Background: Social community may play a role in how successful undergraduate engineering mentoring programs are in increasing diversity, retention rates, and graduation rates. However, there is minimal research about how mentoring programs influence the development of the social community outcomes of connectedness, satisfaction, social capital,…

We present a model for professional development of instructional faculty. Though initially conceived for accreditation compliance as a credentialing process for adjunct faculty, this project led to increases in participants' collaboration on lesson design, investment in curricular decisions, and adoption of active learning methods. In this paper,…

Authored by a teacher-researcher design team, this manuscript explores the boundaries and processes of literacy research enacted across perilous timescales. Building from fieldnotes, reflections, and dialogue from a two and a half year social design-based experiment, this study extends scholarship focused on kinship and communities of practice.…

An interdisciplinary Pop-Up Learning Community (PLC) allowed students from various disciplines with different levels of content knowledge to discuss their perspectives on and beliefs about climate change. The impact of this event on students' climate change beliefs was gauged by a survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. This…

This article describes a reflective process, influenced by collaborative autoethnography and poetic inquiry, and provides an opportunity for replication at other sites. The process illuminated a workgroup's power to enhance professional lives in support of students, seeking to harness collective power to make space for critical discussions as well…

This article documents the innovative practices and initial outcomes from the Grand Rapids Engaged Department Initiative, a cross-institutional collaboration designed in response to the failures of higher education to systematically engage in place. Created to incentivize and resource systemic and cultural shifts across three institutions of…

This conceptual essay explores three "moments" related to our collective efforts as white teacher educators to respond to proposed anti-critical race theory legislation in Michigan. These moments made visible institutional tensions and limits related to taking a stand against racist policies. We explore how we might obstruct flows of…

Approximately 11% of Michigan's roughly 199,620 elementary and secondary students are eligible for special education under Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Students with disabilities placed in a self-contained classroom by an individualized education program (IEP) committee are usually those in need of the most intense programs…

This article reports on one university's experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed "MonsterComp," including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures,…

Many scholars recommend preparing faculty for educator roles. Faculty Learning Communities, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and teaching centers represent common preparatory approaches. But faculty and teaching assistants report time, disciplinary disconnects, and lack of incentives as ongoing barriers. Inspired by K-12's…

Many undergraduate and graduate physics students participate in some form of public engagement throughout the course of their studies, often through groups supported by physics departments and universities. These informal teaching and learning programs can offer unique opportunities for both participants and facilitators to interact in a way that…

Campus leadership at a satellite campus of a large national university took a research approach to solve the workplace problem of increased scholarship requirements for practitioner faculty. The Community of Scholars Action Research Project was developed as a faculty engagement and professional development initiative. The goals and objectives for…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] The communities of practice framework has become an essential framework for understanding identity development both in physics education research (PER) and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, more broadly. However, the use of communities…

Despite the growing presence of students as partners (SAP) in education research and the overlap of goals with learning assistant (LA) programs, there is little research done on pedagogy- and curriculum-focused student partnerships that involve LAs. LAs have expertise as both teachers and learners, so why not leverage this expertise to improve the…

An innovative system-building initiative known as the STEM Learning Ecosystems Community of Practice (SLECoP) is transforming U.S. STEM education through cross-sector partnerships between schools, afterschool and summer programs, libraries, museums, and businesses, among others. Although logic models exist to describe how SLEs can make positive…