Dr. Alexa Lamm and Dr. Millicent Oyugi attended the NSF’s Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Aspire Alliance Summit hosted on July 19 – 20, 2023, at UCLA’s Luskin Center in Los Angeles, CA. The Aspire Alliance Summit regarded systemic change for an inclusive and diverse faculty and explored key issues regarding advancing STEM faculty diversity and inclusion by sharing emergent research and promising practices, community dialogue, and intentional network building.

With the support of the NSF grant through Dr. Alexa Lamm, Millicent collaborated with the Aspire National Team, Regional Change, IChange, Research, and Evaluation teams to present two oral abstracts and one poster at the summit.

Read below about the various presentations.

Research

Building Regional Cross-Institution Collaboratives Across the Nation: The Aspire Regional Change Initiative Shares Our 5-Year Story

Authors: Jess Gregg – CEILS at University of California, Los Angeles; Maria Wright – Bakersfield College; Millicent Oyugi and Alexa J. Lamm – University of Georgia; Jana Foxe and Liz Litzler – University of Washington, Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE); Craig Oglivie – Montana State University; Gigi Delk – Tyler Junior College.

Three women stand behind a podium and in front of a presentation screen on which there is a PowerPoint of their research topic.
(Left to right) Jess Gregg, Millicent Oyugi, and Maria Wright present about the growth of the Aspire Regional Change Initiative and its goals for the future.

Jess Gregg, Maria Wright, and Millicent A. Oyugi presented outcome data collected over the past 5 years, revealing how the Aspire Regional Change Initiative has systematically grown from 3 to 9 national Regional Collaboratives across California, Texas, Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts with an additional planning grant in New York. Each regional collaborative consists of partnerships between 4-year and 2-year colleges, and each provides mentored teaching practicum experiences for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. One of the prominent goals for Aspire Regional Change is to build and strengthen concrete pathways to teaching at a two-year college, particularly for individuals underrepresented in STEM faculty within a given region, to diversify the faculty across the nation more broadly. During this session, the speakers discussed the Aspire Alliance team structure, program goals, teaching practicum program model, and outcome data revealing how mentoring commitments positively impact underrepresented graduate students’ community college STEM teaching competencies and self-efficacy. They also shared project successes, challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned over the past five years. To view more resources, visit www.aspirealliance.org/resources

Roundtable

Examining Collaborative Dynamics and Collective Impact Processes within NSF EBJ Aspire Alliance

Authors: Lucas Hill – University of Wisconsin-Madison; Diane Codding – Northwestern University; Jana Foxe, Liz Litzler, Brooke Wolfe – University of Washington; Millicent Akinyi Oyugi – University of Georgia

A panel of six researchers stand at the front of the room as one holds a microphone to answer a question.
Dr. Millicent Oyugi participates in the roundtable event to share varying perspectives on the success of the NSF EBJ INCLUDES Aspire Alliance projects.

Drs. Lucas Hill and Liz Litzler presented how project dynamics within STEM reform initiatives/ programs, directly and indirectly, influence what is pursued, how it is pursued, and the resultant outcomes and impact. This session examined project dynamics within the NSF Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Aspire Alliance (Aspire) from research and evaluation perspectives based on various dimensions of the collaborative dynamics framework—motivation, group norms and processes, leadership, and resources. The evaluation employed multiple data collection methods, including collective impact surveys, interviews, partnership tracking, and meeting observations, data spread across five years (2019-2023).

Drs. Millicent Oyugi, Diane Codding, Brooke Wolfe, and Jana Foxe presented key results from each perspective:

  • Leadership and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) Dynamics concerning NSF EBJ INCLUDES Aspire Alliance, revealed tensions between hierarchical leadership and DEI principles. Recommendations included advancing dialogue, pushing back against artificial urgency, and establishing an effective workflow to address leadership challenges.
  • Co-Lead Analysis from interviews showed that Aspire excels in its shared mission and norm of respectfully hearing all voices; however, limited capacity affected collaboration with external partners, and different expectations for working with partners caused visibility disparities among teams. Lessons learned included reflections on missed opportunities.
  • Aspire Planning Meetings (APM) analysis from observations of APM revealed 67 instances of lessons learned, primarily related to sustainability, expansion, scale, and partnerships. Sustainability challenges emerged in later years, and lessons shifted over the grant’s life cycle, with partnerships becoming a key focus in Year 5.
  • Collaborative Dynamics analyzed from the collective impact survey data indicated high agreement across most teams concerning team-level metrics. Still, some disagreements arose regarding resource access, goal measurement, and DEI-related issues. Needs assessment models (Witkin and Borich) highlighted critical areas for improvement, the common ones across most teams being access to resources and support, clear data collection plans, and agreement on a common goal.

Key research findings and recommendations were related to leadership, DEI dynamics, and the impact of external pressures on the project. Recommendations included flattening the hierarchy, advancing dialogue, and considering the influence of identity and positionality.

Poster

Enhancing Community College STEM Teaching among Graduate Students from Underrepresented Groups Using a Mentored Teaching Practicum

Authors: Millicent Oyugi, University of Georgia; Alexa J. Lamm, University of Georgia; Jana Foxe, University of Washington, Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE); Liz Litzler, University of Washington, Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE)

Two women stand beside a research poster in an event hall as one explains the research results to the other.
Dr. Millicent Oyugi (right) explains the results of her NSF EBJ INCLUDES Aspire Alliance evaluation reports to another Summit attendee.

Each Aspire Regional Change (RC) collaborative, including California, Texas, Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and New York, exposes underrepresented groups (URG) of graduate students to community college STEM teaching through a mentored teaching practicum. RC’s long-term goal is to promote nationwide diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher learning by attracting more URG STEM faculty in two- and four-year colleges. This research poster evaluated the impact of a teaching practicum and mentoring on URG graduate students’ community college STEM teaching skills, career readiness, and interest in two-year community colleges. The operational concept was a mentoring and teaching practicum, considering Bandura’s (1997) theory of self-efficacy, exposing URG graduate students to mastery, vicarious, and verbal sources of teaching efficacy, and enhancing their STEM teaching skills, career readiness, and interest in community college faculty positions across gender and racial identities.