All posts by IDD

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Foundational STEM courses Curated Resources and Action Items

Students watching webinar on computer, studying online.

Authors

Kyle Grice and Margaret Bell

Our faculty learning community (FLC) generated some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable. Below are some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable; we give a brief orientation to the concepts, with links to additional resources, and potential next steps. Of course, this is only a selection of the extensive body of work, and there is more to be done. While there are a lot of ideas within this list, the most important thing is to simply begin. Within some of these ideas are comments from your colleagues at DePaul about their experiences with implementing the ideas. While our FLC focused on STEM, these concepts could be applied to any course at DePaul. Full names of all the participants in the FLC and their contact information are at the end of the document.  

I. Spend some time in social learning and personal reflection

Big ideas: 

Meaningful and sustained change in education and academia can only come from acknowledging several key concepts: 1) Our society was built in a way that disproportionately privileges White / Male / Cis / Hetero / Able-bodied / Young / Neurotypical / Christian / High Socio-economic-status people in education, housing, employment, and health and well-being, at the implicit exclusion or explicit oppression of ‘others’. Therefore, equity, not just equality, is our responsibility in academia. 2) We all have implicit in-group biases developed from existing in our current society and, as instructors, are coming from places of power and privilege. 3) Everyone has equal and infinite potential to learn and grow, and emphasizing a growth mindset in interacting with students can be impactful. Continue reading →

Frame-Switching As a Way to Get Unstuck: A Student Perspective

Authors

Mary Bridget Kustusch, Kyle Benjamin, and Grace Heath

When you are working on a problem and get stuck, how do you get “un-stuck”? Many of us have developed a myriad of tools, some explicit and some implicit, for helping us move past those sticky places in our work, but how did we develop these tools? How do we help our students develop these tools?

This figure illustrates the theoretical framework used in the larger collaboration for exploring epistemic framing. By placing framing along two dimensions (algorithmic to conceptual and math to physics), we can map how an individual or group moves through this framing space. Each quadrant also contains a brief description of what framing in that quadrant might look like, including an image taken directly from our data.
Figure 1. This figure illustrates the theoretical framework used in the larger collaboration for exploring epistemic framing. By placing framing along two dimensions (algorithmic to conceptual and math to physics), we can map how an individual or group moves through this framing space. Each quadrant also contains a brief description of what framing in that quadrant might look like, including an image taken directly from our data.

As a part of a larger collaboration, we are working to better understand the role of epistemological, or epistemic, framing in problem-solving in upper-division physics. Epistemic framing refers to how a task is perceived, particularly with regard to what knowledge and tools are necessary for completing the task. The particular theoretical framework that we are using considers framing along two dimensions: from conceptual to algorithmic and from math to physics. By putting these dimensions along two axes, we can map how an individual or group moves through this framing space (see Figure). For example, if one is discussing the properties of the physics quantities related to the problem at hand, they are framing this as more conceptual than algorithmic and more as physics than math. Thus, they would be somewhere in the upper right quadrant of this space.

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Liveblogging at the 2009 DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference

Today is the 14th Annual DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference. The conference focuses on ways that personalism plays out in various teaching practices at DePaul. Eric Iberri, Melissa Koenig, and Jeanne Kim (as “iddresources”) will be liveblogging Dr. Punya Mishra’s keynote, “Blurring the Boundaries, The Personal and the Professional in a Webbed World” and a few other sessions if time and technologies permit.