Community College and University Partnerships

Over the last six years I’ve worked on a National Science Foundation grant that was a partnership between Michigan State University, Mott Community College, and Washtenaw Community College to support science and math majors interested in transferring. This year, we are expanding and building a new partnership with Lansing Community College.

Our MSU-based research team is spending the spring 2023 semester reflecting on some of the important work involved in building and maintaining partnerships with our community college partners. We’re doing this reflection so that we can be as thoughtful as possible in reaching out to form a new partnership with Lansing Community College. I’m hoping to write at least one blog post by the end of the summer about what we’ve learned from both our ongoing partnerships and new relationship building. There is a lot of good in our current partnerships and I’m grateful for the work we do together to support students holistically.

As part of our reflection work this semester, I find myself returning to a podcast episode I produced back in 2019 about a physics education partnership between Chicago State University and Harold Washington College. Unfortunately, partnerships don’t always run smoothly. I was excited to produce a piece about a grant collaboration with a lot of positives because I think that there are important lessons to learn from such examples. The podcast episode is also connected to two pieces of writing - a conference proceedings paper (4 pages) and a longer journal article.

If you’re interested in the podcast, it first spends a decent amount of time on Harold Washington College’s Learning Assistant program - as I thought most listeners would appreciate an overview of that. Then, we get into more of the details of the partnership itself.

Here’s the podcast link. And here’s the description: In this episode, we sit down with collaborators at Harold Washington College and Chicago State University to talk about an innovative program to improve physics classrooms. The program was originally started through a grant collaboration across the two institutions. Ultimately, physics faculty at Harold Washington made it sustainable, including some innovations unique to their context. The collaborators offer insight into what made the program sustainable. "There is something really special when two- and four-year colleges come together as genuine partners."

Here are the papers and links to PDFs:

Cochran, G. L., Van Duzor, A. G., Sabella, M. S., & Geiss, B. (2016). Engaging in self-study to support collaboration between two-year colleges and universities. In 2016 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings (pp. 76-79). [link]

De Leone, C. J., Price, E., Sabella, M. S., & Van Duzor, A. G. (2019). Developing and sustaining faculty-driven, curriculum-centered partnerships between two-year colleges and four-year institutions. Journal of College Science Teaching, 48(6), 20-33. [link]

A small side note - I’m personally trying to move away from two- and four-year language to better normalize the diversity of timelines we all take through school. I try to use “community colleges and universities” now - but that is the language I used in the podcast when I made it back in 2019.

Other small side note: I’m proud of the podcast, but audio production is not my full time job - so sound editing wasn’t perfect. :)

Managing Grant Team Stress and Looking Out for One Another During COVID

Things are hard right now. To the extent that I’m able, I want to help grant teams lower stress and look out for one another and their various communities in the coming months.

I’m thankful to be in community with Ayush Gupta, McKensie Mack, and Vashti Sawtelle, among many other lovely folks. I want to credit conversations with these three in particular in helping me name some of what I’ve named, below.

I’m an evaluator as well as a project manager on various NSF grants in the field of STEM Education research. I’m on a lifelong journey to unlearn too much acculturation into academic productivity culture - a culture that I see causing a great deal of stress on people in this time. If we don’t find ways to lower productivity expectations on folks, we know that the most marginalized in our country will be most affected by that because of how COVID is playing out right now.

I know a lot of PIs and team managers are feeling overwhelmed with everything going on in the world. They want to lower stress for their teams, but aren’t quite sure where to start. To help folks, I wanted to share this list of considerations that grant teams can explore. This is really just me spending a couple of hours trying to put into words the various conversations that I’ve had. It’s not perfect, and I welcome additions to the list and critiques of the framing here.

Here’s some considerations. I’ll note that the ethics of this stuff is really complex! There are a lot of ethical principles that may conflict with one another in working through these considerations. You might also appreciate asking a friend, colleague, consultant, or evaluator to hold some space to co-think with you on these considerations:

• Identify the project goals and products that are important to team members’ livelihoods as to prioritize them.

• Consider how grant funds can help the most amount of people meet their basic needs during a time of great unemployment and budget cuts.

• Consider worst-case scenarios and what the team wants to prioritize ahead of time. The goal would be to avoid a situation where many people fall ill and one person feels they are responsible for meeting all of the goals on the grant that were set pre-COVID. To help, consider setting basic goals and stretch goals. 

