It’s hard to believe the PROSPECT S-STEM hub has been underway for a year! We have worked hard across the past year to forge professional relationships within and across all of our partnering S-STEM projects. We know that establishing our professional community takes significant resources, the most important of which is the time of all of our members. We take seriously the need for ongoing relational activities, and part of our messaging about what it takes to establish and sustain co-equitable partnerships that involve 2YC and 4YC is that the partners have to commit the time investment needed to nurture those relationships.
Some of the key activities across Year 1 include: establishing PLCs across most of our S-STEM partners (see Definitions of PLCs in this newsletter); surveying the PLCs (fall 2022) to understand the state of each, local goals, and how PLCs are addressing ongoing challenges; conducting a group concept mapping activity (fall 2022) to focus our documentation efforts to understand partnerships; and beginning to conduct site visits to collect partnership data.
As we move into Year 2, I am looking forward to ongoing engagement across all of our PLCs. I enjoy our whole group meetings because I know I will always learn something new, and be able to take those lessons back to my local S-STEM team. We will be conducting more site visits, and this newsletter will become a regular sharing and dissemination platform. We will be featuring individuals and S-STEM PLCs with each issue, so please let us know when you have updates to share (and we hope you are able to respond and share when newsletter authors reach out). We will also be building out a project website that will begin to contain our collective lessons learned, and share resources for PLCs and generally for supporting STEM transfer students.
Our work is important because at the heart of it all lies our dedication to using our partnerships to better support STEM transfer students across 2YC and 4YC. Achieving more equitable student outcomes, particularly for the low-income students supported by S-STEM projects, is our ultimate goal.
- Wendy Smith, PROSPECT S-STEM Principal Investigator
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
March 2023