Fostering an Equity-Minded Student Success Culture in STEM Through Faculty Development

Interventions aimed at promoting the success and retention of underrepresented students in higher education science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) areas are typically targeted toward co-curricular activities, such as workshops, boot camps, and learning communities. However, community colleges represent a large sector of non-traditional students who carry additional out-of-school responsibilities; for this population of students, committing to and participating in co-curricular activities can be difficult due to time limitations. We at Santa Monica College, a two-year transfer-focused Hispanic-serving institution (HSI), present a faculty development program aimed at creating an equity-minded student success culture within STEM. This program targets newly hired and recently tenured STEM faculty and employs a multi-year cohort model. In the first year, STEM faculty participants undergo professional development training and peer faculty coaching aimed at identifying and developing equity practices. In the second year, the participants implement these practices and are given the opportunity to continue meeting with their coaches for future guidance. Select participants are invited to continue to the third year of the program as peer faculty coaches, creating community across cohorts. Encouraging results were found from student course success data and a student engagement survey that assessed on four domains: (1) caring, mattering, and affirming; (2) culturally relevant andragogy; (3)_classroom racial stressors; and (4) sense of classroom community. This program showed a positive effect on student engagement with culturally relevant andragogy
$(\boldsymbol{F}(\mathbf{2,590})=\mathbf{27.3},\ \boldsymbol{p}^{-} < \mathbf{.001},\ \boldsymbol{\eta}^{\mathbf{2}}=\mathbf{0.85}$
and sense of classroom community
$(\boldsymbol{F}(\mathbf{2,590})=\mathbf{13.3}, \boldsymbol{p} < \mathbf{.001},\ \boldsymbol{\eta}^{\mathbf{2}}=\mathbf{.043})$
. In addition, our results showed that a student's sense of classroom community was a significant predictor for their STEM course success; for every 0.22 standard deviation increase in a student's sense of classroom community, the odds ratio of a student passing increased by 1.24. Our results highlight the importance of the instructor ethos on student success in STEM courses, and presents an alternative to time-consuming co-curricular activities for engaging underrepresented students.