Science Education in Higher Education

As most of my focus has been on K-12 science education and teacher education at the undergraduate and graduate level, I haven't spent much time or effort examining resources for science educators in higher education. However, after some great conversations at a wedding for one of my collaborators, I found myself exploring some great resources for higher education science educators.

Here are some of the sites I visited and some thoughts about them:

• Science Education Resource Center (SERC) - http://serc.carleton.edu/index.html - This is a fairly vast collection of resources on a wide range of areas. It also includes active curriculum development projects, professional development workshops and other resources for faculty to become involved with.
• UTeach Program for Teacher Education - This initiative started out at the University of Texas at Austin and links undergraduate efforts in STEM to efforts to recruit and retain STEM K-12 teachers. The replication of this program at universities across the US have implications for historically marginalized STEM undergraduates.
• David Mogk at Montana State University and have been working throughout his career on efforts in geoscience higher education to improve science education outreach efforts and the recruitment and retention of historically marginalized students. 
• Cathy Manduca at Carleton College has been working to improve science faculty understandings of student learning to broaden the range of experiences students get in their undergraduate education. 
• Valerie Otero at the University of Colorado at Boulder has co-developed the Learning Assistant program to provide students with smaller, transformed undergraduate science experiences providing more opportunities for participation of historically marginalized students.

Are there other sites you know about that may bring science education in higher eduction into contact with STEM equity efforts? Please comment on this blog with the links and your thoughts about them.

Some of this work is supported by the NSF's Department of Undergraduate Education (DUE) Program. Upcoming NSF funding requests that are relevant to Higher Education equity include:

• ADVANCE - Increasing the Participation and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Careers.
• REU - Research Experiences for Undergraduates

While other NFS awards might also be related I couldn't explicitly link them to an equity focus.

How do these all relate to equity? I am interested in the way the programs related to these sites change the nature of undergraduate learning experiences and support faculty in making such changes. We know from literature that participation of historically marginalized STEM populations such as women, non-English dominant speakers and people of color are often limited by lecture format learning often found in traditional undergraduate science classrooms, particularly large lectures with little community or individual contact. It is interesting to think about how we might change such spaces so that those who have been historically marginalized in STEM education and careers can make it into and through our undergraduate STEM experiences successfully. I recently had the most excellent experience of talking with four science undergraduate youth of color from the a large university. These students were concerned that they didn't belong in science classrooms, that the experiences didn't meet their needs and that they were not well prepared from their high school experiences to succeed in university. Unfortunately, their experiences are common for many youth of color, some women and others who have been historically marginalized in these spaces. I love science - the knowledge, the process and the community - and I think the involvement of bright minds like these students is critical to engaging different viewpoints in the production of future scientific knowledge. Our challenge is to find ways to support their learning, help them develop identities as part of the scientific community and ensure that we are not putting any barriers in their way to cause frustration, resistance and reduce retention. As higher educators what are we doing in each of our classes, in every course and learning experience to ensure students of color, women and other historically marginalized students are included and supported?

Thoughts? I would love to hear comments on how we can thing broadly about support for historically marginalized populations in undergraduate STEM education. This might include cool links, interesting work of faculty, student groups or institutional organizations. Please share.