Inclusive STEM Teaching with Tershia Pinder-Grover and Sarah Hokanson

The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project is a free, online, six-week course “designed to advance the awareness, self-efficacy, and ability of faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students to cultivate inclusive STEM learning environments for all their students and to develop themselves as reflective, inclusive practitioners.”

On the podcast today, I talk with two of the project team members. Tershia Pinder-Grover is director of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching in Engineering at the University of Michigan, and Sarah Hokanson is assistant vice president and assistant provost for research development and PhD and postdoc affairs at Boston University. We talk about what makes this online course about inclusive teaching unique, including the use of local learning communities, affinity groups, and a troupe of actors, as well as the challenges of putting together such an impactful course.

And in case you don’t listen to the end of the interview, you should know that the course is being offered again this spring, starting on March 3rd, 2024. See below for a link to register.

Episode Resources

·       Inclusive STEM Teaching Project, https://www.inclusivestemteaching.org/

·       Spring 2024 course offering on edX, https://www.edx.org/learn/teacher-training/boston-university-the-inclusive-stem-teaching-project 

·       Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching courses, https://www.stemteachingcourse.org/ 

·       “Ten Years of Preparing Future Faculty through STEM Teaching Courses,” Derek Bruff, https://derekbruff.org/?p=4162 

Podcast Links:

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Transcript

Derek Bruff 0:07
Welcome to the Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I’m your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

About a decade ago, I signed on to a National Science Foundation grant aimed at developing free online courses for STEM educators designed to help them adopt evidence-based teaching practices. This was back in the heyday of the MOOC, those massive open online courses that took higher ed by storm. I was supporting MOOC development at Vanderbilt and I was involved in the CIRTL Network, a group of doctoral institutions collaborating around the professional development of STEM graduate students and postdocs. Bob Mathieu, the University of Wisconsin astronomer who was then the director of CIRTL, recruited me to this NSF grant, and I spent a good chunk of the next few years working with an amazing team of collaborators at multiple institutions. It wasn’t easy, but we put together two MOOCs on STEM teaching, which are still being offered annually today. See the show notes for a link to these courses, as well as to my blog post reflecting on a decade of work in this area.

The MOOC project taught me many things and one of them was that video production is a ton of work. That's one of the reasons I'm a podcaster today. But I also learned that a quality video based course that's available for free to future and current STEM faculty can have an incredible payoff. A few folks from that original team decided to leverage that experience to create another MOOC for STEM educators. This one focused on inclusive teaching. After recruiting a lot of collaborators and some more NSF funding, they have created the Inclusive STEM Teaching Project, a six week course, "designed to advance the awareness, self-efficacy and ability of faculty, postdocs and doctoral students to cultivate inclusive STEM learning environments for all their students and to develop themselves as reflective, inclusive practitioners."

On the podcast today, I talked with two of the project team members. Tershia Pinder-Grover is director of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching and Engineering at the University of Michigan. And Sarah Hokanson is assistant Vice president and Assistant Provost for Research, Development and Ph.D. and postdoc affairs at Boston University. We talk about what makes this online course about inclusive teaching unique, including the use of local learning communities, affinity groups and a troupe of actors, as well as the challenges of putting together such an impactful course.

And in case you don't listen to the end of the interview, you should know that the course is being offered again this spring, starting on March 3rd, 2024. See the show notes for a link to register. 

Tershia and Sarah, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm excited to talk with you about the Inclusive STEM Teaching project. Thanks for being here today. 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 3:11
Thanks for having us.

Sarah Hokanson
I'm delighted to be here. 

Derek Bruff 3:15
So before we get into the big project, I'd like to ask you my usual opening question so we can get to know you a little bit more and can each of you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 3:27
You know, it's funny because I think I've always wanted to be in education in some way, but I didn't always know it, right? So I grew up in a household where, like my mom was a high school teacher and education was just such a part of who we are and what we did. So it's hard to have a moment in my head because it's always it's always been there always been a part of what we do, even. Like fun things I would do as a as a high schooler, it was always around, Oh, let's teach somebody a thing, right? So it's it's always been there for me.

