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Personal Stories Show CIRTL's Commitment to Diversity

May 2008

Engaging all students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is a priority goal for U.S. higher education. The Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) seeks to contribute to this goal by enabling present and future STEM faculty to enhance the learning of all students whom they teach irrespective of preferred learning styles, race, ethnicity and culture, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, religion, age or socioeconomic backgrounds.

An active interest in diversity unites the professional lives of many CIRTL researchers and students. This article introduces the work of Mark Connolly, Carol Colbeck, and Sarah Wright.

A “Stone Soup” Model of Evaluation
Mark Connolly brings to his work a dedication to empowering colleagues and students. As a researcher for CIRTL, he believes in participatory evaluation – training his colleagues to evaluate their own programs.

Connolly’s interests range across many university issues – from undergraduate life to faculty preparation. His appetite led him to pursue a master’s degree and then a doctorate in programs related to higher education. “I absolutely love collegiate life,” Connolly says.

Throughout his career, Connolly has maintained a strong interest in diversity:  His research has included a study of the cultural issues surrounding the use of Native American mascots and he has written about the undergraduate experiences of LGBT students.

Connolly’s research on LGBT life on campus inspired him to title one of his new publications “Coming Out as a College Teacher at a Research University.” He compares the stigma of disclosing that one is more interested in teaching than in research to the stigma of revealing one’s LGBT identity. “It’s OK to be a teacher,” he says.
 
Although he is modest about his techniques, Connolly has a knack for creating inviting environments for participatory evaluation. His inclusive methods are having a positive effect within the Delta Program, CIRTL’s learning laboratory on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

As an evaluator, Connolly tries to “de-center” himself so that he becomes less essential to the process. Innovations are more likely to be sustained when many participants know how to do evaluation. “What really makes evaluation meaningful is to try to democratize it,” he says.

Part of Connolly’s job is to help people “be comfortable… with being ignorant about evaluation,” he explains. Once he sets people at ease and invites them to participate, the results are much more effective than one person could produce alone.

Connolly compares the way he works to the children’s story, “Stone Soup.” He says that he is like the “charlatan” with the stone who encourages everyone else to add their vegetables to the stew.

A Compassionate View of Faculty Work
CIRTL “sounded like it was written with my name all over it,” says Carol Colbeck, a co-Principal Investigator for CIRTL. She is a professor and dean at the Graduate College of Education at University of Massachusetts-Boston.

“One thread throughout my faculty career has been an interest in underrepresented groups,” Colbeck says. She and graduate student Stephen Quaye are currently conducting a study of CIRTL’s diversity outreach. Colbeck has also coauthored studies on women in engineering with professor Alberto Cabrera of the University of Maryland.

Colbeck hopes that her work with the project will lead to international research collaborations focusing on the doctoral preparation of ethnic minorities, immigrants, and indigenous peoples.

She takes a compassionate and socially conscious approach to her study of faculty work environments and their effect on student learning. She brings insights from previous work with non-profit organizations to her research on the pressures faculty face.  Faculty are sometimes blamed for “all of the ills in higher education” while the educational system continues to require that they focus on research more than on teaching. Colbeck sees a parallel between these ambivalent messages and the way that some public service agencies treat parents who have problems.

Colbeck studies how faculty achieve balance between research, teaching, community service and personal life, given the many demands on their time. “We're all whole people,” Colbeck says.

A Fusion of Diversity and Environmentalism
After working at an environmental newspaper, High Country News, Sarah Wright became attracted to biology education and graduate work. Through a job at a summer research opportunity program for ethnic minority students, she discovered that she wanted to incorporate diversity awareness into her teaching. Wright is now a graduate student in botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Enthusiasm for an environmental education and ethnic diversity inspired her to intern with CIRTL’s Delta Program. She has conducted a series of outreach workshops based on the training program of the CIRTL Diversity Team.

Ever since she first learned about Delta, Wright wanted to participate. “It was kind of like this carrot dangling out there,” she says. “Someday I’ll get to do this stuff I really want to do.”  As a Delta intern, Wright developed a year-long curriculum for an elementary school class on Madison’s east side where many students were English language learners. The curriculum engaged students in studying life cycles of local species by visiting a woodsy area near their school.

“A lot of it was ‘What is science? What do scientists do?’” Wright says. She recalls that the students liked being in nature, and that their scientific skills improved as a result of the curriculum. Concluding her internship she developed a guide to teaching phenology in the elementary classroom.

While working with the elementary school students, Wright joined the first session of the CIRTL Diversity Resources Workshop – an outreach program designed to support STEM instructors in using the materials developed by the Diversity Team. The workshop motivated Wright to deliver three interactive diversity presentations. “The more you talk about [diversity] with other people, the more comfortable it becomes,” Wright says.

More about the CIRTL Learning-through-Diversity program.

More about CIRTL in general.