Higher education has been at the forefront of promoting diverse, inclusive, and equitable learning environments. In this context, Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) are striving to not only graduate students, but also provide culturally enhancing educational experiences to minoritized learners. Our STEM Communities project aims to support sustainable student-centered instructional changes in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses at Texas State University, an HSI, over a period of five years. STEM faculty are provided with opportunities to engage in professional development events, to assess and review historical student outcomes, and to participate in the redesign of target courses by incorporating culturally relevant instructional practices. The current phase of the project involves analyzing course-level student outcome data to reveal potential inequities across various student demographics. Over a series of meetings, the participating STEM faculty teams are encouraged to ask questions about students’ course experiences and discuss the findings through a lens of equity mindset in preparation for the course redesign process. We are recording and analyzing faculty’s initial reactions and discussions about the course-level data for two reasons: (1) to gain insights into the processes that produce individual and collective learning that bring about equity thinking, and (2) to support faculty’s efforts to create an inclusive learning environment. In this presentation, we will discuss the current project progress as well as some preliminary results on how different STEM faculty view inequitable student outcomes.
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