Sarah Hokanson
For me, it took longer. I wanted to be a decision maker. I used to play office when I was a kid and hold meetings. So I literally thought I was an administrator before I was an administrator. But when I had a policy job at the British consul general in Boston, I realized how much teaching people and kind of approaching things with a learning mindset made our policy work successful. And so when I came back into higher ed, I sort of thought of my position as like a policy wonk in an educational setting and so there was this opportunity to combine, I think, the administration and operations part that I really like with the teaching and communication skills that made my prior job so successful. But I would say in terms of identity, it wasn't really until I started actually facilitating programs that I felt like an educator, even though there are lots of people in the higher education world that are very much educators without ever being in a classroom or facilitating directly. But there was something about the identity of leading a discussion that kind of changed my mindset. So I think if you had asked me what I started the job, I still wouldn't say, Oh, I'm not an educator, I am a this or a that, I'm a leader. But now I definitely think that I am. And I would say I probably was all along. 

Derek Bruff 5:43
That's really fascinating. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the project. So the heart of the inclusive STEM Teaching project is this online course that's offered twice a year. What are the goals you have? Well, who are the participants in this course and what goals do you have for them as participants? 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 6:05
I think when we originally imagined this program, this this course really is that it should be it could be any educator, really. It's like faculty of all ranks, post-docs, graduate students would be able to have an opportunity to engage. And in particular, we were trying to design a course that would be really helpful for those in the STEM context, just because of the unique challenges that present itself. When it may seem on the surface that our content may not directly relate to issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. And so we wanted to be mindful of that and really try to offer that context for those instructors. But I think it's actually applicable to folks beyond the STEM context, right? So I think that's important to know.

And I can layer on in addition to the course, there's a whole infrastructure to support the facilitators of institutional learning communities. So you can take the course that Tershia just described, which addresses the unique challenges in STEM. And you can also join in these optional discussions alongside the course. And so our project was pretty committed to thinking thoughtfully about how do we make inclusive STEM teaching content accessible at scale, but being mindful that, you know, in an unintentional hands, these discussions could do harm to folks in the room. And so how are we providing the preparation, the support and just the time and space to reflect and kind of gather their expertise of our learning community facilitators? And there are nearly now 500 trained across the country. So there were kind of those two goals. 

Derek Bruff 7:53
So I want to circle back to the learning communities in a minute, but let's talk more about the course and the participants experience in the course. What what would they encounter? What would they find? What would they be asked to do in this course? 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 8:08
I think we were really very intentional in the way that we designed the course, because oftentimes when people think about inclusive teaching, there is a desire to just say, Give me that checklist, tell me what are the things that I need to do? So I can say that my course is inclusive. And we kind of said, hold on, let's let's think about this in a different way. And so we really wanted to first start with having instructors kind of do some of their own work and really think about and their own identities, their students' identities really engage in that reflection that Sarah was mentioning earlier, like that was sort of like, how are we going to help people think about what's assumptions are they're making about their teaching, about their students, about themselves as they're entering the classrooms? What are how are they familiar with issues associated with diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education? And then once we've had that strong foundation to begin to think about what are the application patterns? And I think that's something that we were really we were really trying to stick to our guns, that that's the way that we wanted our learners to kind of go through the course, to really kind of experience that internal reflection piece and then go into those thinking on what are the research based ways to apply these lessons in their various courses, the content, as well as the classroom environment.

Sarah Hokanson 9:32
One of the things I'm proud of also that is a little bit different is that I think we did a nice job, although we certainly got feedback from folks that maybe it was new to them, in balancing freedom of speech with setting clear boundaries about what is harmful speech. And I, you, you know, in our opening module, we take a lot of care to allow for, again, curious learners to come into this space without experience and really gain that level of experience and understanding while at the same time kind of setting pretty clear boundaries about what our course instructors would moderate in terms of harmful speech and what were kind of negotiable spaces, and then maybe some non-negotiables. And there were folks that questioned like the context of of that in terms of academic freedom and freedom of speech. And we had those conversations. But I'm really proud that we were able to define that in a way upfront, because I do think that made it more welcoming to some participants coming in the course where maybe that hasn't been as clear. 

