Developing STEM Communities of Practice for Institutional Transformation in Two-Year Hispanic Serving Institutions 

The STEM KickStarter 2.0 (KS2) program was developed to build cross-functional, cross-disciplinary communities of practice of faculty, administrators, staff, and students focused on improving STEM teaching and learning for Latinx students at two-year Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). The framework underlying the program comprises community of practice literature and a STEM Evidence-based Student Serving (STEM-ESS) Assessment and evidence-based practices. The goal of KS2 is to improve Latinx student outcomes in STEM and signal intentionality for institutional transformation. Institutions move through the KS2 program as cohorts over 18-months.

This program is supported by a collaborative NSF-IUSE Award with Arizona State University (Award #2142516 and #2142734).

The Transformative Teaching and Learning Collaborative 

The Transformative Teaching and Learning Collaborative (TTLC) was a year-long, interdisciplinary networked improvement community (NIC) to improve teaching. The TTLC topics aligned with the teaching through diversity framework (Castillo-Montoya, 2019). The program finished in 2018 with a one-year follow-up on participants. We found instructors’ conceptions of minoritized students’ prior knowledge advanced further than their practices and the nature and extent of this shift differed by various factors including academic discipline; instructor social identity, particularly gender; teaching improvement goals; and instructor perceived or real teaching agency (Castillo-Montoya & Ives, 2021).  

This work was supported by the Neag School of Education Dean’s Research Incentive Award, the University of Connecticut College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Funds for Interdisciplinary Research Endeavors, NASA Connecticut Space Grant Consortium (Grant Number:  NNX15AI2H), College Student Educators International (ACPA) Emerging Scholars Program, and University of Connecticut Scholarship Facilitation Fund. 

Presentations and Publications