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The Great Resilience: Notes on a Discussion Series to Cultivate Resilience for STEM
Posted: Mar 22 2024 by
Target Audience: Institution Administration, College/University Staff, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty
Program Components: Institutional Systems:Strategic Planning
Higher education was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a result, many faculty, administrators, and staff quit their jobs. This Great Resignation produced upheaval at many institutions across the nation. Looking for a space to find hope and a positive outlook in the midst of instability, the Aligning Incentives with Systemic Change working group engaged in a series of discussions about resilience. During spring 2023, we looked for ways to cultivate personal and organizational stability in the face of the Great Resignation and its impacts on higher education.
February reading (led by Christine Broussard, University of La Verne)
The higher-than-normal attrition of academics surrounding the pandemic has been attributed to (for those leaving) and resulted in (for those remaining) burnout. Our first reading (Vercio et al., 2021) noted that the lack of consistent definitions for burnout and wellness makes studying the problem and assessing the efficacy of potential solutions difficult. Informative reporting should include a range (low to high) of risk and all three subscales of burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, low personal accomplishment). This article underscored that the contribution of systems to 'burnout' has been under-appreciated yet provided the group with aspects of resilience to consider from the field of academic medicine.
The discussion group began with the premise that the antidote to burnout may be focusing on resilience. Like the concept of burnout, we need a common definition of what resilience is in the context of Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine (STEMM) education, why it's valuable, and who is responsible for it. Vercio and others (2021) offered multiple levels from which resilience emerges: individual, community, and organizational. Vercio et al. posited that individual resilience relies upon internal personality traits like temperament, outlook, social capital, and societal factors. Individual resilience is also dynamic and can change based on situation and time. Community and organizational resilience includes (for academic medicine) culture, social networks, learning, leadership, resources, adaptive capacity, systems, and capital. This kind of resilience centers a community of possibilities, not problems, because a focus on the problems derails exploration of vision and possibilities for the future. Better outcomes may be achieved by focusing on a shared vision that is used to address systemic issues.
In February we learned that the historical focus on fixing the individual or reactionary problem-solving can exacerbate burnout, and that institutions have a major role in ameliorating burnout and cultivating resilience. A major take home message from the reading was that to bridge individual and organizational (or community) resilience, four things are needed - communication, sense of belonging, shared vision, and recognition of gifts (see table 1, for practical examples of each category and figure 2 for how the individual and institutional are connected across the categories; Vercio et al., 2021). Institutions might renew and reorder relationships (liminal suspension), learn about and practice compassionate witnessing, and activate more networks (relational redundancy). This new model shifts the "weakest link" from the individual to the weakest bonds between the individual and the organization.
March reading (led by Elizabeth Ambos, Ambos Consulting)
For March, we sought to understand resilience through the lens of how we – as faculty, staff, and administrators – mentor students, our colleagues, and ourselves to confront perceived failure by reading and discussing Chapter 13 of the Council on Undergraduate Research's (CUR) publication "Confronting Failure: Approaches to Building Confidence and Resilience in Undergraduate Researchers."
Authored by a team at the University of Kansas' (KU) Center for Undergraduate Research, Chapter 13 presented a case study of how faculty mentors can help undergraduates confront and cope with research failures. The KU team's innovative approach? They guided faculty mentors to reflect on their own research failures, and then to share these challenges with their students, thereby showing students that failure is an expected step in the research journey. Two of the key KU survey questions: "can you tell us about a time when your research didn't go as expected? Or about any tricks or habits that you've developed to help you stay resilient in the face of obstacles?" elicited a robust exchange during the discussion.