Derek Bruff 10:42
Could you maybe share an example or two of maybe some of the boundaries that you felt were appropriate to set on the conversations in the course? 

Sarah Hokanson 10:49
Yeah, sure. I mean, so, for example, you know, one of the clear things that we set in our guidelines is, you know, just not being dismissive of other people's experiences or kind of not being dismissive of the fact that higher education has oppressive structures and being really clear that certain historical events have happened. And we're not going to debate that those have happened. So in the same way, we're not going to debate that there are inequities in higher education that need to be addressed by instructors. So that's an example of a hard boundary, right? That's a kind of working space of the course that we set very clearly. And, you know, I think that can be that can create discomfort for folks to hear, because even talking about privilege can create discomfort for some folks to hear. But it was important for us, I think, to kind of set the tone very clearly at the start.

So that's one example of many. And, you know, in terms of what we actually moderated inside of the edX platform, I mean, for the most part, the only things that we actually deleted were things that were, you know, an ism of some kind being manifested in a comment or folks that were logged in that were clearly not part of the educator community and were using this as a political forum. So but we made those choices very, very in a restricted way. You know, we really tried to balance allowing people to question us and question the content and having responses to those questions most of the time. But we still did set some boundaries. And I think boundary setting is a really important part of being inclusive. So I think that's why for me, I felt very proud of that. 

Derek Bruff 12:34
And you mentioned it's an edX course, so you are using the tools of the edX platform, right? You've got videos, you've got discussion forums, you've got I don't think you guys do have quizzes, but you could have had a quiz. 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 12:47
I mean, I think I think I think we used the My Inclusivity Framework. Would that be considered a quiz? Yeah. Yeah. So at the end of each module, participants had a chance to kind of answer two questions about their content, thinking about how is that shifted, the way they're thinking about teaching and learning as well as what might they do next? And so that was a part of a regular part.

But in terms of thinking about boundaries in the way that we did our design, we had discussion boards throughout, moderated discussion boards. But I think for our module on the student identity piece in particular, we were very intentional about centering the experiences of those who are marginalized in the in STEM higher education. And so because of that, we did not want to potentially cause additional harm by having a, a discussion board where people would question whether or not those experiences were authentic or real. And so for that particular module, we did not have discussion boards for that. But for most of them we did have a moderated discussion board.

Sarah Hokanson 13:48
It probably make sense in terms of talking about the videos just to briefly mention another aspect of the course that is unique, which is the CRLT Players. And since those are at Michigan, I am going to defer to my colleague at Michigan. But just to say it's super cool and I'm a fan and I and I will say it's such a memorable part of the course for participants. So well done to Michigan, 

Tershia Pinder-Grover
so I will take it away, Sarah. So I think at Michigan we have an applied theater group called the CRLT Players where CRLT stands for the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. And this is a group that has been around at least since the late nineties, early 2000s, doing Applied Theater within the in the in-person context. And so the inclusive STEM teaching project was really the first opportunity to really bring these amazing actors to video and kind of record some of those experiences. And so we call those embodied case studies where you get an opportunity to kind of see the scenarios unfold in front of you by performers who are able to kind of demonstrate different affective moments. You see how this the the situation unfolds with the nonverbal cues, right? The body language and the the expressions. And you can kind of really begin to have a common point of reflection around a student's experience without having to ask anyone to kind of self-disclose a moment of trauma or have someone be able to to say this is something that was this is something that happened to me, but rather people can just kind of point to well, remember when this particular, when Sabeta said this, Sabeta is one of the characters in one and one of the monologues, but it's sort of like when she was describing this situation, you know, people could point to that case as opposed to having to disclose anything about themselves. And so we've had I think we had many videos throughout the course, I think have been a really powerful addition to the learner experience. I think. 

