A National Resource Hub for Culturally Relevant and Responsive STEM Environments at Hispanic-Serving Institutions

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program (HSI Program), this Hub project aims to accomplish three distinct goals to: 1) foster Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) collaboration and networking; 2) support HSI faculty professional development; and 3) generate and disseminate knowledge by and about HSIs. In an effort to simultaneously engage multiple levers of change to achieve better student outcomes, many HSIs respond by offering professional development for faculty on relevant, student-centered pedagogies. These worthwhile local efforts can be enhanced by creating opportunities for leveraging limited resources. This project will create a freely accessible web-based HSI-Resource Hub to share promising practices across the nation’s growing network of public and private HSIs. This HSI Resource Hub will bring together STEM faculty across the hundreds of current and emerging HSIs in the United States. The project will create a community of STEM scholars who not only adopt and advance student-centered approaches to teaching and learning. The Hub will synthesize and regularly update information on what works in HSI contexts to minimize trial and error approaches and nurture an ongoing community of practice. The project intends to improve STEM education for all students at HSIs by developing a professional development toolkit, enabling more efficient resource sharing, and enhancing opportunities for networking. In addition, the Hub will include other activities focused on the dissemination of practical and scholarly knowledge by and about HSIs. These efforts will facilitate the spread of empirically based practices supporting student-centered pedagogy with potential to benefit all students. This project is funded by the HSI Program, which aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and increase capacity to implement innovations that improve STEM teaching and learning at HSIs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.