On the PROSPECT S-STEM team we’re approaching the end of year three of this 5-year project. Looking back we’ve accomplished so much together. In September of 2023 the leadership team met together to set baseline goals for the year. Those goals fell largely into 5 areas: building community within the PROSPECT team, conducting site visits to PROSPECT partner sites, analyzing data from those site visits, creating supports for the graduate students on our project, and sharing the outcomes of our project thus far.
Across these five areas the PROSPECT S-STEM team has had great success. We’ve grown our community with intentionality, including a book club reading Delivering Promise by Xueli Wang led by Rebekah Dupont, and monthly cross-site discussions focused on topical areas like DEI, Mentoring, STEM Identities & Self-Efficacy, Financial Issues, and Sustaining Partnerships. We’ll hear more about these efforts in future newsletters, but for now we mention them as examples of how our community has continued to grow together - supporting our local projects while also getting connected to other projects across the country.
The “Case Study Team” within PROSPECT S-STEM continues to work on our primary goal of conducting site visits with our partner projects and analyzing that data. In 2024 we completed case study visits with four additional partner projects - totalling 10 campus sites. Each of these case studies includes multi-day visits talking with a variety of local team members. We follow each visit by sharing a Partnership Profile where we outline the partnership capital, transfer champions, and community cultural wealth observed at each site and across the partnership. We’ve shared 5 Partnership Profiles across the life of the grant so far and hope that they are useful to project partners. The next steps of the Case Study Team are to share our analyses beyond the individual partnerships.
We have begun the work of externalizing our analyses through presentations and workshops at meetings and conferences. In this last year our team had two presentations at the Council for the Study of Community Colleges annual conference, three presentations at Chemistry Education Research conferences, and one presentation at the meeting of Community, Culture, Cooperation: Innovating Solutions to Economic Violence 2024. We also had an incredible presence sharing our results with other S-STEM projects at the 2024 S-STEM PI and Scholars meeting in Chicago last month - with two workshops, three panels, and three posters - all representing the work coming from the PROSPECT S-STEM team. Look for highlights from that meeting featured elsewhere in this newsletter.
We would be remiss in this year's review if we did not also acknowledge the incredible work of the graduate student researchers on the PROSPECT S-STEM grant. Much of the work across the PROSPECT S-STEM project couldn’t happen without our phenomenal graduate student team. Graduate students have led the way in many of our efforts including project management, data collection, analysis, and presentations. Without this team many of the successes we’ve outlined would not be possible. We hope in this next year to continue to support our graduate students on the project.
Looking ahead to our next year, we aim to be very purposeful in how we dovetail all of these successes. We are setting up structures to enable all of our team members to meaningfully contribute to targeted propagation/communication efforts. Our aim is to encourage team members to each choose one phenomena upon which we are researching, and invest their time this spring on working within a small group to produce a product (blog post, video, manuscript, podcast, etc.) highlighting what our PROSPECT S-STEM team has learned about that phenomenon.
Summary provided by Vashti Sawtelle at Michigan State University and Theresa Jorgensen at the University of Texas at Arlington.