Derek Bruff 16:05
Now I'm imagining like filming inside of a classroom where you're... 

Sarah Hokanson 16:08
And multiple camera angles and so you can not only see the face of the students in the background, but then a shot of the instructor. And I mean, the editing was done by the team at Northwestern who are artists and of themselves as well. So it was a really beautiful collaboration within the project. And I think the also wonderful thing about these case studies is that at least for me personally, I don't know if there's research on this. Derek, you would probably know, but when I read a case study, I put myself in the moment, right? And so I just taught responsible conduct of research this morning. And there's a case study about a PI and a mentee. And oddly enough, I always put myself in the mentee category. I don't know when that shifts. I am PI, but I don't know if maybe I'm just not there yet.

But nevertheless, like I, you're trying to create empathy with words on a page and so you immediately put yourself in the case and that can be challenging, you know, because that brings your identities and lived experiences into a case rather than the identities and experiences of students and how to respond to those individuals. And so the nice thing about the case study as well is that it takes... the viewer gets all of that empathy through the way that we connect with cinema generally and with characters generally, and leaves themselves out of it, which I do think is an important part of responding to, as Tershia points out, the students in our classroom as opposed to responding to ourselves in our own experiences and bringing that baggage into our strategies. 

Tershia Pinder-Grover
But I think there is a way that you can personally connect with what's happening in the case study, even if it isn't your own experience right? So I think that's part of what makes those embodied case studies so powerful. 

Derek Bruff 17:57
And in that distance, I think it's also of a fictionalized case study, right? So that I can also imagine, especially for, as you mentioned, you didn't want participants to kind of question the lived experiences of others. And so knowing that you're watching a case study that is fictionalized, that is designed in some way, I think maybe even makes a little space for people to push back or just explore. Why why did that person have that reaction? You know, you can you can kind of go to it more hypothetical or what if thinking, you're not trying to reverse engineer one individual's actual experience or psychology, but you're trying to understand the dynamics at play? 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 18:42
Well, actually, what I think, actually, Derek, just to clarify a point there, I think one of the things that my colleagues at the CRLT Players do is they do a lot of research to provide the fundamental basis for these case studies. So there may not have been a person named Sabeta, but Sabeta represents a whole host of research literature about the experiences of particular kinds of marginalized individuals. So it is it's dramatized, I would probably say, more than say it's completely fictional.

Sarah Hokanson 19:15
And it's helpful because it provides the social science, it provides narrative to the social science research, because I find sometimes when you give faculty a very prestigious and valuable social science research in the form of the research itself, it's sort of like, Oh, well, but that's biology, that's not physics, or Oh, well, but that's that person. It's not me, right? And I think there's a there when when there is a human dimension to that research, it becomes harder to look away from. You can see the grimace on their face or kind of the moment of recognition when they're misgendered and how that feels. It kind of shows up visually without them saying a word in the classroom, right? So it becomes harder to dismiss it. So I do think even though, as Tershia points out, they are fictionalized because they're so evidence based, they're also like social science research come to life and very, very real. So it's kind of the best of both worlds and and and so it's it's a little more than kind of going to see Barbie and unpacking feminism that way. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's it's it's not quite that level of of kind of fiction. And you know even though I'm grateful to Barbie for, for bringing feminism into this space. 

Derek Bruff 20:41
Right. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that I had seen the CRLT Players at a POD Network conference several years ago and got a little window into their process. And so I'm glad you were able to kind of talk about that because because I think the other thing is that I have found that sometimes STEM faculty being so embedded in the epistemology of their own fields, don't always know how to interpret social science research as a social science researcher might interpret it right. And so I think having some other way into to those findings and that research that is perhaps more accessible for someone who's not familiar with the methodology might might be really helpful. 

Let's talk about the learning communities, because I know that's another big piece of the course structure. And did you say you had five hundred trained facilitators? 

