topics fit more than one category, but paying explicit attention to the categories helped us balance and build on our content through the workshop series instead of defaulting the focus to the more accessible category of how we teach. 

IETSW was a year-long, cohort-based program designed to provide 36 hours of workshops plus four to seven hours of engagement between each workshop. The program began with two full-day workshops. Then faculty participated in eight two-hour workshops during the fall and spring, and two, three-hour workshops as a semester wrap-up. Each workshop contained several 50-minute sessions. Participants were assigned pre-session work, such as readings and videos. After each workshop, participants completed implementation activities that required further engagement with a given topic, and/or classroom implementation.

For additional details related to the format of the IETSW program, and to explore the theoretical perspectives that underlie the programming, check out our recent publication:

STEM Faculty Development for Creating Learning Environments that Promote Inclusive Excellence 

Session Types

We had three basic session types. Session types were determined by what happened in the session as compared to the pre-and post- sessions and describe how participants engaged with the content.

Initial engagement sessions were used when the topic was challenging, and participants needed group processing time to make sense of the content. Once participants interacted with the basic ideas in the session, they had opportunities through the implementation activity to extend their engagement with the content, often through readings. Our racial oppression session was an initial engagement session.

Extending engagement sessions were the most common session type and were used when the content was easily accessible through readings, watching videos, or other activities. Participants were assigned pre-session work; in the session itself, we deepened the engagement. This session type supported participants to take action in their classroom through the post-session implementation activities. Our implicit bias and microaggressions sessions were examples of extending engagement sessions.

Initial engagement and implementation sessions integrated the implementation and the initial engagement. Sessions incorporated an introduction to a concept and work time to implement the topic. Our syllabus and disaggregating data sessions were initial engagement and implementation sessions.