• Consider existing policies for paid time off that can help in two ways: (1) lowering program officer expectations of productivity and (2) supporting personnel in the emotions of working less. The NSF CARES Act is one consideration here. 

• Consider that there might not be official policy to invoke for paid time off outside of childcare, yet people may be dealing with additional care-taking responsibilities to sick family members, stress, the difficulty of working from home, etc. Are there ways to (similarly to the above bullet) (1) lower program officer expectations of productivity and (2) support personnel in the emotions of being less “productive” on academic product creation? Can grant goals be re-negotiated with the program officer to lower team stress about expectations? I have been hearing some program officers are supportive of this.

• Many people on teams are facing a question of whether they should lower their % time because they are not feeling as “productive.” Power, privilege, and relative salary rates should be considered here. I’m hearing a lot about people trying to manage their emotions around feeling responsible for work. I wonder if ways of re-framing work can help all team members during this time. Particularly for folks on the lower end of the salary scales, consider how managers/PIs can help them see aspects of working from home as “work that counts.” For instance, Zoom meetings can cause stress in many ways. It is hard on the body to sit at a desk all day. Can personnel be supported to frame recovery time from Zoom meetings as part of paid work? When working an 8-hour work day in a campus office, people typically get coffee with one another, move between buildings, have 20 minute hallway conversations, deal with fire drills, etc. Can personnel consider a “working from home during a pandemic is just different” % of their time that frees up their sense of how long they should be “on” during a day? As a kind of last option, if it helps a person who is financially stable to feel less responsible and lower their stress, I know some faculty feel better not taking planned summer salary so that they can lower the expectations they place on themselves. This may also have the benefit of freeing up money to pay undergraduate researchers who might not have as many on-campus job options during COVID. The ethics of these questions are complex! 

• Consider grief training for team members to normalize what they experience and how to best help colleagues who are grieving. One space that offers such training is Being Here Human.

• Consider paying for anti-racism and anti-oppression consulting and/or training for team members, all the more important as COVID amplifies existing systemic oppression.

OK, these are some considerations that I’ve been discussing with people. Here are my ultimate hopes: may we all look out for each other in this time, may we set up structures that shift resources along lines of power and privilege, and may we find moments of peace and acceptance with how life has so suddenly changed.

-Angie

Supporting Undergraduate Research Students: A Holistic Check-in Form

This post is about a form that Vashti Sawtelle and I developed for use with our undergraduate research mentees at Michigan State in physics education research. At the beginning of each semester, we ask students to fill out this form. 

Why Did We Develop This Form? 

As research advisors, we want to support students holistically. Yet, some students may not be aware that they can talk to us about topics outside of research (e.g. study skills, time management, etc.). To the extent that research students want holistic support, we want to send them the message that we can discuss these broader topics. 

We have four main questions that we ask students to fill out. I will go through each question and its respective reasoning. We have found this form to be particularly helpful in prompting conversations that have allowed us to better support our students. I will also provide a link to a Word document of our forms at the end of this post. 

Context

It is important to note that this form was developed in the context of a large research university. We expect much of it could still be helpful across different kinds of colleges. However, some of our reasoning is based on the large research university context. In addition, students typically work with us (paid) for 5 hours/week for one semester and then scale up their hours over the summer if they choose to continue working with us.  

Vashti and I do a lot of messaging in our meetings with students to let them know that we care about broader holistic topics. This form is one piece of a wider set of things that we do to support research students to have good experiences with us and in college in general.

Questions on the Form and Reasoning

Question 1: What other mentors (students, staff, faculty, and/or other positions), if any, do you have at Michigan State? What kind of mentorship do they provide ? Are there others outside of Michigan State that provide you with certain kinds of helpful support? What kinds of support do they provide?

In this question, we are really trying to understand what other support a student has. We are at a large research university where students can fall through the cracks mentorship-wise. We have sometimes had students who answer “none” to this question. If students have little-to-no other support, this helps us to understand that we will want to devote more time in meetings to talking about topics beyond research. We have other students with a strong mentorship support network. Although we are always happy to talk about things outside of research, these students may not need this additional support as strongly. In fact, they may prefer not to talk about their courses as they already are talking to someone else about that.

Question 2A: What courses are you taking? What time do you estimate these courses will take, on average, each week?

Question 2B: What other major time commitments to you have (e.g. job, leadership in a club or sport, arts, etc.) What time do you estimate these commitments will take, on average, each week?

