WIMS Teacher-Scholar Cohort

This page seeks to organize the notes/thoughts/suggestions of our WIMS teacher-scholar cohort. The original proposal

Objectives from Original Proposal

  • make STEM more relevant and accessible for women and non-majors
  • generate ideas on how to leverage the IQ Center to improve our pedagogy and research

Challenges

While WIMS faculty understand the continuing–sometimes masked–challenges for women in science (who doesn't have a good story about that?), our students tend to be blissfully unaware. There are general issues on campus with women's hesitation to take on leadership positions.

  • These issues aren't isolated to WIMS; they're pervasive throughout W&L culture. How can we make positive change across the campus?
  • How to teach persistence/following through? There is a lot of failure and negative results in STEM. How do we teach that that is okay?

Ideas

  • Show examples of women in the field
    • act as role models
    • show there are different ways to be/do a scientist/mathematician
    • how questions change with women's involvement
    • more speakers - finding female speakers
  • Rethink the problems we assign
    • not the stereotypical “think pink” and make the problems more feminine, but …
    • questions that are more interesting/relevant to a general audience, perhaps social implications …
  • Change how participation happens in class
    • allow more time for students to formulate an answer first before calling on someone or asking for volunteers to answer
    • encourage female students to keep talking if they are cut off
  • Involve male colleagues with these ideas/changes
  • Use both one-on-one mentoring and group encouragement
    • during one-on-one mentoring let students know that they're not alone in how they feel – give personal examples
    • fight the “imposter syndrome

Questions

Opportunities

  • The HHMI grant has funds for course development and supplies for a new course or module that relates to STEM
  • Emphasize transferable skills

Suggestions

Action Items

Teamwork Discussion

  • Discussion leader: Lynn Chin, Sociology – November 6
  • Starting discussion:
    • assigning roles
    • size of teams
    • leadership within the team
    • sense of ownership
    • defining expectations

Leadership Roundtable Discussion

  • Invite panelists: Shana Levine, Nicolaas Rupke, Megan Schneider, and Jeffrey Shay
  • Invite participants: students and faculty, with a (slight?) WIMS emphasis
  • Starting questions:
    • what is leadership?
    • how do you develop leadership skills?
    • how do you find leadership opportunities?
    • how do faculty/upperclassmen help encourage/nurture leadership skills in students?

Discussion/Comments

wims/teacher_scholar_cohort13_14.txt · Last modified: 2022/02/09 15:16 by 138.197.181.193
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