The PR HEARTS (Higher Education Assembly of Researchers, Thriving not just Surviving) Conference will support faculty in multiple ways that are designed to promote their wellbeing, enhance their lived experiences, and increase self-efficacy and sense of belonging – thereby building their capacity to retain more STEM students at their institutions.
This proposal directly supports Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) capacity building efforts by providing support in the form of space and resources for STEM faculty in Puerto Rico to move from surviving into thriving. Faculty that are well-supported can indeed support their students well. Conference Details
Plenary Speaker – Edwin J. Barea-Rodriguez, Ph.D. – Associate Dean for Student Success and Instructional Innovation and Professor of Neurobiology – Director, RISE /MARC Students Training – Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) Fellow | Co-Chair, My Brother’s Keeper San Antonio-Post-Secondary Action Network | College of Sciences, The University of Texas at San Antonio
Speaker – Melvin Hall, Professor Emeritus – Northern Arizona University
Thinking Evaluatively in Program Design, Implementation, and Evaluation
- Broadening Participation programs are efforts to prop up a broken system, if it were not broken our broadening participation programs would not be needed
- Evaluation can and should be considered a part of that system, so what fix must we make to evaluation to repair the broader system of STEM workforce development (or at least spotlight the issues)?
- Our people are the reason and resource behind this system, so why do we default to fixing the people, rather than the systems that are not serving them well
- Program Evaluation must engage in reflection and reflexive practice to discontinue its complicity in the brokenness of our systems. Its focus and role must expand to examine the elements of the system that perpetuate the need for broader participation programs.