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Factors affecting Learning, Attitudes, and Mindsets in Education network

 

 

The FLAMEnet Steering Committee is thrilled to bring you our 2022 Annual Meeting! 

 

 “Changing the Culture to Build Student Resilience”

 

We aim to facilitate discussions and activities around challenges you identify as cultural change challenges to student growth and student resilience. FLAMEnet 2022 will aid teams of attendees in crafting an action plan to address those challenges!

 

Things you need to know about the conference: 

  • Dates: Monday, May 23rd - Wednesday, May 25th 2022
  • Location: In-person (at Emory University), MD) and Virtual
    • Accommodations: Rooms held in reserve at the Courtyard Decatur. Make your booking at THIS LINK to use the group rate
    • COVID precautions: We will be operating under Emory guidelines which has recently relaxed the indoor mask mandate. While we cannot require all participants to be masked, we will do our best to make everyone feel safe to work and be social at our annual meeting. These precautions will include greater physical distance between working groups and outdoor dining venues.
  • Registration has closed, but spots may still be available. If you are interested in attending virtually or in person, please reach out to us through info@flamenet.org.
    • There is NO registration fee for this meeting!

    The goal of this year’s meeting is to build a network of multidisciplinary and multi-level teams that pursue cultural change in STEM education through challenges local to the members' contexts. Our prior work established this community and grew this community of researchers and educators. We seek to further that impact by developing structures to support our faculty in exploring and enacting change. 

    Specifically, we will encourage applicants to form local teams that include faculty of different ranks and department or institutional leaders who can provide the resources needed to implement a plan for change. At the meeting, through speakers and workshops, these teams will learn about best practices in enacting cultural change, how to develop interventions, and how to assess change. We expect teams to utilize the workshops, the speakers, and other attendees as resources to develop a feasible year-long proposal to implement in their local environments by the conclusion of the meeting. Once enacted, the teams will report their progress back to the FLAMEnet community over 2022-2023 during our bi-weekly community hours. These sessions will provide feedback, support, and offer troubleshooting opportunities.

    We want to prioritize diverse voices in this meeting, and will encourage communication across teams from different institutional types - from minority-serving institutions to community colleges to research intensive universities. We believe that while change efforts make the most impact when they are tailored to the local institutional culture, all members can learn from each other’s efforts!

What do we mean by cultural change challenge?
 

Culture refers to the evolving set of explicit and implicit norms that guide the interactions amongst members of an academic community: which members hold which responsibilities, to who takes what actions, and to the common practices of that community (e.g., how a department coordinates a sequence of courses; how a department conducts faculty meetings; the collegiate expectations for faculty tenure process). These norms also reflect the values that members place on their responsibilities, actions, and practices. Changing academic culture thus refers to targeted efforts to transform certain norms, practices, and values through concerted action in response to identified goals or barriers. To address “Changing the Culture to Build Student Resilience”, below are examples of challenges or goals FLAMEnet 2022 attendees might identify:

  • Challenges
    • High attrition rates in particular course sequences
    • Lack of formal recognition or incentive to innovate course curricula
    • Grade discrepancies based on demographic factors of race, ethnicity, gender identity, first generation status, etc.
    • Lack of PEER representation in faculty or faculty hiring process
    • Limited knowledge in department about implementing evidence-based interventions to stimulate student motivation and interest
  • Goals
    • Adopting student belonging interventions in all introductory courses in a department
    • Adopting exam wrapper reflections to build student strategies for success  
    • Creating policies for the evaluation of teaching to include measures of inclusive teaching excellence