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About Leaders in effective and inclusive STEM: Twenty years of the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators

After 20 years of ISEE's Professional Development Program, we gathered alums to take stock of the work we have done, how it influences the work we do now, and how that work might go forward in the future. We present the resulting collection, Leaders in Effective and Inclusive STEM: Twenty Years of the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators. See the introduction for a more complete discussion and outline.

Editors: Scott Seagroves, Austin Barnes, Anne J. Metevier, Jason Porter, & Lisa Hunter

Articles on professional development:

After our introduction, the first section of this collection features professional development both within the ISEE PDP and extending out from it to influence other settings. 

  • The first article, led by Anne Metevier, presents ISEE’s vision of the sorts of learning experiences the PDP has always aspired to; this article updates our previous conception of "inquiry" to our new nomenclature of "authentic, inclusive STEM learning experiences." 
  • The next article, led by Barry Kluger-Bell, describes the in-the-moment facilitation of learning in such experiences, and our professional development work to grow participants' facilitation skills.
  • The work led by Max Tarjan adapted leadership professional development from ISEE's PDP to non-academic workplace settings.
  • In a bridge between this section on professional development and the next section on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the article led by Carley Corrado describes a model of organizational DEI work and its connections to experiences in the ISEE PDP.  

Articles on diversity, equity, and inclusion:

In the ISEE PDP, social justice for groups that are marginalized in STEM was first addressed in the “diversity and equity” strand; later we renamed that part of our work the “equity and inclusion” theme. This section features two articles on these issues, following the previous article on DEI professional development, and leading into the first article of the next section on internships.

  • Christine O'Donnell's contribution compares the equity and inclusion focus areas from ISEE’s PDP with the well-known culturally responsive and culturally relevant frameworks from the K–12 context.
  • An article led by Nicholas Santiago details how a suite of science workshops for college transfer students was designed with a focus on promoting the learners’ science identities, in an effort to support students who may have backgrounds that are underrepresented in STEM fields.

Articles on internships:

One of ISEE’s other major programs is the Akamai Internship, which helps build Hawai‘i’s scientific and technical workforce. Because of the close interplay between the PDP and Akamai, ISEE and its participants have worked a great deal on the design of internship programs and internship projects. This section features three articles relating to internships.

  • Flowing from the previous section on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the first article led by Jerome Shaw discusses intentional strategies in the Akamai Internship for building a sense of inclusion and community among the interns and program staff.
  • The entry led by Alexandra Holloway describes the design of internships at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as analogous to the design of “PDP-style” active learning experiences.
  • The second article led by Jerome Shaw presents frameworks that support interns’ deeper understandings of their own projects, and how these frameworks interact with PDP activities the interns experience.

Articles with international perspectives:

Two members of the ISEE PDP community provide an international perspective on STEM and education in this section. 

  • In his contribution, Sebastiano Cantalupo describes graduate-level astrophysics courses with an emphasis on scientific practices that he designed and taught at universities in Switzerland and Italy; he compares the emphasis on practice to classical approaches to teaching and learning.
  • The next essay from Barry Cense discusses his experiences using inquiry teaching and learning techniques in different cultural contexts.

Articles on assessment:

Participants in the ISEE PDP used an assessment-driven backward design process, and many participants have continued to use and expand on these assessment ideas. This section has two articles that describe assessment-related work after PDP participation.

Articles describing activity designs:

Every PDP participant worked on a team to design some sort of STEM learning experience. Many articles in Learning from Inquiry in Practice  (2010) describe activity designs from the first decade of PDP participants; this section features more activity design descriptions from the PDP community.

Articles on impacts and future directions

At the meeting "Advancing Inclusive Leaders in STEM: 20 Years of the PDP," panels reflected on the impact of the ISEE PDP from different perspectives, and looked ahead to future ways in which this work might continue. This section features contributions from the meeting's panels, and our recommendations for the future.

Our recommendations

The last article in this section on impacts and future directions — and in the entire collection — is the PDP team’s review of the impacts and lessons learned from 20 years of the program. We describe what we feel are the essential features of the PDP, its impacts, and our recommendations for those who want to adapt or expand this work.