The Univeristy of Wyoming’s Science Initiative and the state’s community college plan to use the Howard Hughes Medical Insitute Inclusive Excellence 3 grant (HHMI IE3) to promote inclusive excellence.
In 2019 UW’s Learning Actively Mentoring Program director, Rachel Watson wrote the pre-proposal for the HHMI IE3, and they became finalists in 2020.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and social justice issues in 2020, Watson says David Asai, HHMI’s director for science education, revisited the granting process to make it more inclusive.
The three learning communities of inclusive excellence are: meaningful evaluation of effective and inclusive teaching, the content of the introductory science experience, and effective and long lasting partnerships between two- and four-year colleges.
The Wyoming Inclusive Excellence team chose to focus on the third challenge; making a long lasting partnership between them and two-year schools.
They accepted membership in the national learning community composed of 15 fellow institutional teams from across the United States.
Watson said Northwest College (NWC) is the first state community college to engage with UW in inclusive excellence work.
The Wyoming Inclusive Excellence team also received a small grant to gather information about inclusive excellence on campuses across the state.
The grant supports Watson, Reshmi Singh, a UW School of Pharmacy associate professor, and Rosemary McBride, a UW College of Education doctoral student from Rawlins, Wyoming.
They will research institutional ethnography at each of Wyoming’s community colleges.
Watson said that “institutional ethnography is a qualitative research technique that involves collecting stories from individuals affected by inequitable institutions.”
UW and NWC educators recently met as a “learning community to achieve lasting inclusive excellence goals,” Watson said.
Representing UW were Annie Bergman of the IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) program; Erin Bentley, botany and Program in Ecology graduate student from Green River; and Christi Boggs, associate director of digital teaching and learning in the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning.
From NWC were Deepthi Amarasuriya, physics; Eric Atkinson, biological sciences; Tim Glatzer, mathematics; Kim Kost, Terri Meyer, and Lindsay Shaw, all from the TRIO Program; Lisa Smith, institutional research manager; and Uko Udodong, chemistry.
During a day-long retreat, the group discussed HMI’s guiding questions: What are the root causes of the institutional barriers to inclusion? What creates and sustains those barriers? Why are those barriers so durable?
The retreat’s goal was to create a design for the program to try and bring in scholars from across the state.
“Nurturing transdisciplinary scholarship is perhaps the most powerful thing that we can do to support diversity, equity, and inclusion goals within higher education across the state of Wyoming,” Watson said.
“Transdisciplinarity gains its research power by inviting scholars of diverse backgrounds — from math and science to agriculture and art — and from all walks of life to come together to solve the world’s problems. It acknowledges that we will not progress on these problems if we do not have all diverse identities, disciplines, and ideas around the table.”Science Initiative and Grant Enable UW, Northwest College Educators to Pursue Inclusive Excellence
