Leveraging a University Toward Equity in STEM: The CREATE STEM Success Initiative at the University of California, San Diego

• In Event: 60.083 - Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: 60.083-19 - Division I Roundtable E. Researching a Region for Education Equity: A Symposium With University of California, San Diego, Faculty and Researchers

Abstract

In the CREATE STEM Success Initiative (CSSI: http://create.ucsd.edu/stem-initiative), we at CREATE (UC San Diego’s Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence) are working to leverage research for truly regional change. We’re exploring with hundreds of colleagues, students, and community partners how a university can be a resource hub for leveraging local opportunities to learn for high-need students and teachers (k20) in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). This campus-wide effort, launched in July 2013 by our Chancellor, synergized months of input from UCSD faculty, staff, students, and local educators on strategies for collective local impact on the K-20 STEM pipeline. UCSD’s CREATE led the visioning process and heard a desire for responding to pipeline problems collectively, via systematically marshaling and networking outreach and education work undertaken by UCSD. We are now working to develop a systematic university-community impact model that can be shared nationally.

Because of UCSD’s own strengths and because of San Diego’s particular STEM energy, the idea of systematically improving the STEM “pipeline” to college and career – to coordinate and marshal efforts so that underrepresented students better succeed in K20 STEM-based skills, courses, majors and careers -- has become a key focus for UCSD’s collective effort, linking colleagues across Divisions, outreach colleagues, students and staff. In this collective impact initiative, CREATE is supporting UCSD colleagues doing STEM-related outreach and education work in a systematic, collective campus effort to work with community partners to plug “leaks” in the local/campus pipeline in STEM. Through basic research on pipeline “leaks” and design research creating and testing pipeline “plugs,” we’re pinpointing learning opportunities that students need and networking university resources with local partners’ to create those opportunities,

As a networked improvement community (Bryk, Gomez and Grunow 2010), the CSSI links professors hungry for grants to do their own work; funders requiring outreach plans; campus leadership hoping to demonstrate connection to a “majority minority” community; promotion policies requiring diversity effort; a national and local focus on the STEM pipeline as an employment and economic priority; and energized students and teachers hungry to fuel their own development. We are leveraging the logic of the STEM pipeline: in our work, it fuels a sense that young people in public schools, who are more nonwhite than ever, deserve optimal opportunities to learn because they are our nation’s future professionals (Pollock 2014). Arguing that STEM education is a crucial focus because too few of the demographically dominant children of the future will be prepared to innovate solutions to shared problems is a new logic (vs. Pollock 2008), and it’s one that’s becoming a useful lever for producing more opportunities to learn. The CSSI supports key CREATE staff with longstanding local relationships to spend each day linking UC San Diego faculty, staff, programs and students to the K-12 education community, to support high-need students and their teachers in key STEM skill areas. In partnership efforts with campus and community colleagues since July, we’ve created new opportunities for thousands of underrepresented students and their teachers.

Authors

• Mica Pollock, University of California - San Diego

• Susan S. Yonezawa, University of California - San Diego