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Facing the Challenge: Connecting Concepts to Practice to Improve STEM Faculty Professional Development

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Abstract

The National Science Foundation-funded Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Aspire Alliance (Aspire) has made efforts to address broadening participation in STEM through multiple initiatives, including faculty professional development. Aspire, recognizing the positive outcomes related to inclusive teaching, developed the Inclusive Professional Framework (IPF), a conceptual framework that was designed to address equity in STEM. The IPF is focused on foundational awareness, knowledge, and skill development that can be applied to all areas of faculty responsibilities, and in turn ensures that faculty are engaged in not only inclusive teaching, but inclusive practices across their multiple roles with students and colleagues. The IPF was created to center a reflective process, which in turn leads to self-reflexivity. The Aspire team found operationalizing the framework in concrete ways and building faculty skills in self-reflexivity to be more challenging than they had anticipated. Through qualitative interviews, this paper highlights the challenges inherent in moving from conceptual framework to practice by examining how developers and facilitators of the framework conceptualized the IPF and how they attempted to operationalize it in their personal or professional lives. This paper also underscores the nuancing that occurs as individuals continue to make sense of a framework after it is initially published and they begin to use it in their practice–field testing the ideas and concepts in the real world. This knowledge is especially helpful to faculty developers that work in centers for teaching and learning, higher education administrators, and faculty.

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Notes

  1. This participant was able to respond to questions connected to her background and its influence on her DEI beliefs but she was unable to describe the IPF domains and was therefore not included in the latter part of the study which focused on the conceptualization of the IPF.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Bipana Bantawa, Sean Bridgen, NiCole Buchanan, Chris Castro, Emily Dickmann, April Dukes, Levon Esters, Lucas B. Hill, Gretal Leibnitz, Louis Macias, Robin McC. Greenler, Ebony Omotola McGee, Shannon Patton, Robin Parent, Christine Pfund, and Kecia Thomas for contributions to the intellectual development of the Inclusive Professional Framework. We also wish to thank Quincy Clark for her early involvement in the conceptualization of this study and her contributions toward data collection. In addition, we wish to thank Chris Castro, Chris Dakes, Yunshu Fan, Robin Greenler, Erica Hagen, Lucas Hill, Lisa Jong, Todd Lundberg, and Evangeline Su for their feedback and suggestions, especially around threshold concepts and frameworks. Janet Trembly is responsible for the IPF: Faculty image design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Leadership and Counseling , Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI, USA

    Selyna Pérez Beverly

  2. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Office of Inclusion, Equity & Diversity in Engineering, College of Engineering, Madison, WI, USA

    Donald L. Gillian-Daniel

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Correspondence to Selyna Pérez Beverly.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1,834,518, 1,834,522, 1,834,510, 1,834,513, 1,834,526, 1,834,521 (NSF INCLUDES Aspire Alliance). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

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Beverly, S.P., Gillian-Daniel, D.L. Facing the Challenge: Connecting Concepts to Practice to Improve STEM Faculty Professional Development. Innov High Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-024-09705-9

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