Some of the key takeaways from the discussion included: "FAIL = First Attempt In Learning" and "The take home for me is the importance of sharing personal experiences of failure in a scientific context." Another discussant noted: "It is important for us to also consider how to help faculty deal with failure." Several discussants thought the KU approach needed to be reframed to address deep-seated teaching philosophies: "Seems like the discussion about failure in research needs to be a systematic factor. There are some faculty members who don't espouse the "growth mindset" model..." Also, how might KU's faculty mentor survey be retooled to fit community college faculty mentors who work with undergraduate researchers? The energizing conversation closed with an "aha" observation: "Through the sharing of faculty failure and subsequent resilience/recovery – faculty help students work through their own struggles with research. This will help inoculate students against fear of failure and imposter syndrome".
April reading (led by Jennifer Manilay, University of California, Merced)
In April we narrowed our attention to resilience in STEM academics focused on education. The reading we selected, "Understanding STEM academics' responses and resilience to educational reform of academic roles in higher education" (Ross et al., 2022), examined the intersection between individual disposition and influences of increasingly broader academic systems. We noted that because the Ross et al. study was undertaken in the Australian higher education ecosystem, what was described in the paper may match to a "typical" research-intensive institution in the US, but not a community college.
The authors identified five major themes from their survey of faculty and administrators: value and quality; progress and mobility; status and identity; and community and culture. Several themes resonated for the group. For example, STEM teaching is often not as valued as research. Moreover, even teaching-focused institutions like "community colleges and some private schools still have the same resistance to changes in STEM education that we see at larger schools where faculty are doing science-based research." A possible solution is to categorize faculty by their focus. We queried: "what can we learn from institutions that have created multiple tracks for academics (teaching and research) like medical schools or teaching track faculty from R1s? The answer: sometimes takes decades...to implement".
The status and identity theme is related to value and quality, and revealed that to be successful education-focused faculty need to conduct education research. Re-tooling to do education research is problematic in part because of "a focus during graduate school where perhaps teaching was not emphasized as important and/or no training is received." Ross et al.'s study noted that survey respondents perceive a double standard whereby research faculty could ignore feedback about their teaching (and still be promoted or earn tenure), whereas teaching-focused faculty could not ignore feedback about their research.
One of the key points made in the Ross et al. (2022) paper is that "the cultural/reward/prestige divide between research and teaching faculty tends to be experienced by women and non-dominant culture/non-English as first language faculty. Student evaluations often exhibit biases."An important connection to the efforts of our working group is that this paper supports diverse teaching evaluation approaches and taking student evaluation biases into account when assessing faculty teaching.
The community and culture theme brought our group full circle to the first reading and the role of community and institutions in promoting resilience. We noted that the resilience of the faculty during times of economic stress and changes in campus leadership may come from interactions with other faculty or administrators (community) empathetic to the situation.
Attributions:
We thank the members of ASCN Working Group 6 for their contributions to the spring 2023 discussions and to the editing of this blog post.
Suggested Citation
Broussard, C., Ambos, E. L., Manilay, J. O., and Wright, C. (March 22, 2024). The Great Resilience: Notes on a Discussion Series to Cultivate Resilience for STEM. [Blog post]. Retrieved from [https://ascnhighered.org/283156]
References
Corwin, L. A., & Charkoudian, L. K. (2022). Confronting Failure: Approaches to Building Confidence and Resilience in Undergraduate Researchers. Council on Undergraduate Research. https://myaccount.cur.org/bookstore.
Ross, P. M., Scanes, E., Poronnik, P., Coates, H., & Locke, W. (2022). Understanding STEM academics' responses and resilience to educational reform of academic roles in higher education. International journal of STEM education, 9(1), 11.
Vercio, C., Loo, L. K., Green, M., Kim, D. I., & Beck Dallaghan, G. L. (2021). Shifting focus from burnout and wellness toward individual and organizational resilience. Teaching and learning in medicine, 33(5), 568-576.
