The number of higher education institutions earning the designation of Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) has more than doubled between 2005 and 2018, and accounts for nearly 17% of all non-profit, degree granting institutions. In 2017, in response to two Congressional Acts, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded a total of 11 national conferences to inform the design of their new HSI Program. The University of Arizona, one of first conference awardees, held a working conference that brought together over 100 faculty, students, and administrators from 42 Southwestern HSIs, including 37 HSIs and five emerging HSIs, to identify gaps, opportunities, and key recommendations for transforming STEM education at HSIs.
Six major themes, encompassing 13 critical focus areas, emerged from our analyses of the conference transcripts. The major themes are as follows: (1) advising, mentoring, and non-academic support systems, (2) STEM academic structure and related support systems, (3) evidence based pedagogies, (4) equity, diversity, and culturally responsive practices, (5) research experiences and high impact practices, and (6) serving Hispanic students at HSIs. Each focus area includes one or more sets of recommendations for ensuring inclusive support systems for undergraduate students at HSIs and emerging HSIs.
Outcomes: Findings from this project will directly inform the development of NSF’s HSI program, in addition to paving ways to new and stronger cross-institutional synergies in the Southwest. Specifically, the conference has led to the formation of the STEM in HSI working group at the University of Arizona to engage with academic and non-academic units, as well as faculty at other southwestern HSIs and initiate collaborative work that raises institutional awareness of what it means to serve STEM undergraduate students at new and emerging HSIs.
Vignesh Subbian is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Systems and Industrial Engineering, member of the BIO5 Institute, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Center for University Education Scholarship at the University of Arizona. His professional areas of interest include medical informatics, healthcare systems engineering, and broadening participation in engineering and computing. Subbian’s educational research is focused on asset-based practices, ethics education, and formation of identities in engineering.
Marla A. Franco, Ph.D., serves as the Assistant Vice Provost of Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Initiatives and the Executive Director of Assessment, Research, and Grant Development at the University of Arizona (UA). She led efforts at the UA that resulted in the university being recognized as a federally designated HSI in 2017 and is now working across the full scope of the university enterprise to develop a centralized vision for optimizing this designation in a way that truly benefits students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members from diverse backgrounds. Her research expertise is centered on understanding the implications of negatively perceived campus climates for diversity on the cognitive outcomes of Latinx college students. She has also published on topics such as transforming STEM education at HSIs and assessing the capacity of HSIs to serve Latinx students.
Guadalupe Lozano, grew up in Argentina. She is an Associate Research Professor of Mathematics and serves as Director for the Center for University Education Scholarship (CUES). She is also a Co-Founder of the STEM in HSI Working group at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Lozano's work focuses on transforming undergraduate STEM education at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI), a joint effort with her STEM in HSI working group at UA, initially funded by the National Science Foundation. Lozano has been involved in K-12 and undergraduate math education initiatives which inform her current work. Her projects have included: (1) the national training of educators in the Common Core Mathematics Standards, (2) the writing of reform calculus curricula, (3) the writing of national recommendations for deploying active-learning practices in undergraduate mathematics, (4) the quantitative assessment of the impact of active-learning pedagogies on the conceptual learning of calculus, and (5) and the establishment of cross-institutional faculty collaborations for streamlining the transition from community colleges to the university.
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