Cottrell Scholars Bring Ideas, People Together to Create Change in STEM Classrooms
A Cottrell Scholars Collaborative project is expanding connections between Cottrell Scholars and FLAMENet, a national network of science faculty, psychologists and education researchers working to promote resilience and tenacity among college-level STEM students. This spring the collaboration is presenting three mini-workshops on “Inclusivity in Introductory STEM Courses” sponsored by FLAMEnet and Research Corporation for Science Advancement.
FLAMEnet (Factors affecting Learning, Attitudes, and Mindsets in Education network) was founded in 2017 by Cottrell Scholars 2015 Jen Heemstra, Emory University, and 2018 Lou Charkoudian, Haverford College, along with education researcher Lisa Corwin, University of Colorado, Boulder, to change the academic culture and help give students the support they need to confront and cope productively with failure. The network was created with multiple links to the Cottrell Scholar community.
Heemstra was a new Cottrell Scholar in 2016 when she was invited to give a talk at Haverford College, where she was introduced to Charkoudian by CS 2008 Casey Londergan.
Charkoudian was impressed with Heemstra’s research program and dedication to student well-being. When Charkoudian was invited to write a perspective article for the journal Biochemistry, and with the encouragement of co-author CS 2016 Kathryn Haas CS 2016, she asked Heemstra to co-author.
Writing that article together, they discovered a shared passion for “engineering opportunities for students to fail, iterate, persevere and find themselves as scientists in that process,” said Charkoudian.
“We realized there was a clear unmet need to study interpersonal factors that influence how undergraduate students engage in their courses and eventually careers, how we could better support them to be challenge-seeking, and how we could promote more inclusive and diverse STEM courses,” said Charkoudian. “Jen’s vision and connections took the seed of an idea and turned it into a national network.”
Heemstra had met Corwin through another Cottrell Scholar effort, the writing of the RCSA-supported book Expanding the CURE Model: Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience. With Corwin as a third co-founder, and with a National Science Foundation grant, FLAMEnet was born.
“If we want to create change in how we teach in the classroom, we need to bring individuals with different expertise together – the psychologists who understand how different factors impact students, the education researchers who know how to design interventions and assess their impact, and instructors, the boots-on-the-ground people in the classroom who know what works and what doesn’t,” said Heemstra. “As we have built up the network, it’s always been about bringing together various groups of stakeholders to understand how different psychological factors impact students in the classroom, especially students from historically underrepresented groups, and to help equip instructors with the knowledge of how to harness those factors to support students.”
Heemstra added that interventions can be formal, like doing a values exercise in class, or may simply address what instructors believe, how they approach their classrooms, or the way they talk, which has a significant impact.
FLAMEnet held workshops in 2018 and 2019 at Emory University and considered how to scale up when the idea for a larger collaboration emerged at the 2019 Cottrell Scholar Conference in Tucson.
As a new awardee, CS 2019 Kerstin Perez, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave a brief talk about her work at the 2019 conference. She had been studying the concept of belonging and how feeling like a welcomed and contributing member of a community affects student learning, especially for those from underrepresented groups. The educational component of her Cottrell Scholar proposal was to assess various belonging interventions at MIT.
Her talk sparked a lot of conversation. “Cottrell Scholars from all over were thinking about similar things,” Perez said. “They were implementing similar things in their own courses and looking for a community of people who could work together on this.”
Heemstra and Charkoudian were at the conference and suggested that interested Cottrell Scholars could fold in nicely with FLAMEnet.
“There was definitely an overlap of goals, and overlap of building partnerships and bringing people together in authentic ways to do things we couldn’t otherwise,” Heemstra said. “A huge number of the initial FLAMEnet network and people involved over the years were Cottrell Scholars or linked with RCSA.”
“Establishing a Network for Effective Interventions in STEM Classrooms: Fanning the FLAMES,” a proposal Perez put together to bring the Cottrell Scholar community into FLAMEnet, was one of three projects to receive a Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Award of $25,000 in 2019.
“Seeing other people who were doing these kinds of things and studying and doing the scholarship was inspirational because we had been trying these kinds of mindset interventions, but kind of blindly,” said CS 1995 Thomas Solomon, Bucknell University, who later became the lead Cottrell Scholar on the project. “It was nice to see a group of people who really understand these kinds of things.”
Along with Charkoudian, Heemstra, Perez and Solomon, other collaborators on the CSC project include: Michael Dennin, University of California Irvine; David Forbes, University of South Alabama; Carla Frölich, North Carolina State University; Michael Hildreth, University of Notre Dame; Shahir Rizk, Indiana University, South Bend; Jennifer Ross, Syracuse University; Tristan Smith, Swarthmore College; and Kana Takematsu, Bowdoin College.
The collaborative’s original plan was for RCSA funding to enable Cottrell Scholars to attend FLAMEnet workshops, but the 2020 workshop was canceled due to the pandemic, and the 2021 workshop was remote, so little of the funding was used.
Conversations began among the group about how best to steward funds from the collaborative, and how to take advantage of the interwoven interests and efforts around resilience, diversity, equity, and inclusion. They decided to host three interactive, online workshops in 2022, securing two speakers from FLAMEnet, and a third from another concurrent RCSA-supported project, the American Institute of Physics’ TEAM-Up Task Force, which has analyzed sources of persistent underrepresentation of African-Americans in undergraduate physics and astronomy.
“I’ve been going to a lot of talks about DEI, and there is a lot of conversation about how important this is, and how we have a serious equity problem, especially in physics, but I often leave these talks feeling frustrated,” Solomon said. “What do we actually do about it? So, one of the goals of these workshops is for people to leave with specific ideas and things they can try.”
About 150 participants attended the first mini-workshop on March 21. "Creating Pathways of Kindness and Inclusion in STEM Education" was presented by Mica Estrada, Institute for Health and Aging, University of California, San Francisco. "Promoting Equity in Science Learning" by Chandralekha Singh, Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh, will follow on April 19, and "Whiteness and Structural Racism in Introductory STEM courses" by Terrell Morton, College of Education and Human Development, University of Missouri, will finish the series on May 11. More information about the mini-workshops can be found here, along with recordings of the sessions.
“The Cottrell Scholars Collaborative work is taking the best of the tools we learned in the pandemic and bringing them forward in a slightly different world,” said Perez. “People are more comfortable with the tools and being interactive in a Zoom setting. People are there because they want to engage, they want to have the conversations.”
Beyond funding the speakers’ honoraria through the collaborative award, Solomon said RCSA plays an “intangible but hugely important role in bringing people together” and creating a community of support, creativity and problem solving among Cottrell Scholars.
Heemstra called that community “the most influential network in my career.”
Charkoudian said she sees Cottrell Scholars living out the lessons from the March workshop.
"The speaker, Mica Estrada, challenged us to use our influence and our privileges and our power to grow kindness in our academic spaces, and that’s one of the things the Cottrell Scholar network does really well," she said.
