Faculty Professional Development for Culturally Responsive Pedagogy in STEM Higher Education: Examining the TIDES Model

Introduction

Every three minutes, at least one undergraduate student majoring in a STEM field at a four-year U.S. college or university either changes their major to a non-STEM discipline or withdraws from the institution altogether (National Science Board, 2018). This contemporary reality manifests as a loss of more than 310,000 undergraduates from the U.S. STEM enterprise every academic year. It is particularly acute for new majority students (Schneider, 2014)—especially Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Native Alaskan—who arguably constitute the largest untapped source of STEM talent in our country.

According to 2014 U.S. Census data (National Science Foundation, 2017), among 18–24-year-olds, 14.8%, 21.1%, and 0.9% are Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Native Alaskan, respectively. Even considering that some may opt out of college completely, individuals in this age group should still account for roughly twice as many degrees as were awarded to them between 2004 and 2014. As noted in Figure 1, this means that 95,000 more undergraduate STEM degrees should have been awarded to Blacks students, 140,000 more to Hispanic students, and 6,000 more to American Indian/Native Alaskan students.

Figure 1.

Number of STEM undergraduate degrees awarded in the U.S. by year (NSF 2017)

While strategies to improve the retention of undergraduate STEM students have received considerable attention (Tsui, 2007), most have perpetuated deficit models and resulted in mere workaround efforts focused almost entirely on “fixing” the students, rather than addressing the sociopolitical and institutional systems and structures that continue to exclude them from STEM and, thereby, from a better quality of life. The Teaching to Increase Diversity and Equity in STEM (TIDES) initiative of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (Mack et al., 2019) is grounded in the understanding that decades of these efforts to fix students has not only failed to move the proverbial “needle,” but also threatens future U.S. global competitiveness in science and technology. With its innovative, virtuous approach to STEM faculty professional development, TIDES has established an effective means of addressing a root cause of the underrepresentation of new majority students, believed to rest within the inherent beliefs, values, and traditions of U.S. higher education institutions, the STEM departments that reside in them, and the individual STEM faculty responsible for sustaining their vitality, even as the landscape demographics shift.

To that end, our chapter begins with a departure from the traditional mode, which would unduly attribute the current underrepresented status of diverse students in STEM—and, more specifically, in the computer/information sciences—to impaired student aptitude, motivation, or social capital. Rather, our chapter begins with the premise that the national imperative for greater focus on developing a competitive and diverse STEM workforce extends far beyond the students themselves, to the faculty who bear the responsibility for ensuring their learning, development, and socialization into the discipline. However, support for STEM faculty has become complicated by sociopolitical factors that include: (1) the all-but-absent reliance on social-justice themes to inform professional-development interventions; (2) an ever-increasing need for a competitively trained and liberally educated workforce in the computer and information sciences (Evans et al., 2013; National Science Foundation [NSF], 2017); and (3) the perpetual systemic exclusion of underrepresented groups from opportunities that could afford them meaningful participation in STEM and, thereby, access to a better quality of life in America (Schneider, 2014; Van Der Werf & Sabatier, 2009). Against this backdrop, the motivation and mission of TIDES—to increase Computer Science (CS) faculty self-efficacy in engaging in culturally responsive pedagogical practices—is set forth as a means of effectively recruiting and retaining diverse undergraduate CS students, and, thereby, the diversity of our nation’s STEM workforce.