We ask students to estimate their course and commitment load for a few reasons. One reason is that it helps students in planning out their weeks and thinking about time management. Another reason is that it helps us understand, as research mentors, whether they are taking on a particularly heavy load. This helps us with advising. It also helps us in supporting them to commit to a reasonable amount of research hours each week. If we notice a lot of hours are devoted to a job unrelated to a student’s career directions, we can also think of creative ways to support their employment in directions they care most about. 

Question 3: What courses did you take last semester and what were your final grades?

Grades don’t always represent all aspects of learning (e.g. your professor may or may not reward your skill development in figuring out how to more effectively manage your time). However, if you are struggling with your grades, we want to support you in strategizing how to improve. 


We have found that students may not always communicate that they are struggling with their grades, particularly early on in the mentoring relationship. We want to make sure that we can support them to drop classes if this is needed. We try to emphasize to students that grades are not necessarily the best measure of learning. However, we do not want them to take on research with us at a detriment to their grades. We see ourselves as mentors who support students in learning how to be successful at the academic college game. 

Some of our students have had difficult semesters with respect to grades. We have never stopped working with a student due to low grades. We check in with them about the underlying reasons. Did they have some difficult health/life/family things that made the semester hard? Do they need to work on an improvement plan around some holistic skills (e.g. time management, organization, etc.)? Do they need support in navigating an unreasonable university structure?

We also ask: Is research with us causing a problem? Although it could be possible, in practice we have never had an instance where a student’s research with us was determined to be the issue. We have found that research typically plays more of a positive role - a place where students can experience success and encouragement. If a student is struggling academically, we might devote more of our weekly research mentor meetings to helping them develop a strategic plan for academic improvement. For instance, 20 minutes of the 60 minute meeting might focus on strategic planning. This strategic planning might involve something as detailed as filling out a spreadsheet of goals for the week (e.g. “ask someone in your class to form a study group.”) We may also encourage them to lower their research hours with us somewhat if it is feasible, given their financial needs.

Question 4: Do you have any topics or worries about the coming semester that you would appreciate support around? (e.g. time management, organization, a particularly difficult course, collaboration skills, thinking about next steps after college, etc.) Please explain a little. 

The reason behind this question is straightforward. We want to send the message to students that they can ask us questions beyond research. In particular, it is helpful to know if they have already identified something that they are interested in or worried about for the upcoming semester. This allows us to follow up during our weekly meetings. For instance, a student may be graduating soon and have worries about next steps. Or, a student might know that they failed a course and will need to re-take it. This helps us be more direct and strategic in mentoring meetings. 

Links to Resources and Social Media Contact Info 

If you would like to download our beginning-of-semester form, you can do so [here]. We also sometimes use a mid-semester check-in form. That form is fairly similar and can be found [here]. It also asks students to reflect on something that they feel proud of. If students are unsure what kinds of holistic skills they might consider working on, here is a [resource] they can use.

I hope to write a follow-up post in the near future about how I specifically support students in time-management during one-on-one planning conversations. So, stay tuned! 

If you have other questions that you ask students, we’d love to hear! You can tweet at me (Angie) @SFOregonian or leave a comment here on this blog post --

Acknowledgements: These ideas were informed by Angie’s involvement in the Compass Project and Access Network communities. For more information about how members of these communities have worked on supporting students to grow their holistic skills and reflect on that growth, see [this article] in the American Journal of Physics.

I would also like to acknowledge Jon Bender, a former middle school physics teacher, who originally had the idea of creating a holistic skills rubric. This rubric was adapted for use by undergraduate physics majors in Compass by Dimitri Dounas-Frazer and Geoff Iwata and was subsequently modified by John Haberstroh and Joel Corbo, resulting in the 2012 version that I linked above.

SACNAS 2018

Wow, where do I begin? This was my first time attending SACNAS and it was lovely. I’m thankful to Ximena Cid, who invited me to come. She organized a session on Indigenous Physicists. Corey Gray, Ximena, and I all gave talks in this session that centered culture and family stories. Corey was part of the discovery of gravitational waves. His mom actually translated the LIGO gravitational wave announcement into the Siksika language. He shared a video of her reading the announcement. Here’s a photo of Corey, Ximena, and I at the SACNAS Pow Wow.

I told folks who attended our session that I would try to put together a few resources here.