What we wish we would have known about theories of change and change theory at the beginning
Posted: Dec 7 2023 by
Target Audience: Non-tenure Track Faculty, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Post-doctoral Fellows, College/University Staff
Six years ago when we first met, we were two individuals who identified a common challenge on our campuses – namely supporting students who arrived with varying comfort and experience using quantitative (Q) skills in STEM and social science contexts. Talking with others, we were eager to think about how we might collaborate to do better for our students. We wanted to make a change, but change theories or theories of change? We didn't know what those were! As we have learned about change strategies and change theory over the last six years, we've repeatedly come across ideas that make us think, "Wow, we wish we would have known this when we started this project!" This post is an effort to share some of what we've learned with other practitioners who might be trying to change things on their own campuses. More
Intentionality, Accountability, and Growth: Insights and future directions from DEIJR symposia facilitated at national meetings of the American Chemical Society
Posted: Oct 3 2023 by
Stephanie Feola, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Guizella Rocabado, Southern Utah University
Author Note: This is two of two blog series. This second post was written by Stephanie Feola.
Target Audience: Post-doctoral Fellows, Graduate Students, Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, College/University Staff, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty
Program Components: Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion
Creating space for discussions and presentations about issues of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Respect (DEIJR) is a means of building momentum for systemic change in discipline-based education research (DBER) communities. In this two-part blog, I, Stephanie Feola, and co-organizer Guizella Rocabado will share the lessons we've learned throughout this change process. In the first installment, we described the lessons learned from instituting the change of creating a space for DEIJR research and conversations during the American Chemical Society National Meetings. In this second installment, we share how the focus of the presentations, the nature of the discussions, and theorizing about DEIJR have changed since we began organizing the symposium in 2019 and draw implications for systemic change. More
Announcing the Curated Teaching Evaluation Change Initiative Repository
Posted: Sep 15 2023 by
Christine Broussard, University of La Verne
Stephanie Salomone, University of Portland
Carlos Goller, North Carolina State University
Sharon Homer-Drummond, PhD, AAAS
Casey Wright, Western Michigan University
*Author Contribution Note: All Authors contributed equally to this post.
Target Audience: Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, College/University Staff
Program Components: Professional Development:Course Evaluation, Institutional Systems:Incentive/Reward Systems, Evaluating Teaching, Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion
The Aligning Faculty Incentives with Systemic Change Working Group is excited to report we havecurated a repository of teaching evaluation change initiatives to support national efforts at the systemic change of faculty teaching evaluation. Teaching evaluation is an area of critical focus for systemic change efforts to align undergraduate students' experience in STEM courses with best practices for inclusive learning (NASEM, 2020; Boyer 2030 Commission, 2023). Since the academy is deeply resistant to change (Wise et al., 2022), it is critical to share innovations that have successfully impacted teaching evaluation with the systemic change community (e.g., Simonson et al., 2023). We have created the Curated Teaching Evaluation Initiative Repository to meet this need. For the repository, we define an initiative as a concerted program or set of related efforts that have been undertaken to change the policies, processes, or practices around teaching evaluation. These initiatives are not limited to resources for individual faculty to change their teaching practices but instead describe efforts that have been successful in creating systemic change. More
Creating space for critical conversations in chemistry: Lessons Learned from organizing DEIJR Symposia at national meetings of the American Chemical Society
Posted: Sep 13 2023 by
Guizella Rocabado, Southern Utah University
Stephanie Feola, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Author Note: This is one of two blog series. This first post is written by Guizella Rocabado.
Target Audience: Graduate Students, Post-doctoral Fellows, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Underrepresented Minority Students, College/University Staff
Program Components: Professional Development:Accessibility, Institutional Systems:Evaluating Teaching, Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion, Outreach:Presentations/Talks
Creating space for discussions and presentations about issues of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Respect (DEIJR) is a means of building momentum for systemic change in discipline-based education research (DBER) communities. In this two-part blog, I, Guizella Rocabado, and co-organizer Stephanie Feola, will share the lessons we've learned throughout this change process. In this first installment, we will describe the lessons learned from instituting the change of creating a space for DEIJR research and conversations during the American Chemical Society National Meetings. In the second installment, we will share how the focus of the presentations, the nature of the discussions, and theorizing about DEIJR have changed since we began organizing the symposium in 2019 and draw implications for systemic change.
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