Sarah Hokanson 21:28
As of Wednesday. So actually we're in the middle of a facility or training right now. And so it actually might be more than that because we had 100 people in the Zoom Room on Monday. It was our biggest training ever with 39 institutional teams. So and so we developed a facilitator guide amongst a subgroup of us in the project and then developed the six hour virtual training. 

To be honest, we had conceptualized it as an in-person training and then COVID happened and so we changed that. And in the end, I actually think there aren't many things that I'm like, Oh, thank goodness for COVID, but this might be one of them in the sense that it made this training so much more accessible to places that maybe don't have travel funding, because our grant would have supported travel awards, but not to the level that some folks might have needed to participate. And I also think that the lower time demand, so the 6 hours allowed us to be thoughtful of of the teams that we had in the room. So how are we getting folks that are prepared to do this right where I view this training a little bit less about like how to facilitate. We're talking to these folks as if they're our colleagues joining our community of practice around facilitating a learning community and much more about helping them understand, okay, what's different about this course and how might you facilitate an embodied case study?

So it's we call it the facilitator training. It's almost a kind of lazy language in a sense, because this isn't like how do you lead a discussion on inclusive teaching, or... these are highly skilled, highly trained folks who are leading institutional change at either department level. So groups of STEM faculty or other institutional level partnerships, the Centers for Teaching and Learning. And, you know, I think that we've had learning communities run about at different points of the project over 180 different institutions. So that's exciting. You know, this was an area of the project that both Tershia and I were really involved in deeply, and it's been a really rewarding part because I think often in these federally funded projects, you you say, Oh, this is going to scale to millions or, you know, there's a there's a pie in the sky that you're aiming for. And I really think that we kept our promise. I really think that we have made these materials accessible to a number of institutions and beyond the kind of AAU elite R1 places as well. So I think that's a really special part of what we've done. 

Derek Bruff 24:12
And what... let's talk about the numbers just for a second, just for context. So so you ran the course, I guess, twice last year. And so how many participants might you have in a typical running of the course and how many of these learning communities would you have that are going concurrent? 

Sarah Hokanson 24:28
So I'm looking just at the slides that were from all of our course run. So we actually ran the course six times and are we have counted participation for five of them because the first time was a pilot. And I'll actually let Tershia talk a little bit about the pilot because that was a really important part of our process, actually. But any given course run over those five course runs we had learning communities varying from the spring course run tends to have more where we have sort of 40 to 50 institutions running learning communities and the fall is a bit lighter. It's more like 30 to 40 at one time. There are also some places that say essentially, thank you very much for running a live MOOC, but it would work better for us in the summer or as a boot camp format. And so they actually run off cycle. They have a version of the course in edX where their discussion boards are missing because we're not there to moderate them and they lead the learning community at their own time.

In terms of course, numbers, I mean it depends on how you count. We've had over 11,000 folks inside edX, but you know, if you measure the completion rate, it still seems kind of low because, as you know, Derek, from the MOOCs you've created, like half the people sign up and then that's the end of their engagement with your course. So the statistic I guess that I think demonstrates the impact is not necessarily how many registrations we've had, but that if someone clicks on one thing, a video, you know, an activity, honestly, the just the course introduction, it really doesn't matter. 45% of those folks complete the course. And and so that to me is just a really astounding number given, you know, the attention span of folks for online stuff. 

Derek Bruff 26:24
What is what is a learning community? What's the what's the idea of the model there? How does... who who organizes these and how do they kind of complement the the main function of the course? 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 26:36
So I would just share that with the learning community. It's oftentimes there are these teams of basically institutional change agents, right, that go through the facilitator training and have decided to run this cohort, the the learning community alongside with the MOOC. We support them in that process by giving them a a whole host of resources to help them have conversations all at the same time. So like if module one has opened modules, you know, zero and one have opened, then there's a whole facilitator activity sheet for them to kind of work on in their learning community and they can adapt it to their particular context. But it just kind of goes along side of that.

And at Michigan, I've had a chance to facilitate several of the learning communities there. And I think, Sarah, I think you've been involved with some of the things over at Boston too. I've been able to do both sort of along with the course run as well as at our own separate pace at Michigan and it's been really great because we've been able to kind of dig deeper and engage in some conversations that allow people to process, especially within the context of their institution. Or like one of the learning communities I ran was with that particular department. And so they were able to talk specifically about their departmental issues, concerns and so forth, so that they could kind of see specific applications of the work. And so I found those learning communities to be very rewarding as a facilitator and learning and co learning really with the folks who were in there.

Sarah Hokanson
And I've done it a multitude of ways, like Tricia in terms of it also works the other way where there are some folks who, for whatever reason, either by rank or honestly by departments or climate, don't feel that their colleagues are super ready to engage in these types of conversations. And so at BU we've run some learning communities that are across departments to give people the opportunity to kind of connect with like minded colleagues. So it's both. It's yes and, depending on the context and depending on what people need. 

Derek Bruff 28:51
And I just have to say, as someone who worked hard on a previous MOOC aimed at STEM educators put together by some of your collaborators on this one, to see this model in such, just to see it come to fruition like this, to see it in such a robust way, that's it's really rewarding, right? I think we had back then when we started in 2014 or whatever, right? We had a vision that was kind of like that. But the infrastructure needed and the planning needed to make this happen, right? To kind of create the course, to create the idea of learning communities, to kind of plant that seed, to find facilitators, to develop the training and resources they need to really do it well. I just I love the intentionality in all of this. And and I think the impact is is is really remarkable. So it's very exciting to hear about all this. 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 29:47
So there is what other part of our course that I think is a really unique feature and a very important one. And we have an opportunity to provide affinity groups for different groups of our learners to engage with the course content in conversations with people with similar identity backgrounds. And so I just want to acknowledge that we weren't able to get every possible combination of identities since we are composed of a myriad of identities. But what we try to do is create learning these affinity groups that were intersectional as it relates to race and gender for the most part. And we try to make sure that all of our facilitators, all of our facilitators of those affinity groups held those identities as well. And so they either came from our learning community group or were a part of our original project team too. And I think that these were really unique opportunities for for folks to kind of get sort of the identity based conversations going in ways that would be really helpful for folks to kind of dig deeper based upon where they were in their experiences.

Yeah, So I think that's a particular part that I think has been really, really helpful. I know that I led the BIPOC Women Learning, I keep calling it learning, the BIPOC Women Affinity group. And Sarah, I think you were in. Did you facilitate the.

Sarah Hokanson
No, I didn't facilitate one, but actually attended one. So I attended the White Women Group as a kind of participant when I was taking the course myself. So interestingly, my role in the project was focused much more on the facilitator training, which came later. I wasn't on any of the module teams, so I actually took the course during the pilot to kind of get a sense of what it was like as a participant. So that when we made the facilitator guide, I would have a sense of kind of what might come up for participants and what discussions might be useful. So I oddly enough, while I contributed a lot to the project, it's one of the few edX projects I've worked on where not a single activity or video inside the actual course itself that I co-create. But that's okay because, you know, the cool thing about this project was the different dimensions to it.

And I think the other piece that we haven't talked about that I do want to give a shout out to just because these folks often work behind the scenes and don't get the same recognition that content designers get through just like by the very nature of being on video, for example, is our social science research team. We have a very large research team that's focused on three distinctive research questions related to the course from the impacts of the online space for learners to the impacts of our learning communities on facilitators and learners to like what our actual faculty doing as a result of the course in their classroom and making those observations of specific teaching strategies that have emerged and the impact on their students. So going beyond the students in our course, but to the actual students in STEM disciplines that are interacting with our learners. So it's a huge part of the project. And some of those manuscripts are either accepted or coming out. Now, I know Tershia's team, I think had the first paper that has been published, and I'm focused on the facilitator research, and our paper was just accepted. So I'm excited to also see that work out there too.

And thanks, of course, to the National Science Foundation, which I don't think we've done yet for funding this work. And I think one of the great things about the NSF in particular is that they really do hold these interventional projects accountable for doing the research behind what they do. So I just have to say thanks for the money, NSF, keep it, keep it flowing.  

Tershia Pinder-Grover
But but I think that's that's a really important point because, you know, you don't want to have a learning opportunity without really knowing, well, is it effective? Is it really helping? Right. And so much of our the data from our social sciences colleagues here show that we've had strong pre post gains in learning and around awareness and confidence and self-efficacy. And even when we think about sort of some of the qualitative results, there's quite a bit in terms of how people are shifting their practice, changing their attitudes and really thinking about how they can best support students. And that's really exciting. That's really exciting. 

Derek Bruff 34:39
So having said all that, what's next for this project? I know I think the grant period is ending soon, but what's, what's the future of the course and the project? 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 34:50
We are going to be able to offer it one more time via edX so and beyond that we will be able to support our facilitated learning community, our facilitators in continuing it with their campuses, with sort of the local course runs. And so that's how the project will continue on. But I think from what I understand, we have one more offering of the course on edX in this traditional form coming up this March. 

Derek Bruff 35:20
That's great. Okay. And I will make sure to put it in the show notes, information about that course. Right. For anyone who might want to participate and jump in or even think about, do you have to have taken the course to be a facilitator? 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 35:33
Not necessarily. Not necessarily. I think we need more strong facilitation teams. So folks who have maybe facilitated DEI conversations before, but and they may have been folks who have access to faculty populations and maybe they're partnering with someone who has facilitated learning communities before. And so the idea is that they're creating a need to kind of move forward this initiative. And if they're able to articulate sort of their the justification, the reasoning, like why does this team work and why now for their particular institutions? And that's how things can go forward in that space. 

Derek Bruff 36:10
Oh, I love the team, man, because I can imagine you might have like a department leader who is there because they value the work, but they're there. They may not have the facilitation skills or the kind of deep knowledge as someone else, but they have the position of authority. They can kind of bring their colleagues in, you partner or someone like that who's a willing team member with someone who maybe has more experience facilitating these types of conversations with faculty. That's a great team. 

Tershia Pinder-Grover 36:40
Absolutely. I mean, I've seen applications with folks who are who connect with maybe they have a colleague in a non STEM field, Right. Who basically facilitates conversations around DEI as part of their regular practice. Right. They might come in and be a co facilitator with that STEM faculty member or they might or a STEM faculty member might connect with someone from their teaching learning center and they would together kind of work together to create a learning community that can kind of delve into these discussions pretty deeply. And so we really want to be mindful of not just... we want people to be able to have the skills, to be able to be committed to learning. We have to keep learning in this area. The moment you say you know everything about DEI, then you're done because you got to keep learning. There's so much more to learn. 

Derek Bruff 37:32
Thank you both for coming on the podcast to talk about this project. It's really fascinating and important work and I'm glad I had the chance to talk with you both about the project and your roles in it. So thank thanks again for being here today. 

Sarah Hokanson 37:45
Thanks for having us. 

Derek Bruff 37:53
That was Tershia Pinder-Grover from the University of Michigan and Sarah Hokanson from Boston University, both project leads on the Inclusive STEM Teaching Project. As they indicated, this spring’s offering of the course might be the last offering, so if you’re listening to this episode within a week or two of its air date, you can jump on that! See the show notes for a link to register for the course.

Also, if you’re listening to this episode on its release, we’re finishing up the 2024 slow read of my book Intentional Tech. We’re reading and discussion chapter six on learning communities this week, and we’ll finish with chapter seven on authentic audiences next week. And whenever you’re listening to this episode, know that you can find some bonus resources for the slow read on the Intentional Teaching Patreon.

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to the UPCEA website, where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings.

This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you’ve found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot.
As always, thanks for listening.