If you’re interested in learning more about my tribe, The Chinook Nation, there’s a few resources you can look at. We have an instagram account, @everydaychinook. There is also a new-ish documentary, Promised Land, that follows our fight and the Duwamish Tribe’s fight for federal recognition. An anthropologist, Jon Daehnke, has had a long-term partnership with our tribe that resulted in a 2017 book called Chinook Resilience: Heritage and Cultural Revitalization on the Columbia River. I mentioned how important canoe culture is to our tribe and many Pacific Northwest Tribes. There’s a whole chapter in the book about that. Chapter 5 is titled, “There's no way to overstate how important Tribal Journeys is": The Return of the Canoes and the Decolonization of Heritage. In 2015, we sent a letter a day to President Obama for 80+ days to argue for our federal recognition. In these 80+letters, we share a lot of our history and culture. For instance, below is an excerpt from one letter about a 1999 canoe naming ceremony I was able to attend. I love the meaning behind Skakwal’s name.

Our tribe has just started a renewed push through the court system for federal recognition. We are hopeful about this, but it is a long process. Other northwest tribes have been showing up outside of the Washington State courthouse, standing in support of our cause. You can read more about that here.

In terms of the work I shared on supportive communities, I encourage you to read the blog post below this one. In that post, I share some of the best resources I’ve written with colleagues on these topics.

I raise my hands to Ximena and SACNAS for their hard work in creating supportive spaces for marginalized folks in physics and science more generally.

Intentional Design Toward Supportive Communities in Physics Education

Today, I'll be at Stanford to give the Physics Department Equity and Inclusion Seminar. I'm looking forward to talking with folks about intentional design of supportive communities. At the end of a talk, I like to refer people onto further resources. Here, I've collated some relevant resources.

(1) A 6-page general audience article that I wrote about designing educational experiences with the goal of supporting students to do things that they are proud of.

(2) A 4-page general audience article that I wrote with Gina Quan: "Creating Together in Compass: Strategies to Support Participation." We discuss the jargon buzzers idea as well as other strategies toward creating a community where we hear everyone's voice.

(3) A 15-minute podcast episode and 2-page general audience article about making research groups productive and supportive spaces.

Then, I also wanted to link to this Physics Teacher article by Johnson et al. (2017) titled, "Common Challenges Faced by Women of Color in Physics, and Actions Faculty Can Take to Minimize Those Challenges." In this article they describe, "the characteristics of a department where women of color report that they are thriving."

Designing Educational Experiences for Proudness

Today, I'm excited to be the speaker for DePaul University's Physics Department Colloquium. I'm going to talk about my research on students' experiences with challenge in college physics. I always try to share some practical resources at the end of my talk for people who are interested in further information. In this case, I wanted to share with folks this 6-page general audience article that I wrote about designing educational experiences with the goal of supporting students to do things that they are proud of. Soon, I'll also be able to share a full journal article on the research side of things!

How to Get the Most Out of Your Research Group Experience

I wrote a really short and readable two-page article on the following topic: how do we make research groups supportive spaces for feedback on work-in-progress? The article focuses on some principles that the presenter can keep in mind to get useful feedback. Below is an excerpt, or you can click here to get the full two pages. This article was originally published in the Physics Education Research Consortium of Graduate Students (PERCOGs) Newsletter. PERCOGs puts a lot of awesome things into the world - check them out!

"Flower" by Flickr User solarisgirl. CC BY-SA 2.0

Piecing Together Podcast: Inaugural Episode

The very first episode of the Piecing Together Podcast is here! In this episode we talk to the Functions Research Group, a mathematics education research group at the University of California, Berkeley. The group discusses some of the hard work involved in creating a supportive space where people can receive feedback on work-in-progress.

The Functions Research Group in action.

Like what you hear? Support the Piecing Together Podcast by giving us positive feedback in the comments, below, or on Twitter @PiecingAudio. You can also donate here. We're primarily a volunteer effort, so donations help a lot!

Vocalo Storytellers: Partnership Between the American Indian Center of Chicago and Northwestern University

Last Spring, I was a part of storytelling program through Vocalo, a local radio station here in Chicago. My piece was about a partnership between the American Indian Center of Chicago and Northwestern that involved tapping maple trees on campus. It was also more generally about what it means to keep culture alive while living in a city like Chicago. Last Fall, Vocalo played clips from our pieces on air. You can listen to an interview with my fellow storyteller, Ayinde, and me, here. Ayinde's piece is also really interesting and has some related themes, but if you want to skip to my part it's at 9:50.

You can also listen to the full piece here: