Culture & Environment

8) Students gain knowledge and skills to participate in a multicultural society and workplace. 

Students engage in group projects and activities that are intentionally designed to simulate workplace environments and develop skills needed for the workplace, such as collaboration and problem-solving.

• Reflect on your current use of the instructional strategies listed here Equity-Focused Teaching Strategies Reflection: Critical Engagement of Difference and identify strategies to implement next. Center for Research on Teaching and Learning, University of Michigan.

• Bring in diverse guest speakers to share experiences in STEM careers.

• These labs are remarkably diverse- here’s why they’re winning at science. Article about how being inclusive gives teams a competitive edge in science. 

• Getting started with project-based learning definitions and resources from the Center for Teaching and Learning, Columbia U and City University of NY.

Align projects/activities to specific community and global needs in ways that nurture partnerships and relationship building with important members of the community (e.g., local people and tribes, communities of color). 

• Use authentic project-based learning (PBL) to engage students in meaningful work in collaboration with peers to create valued products (See, for instance, these resources).

• When launching group project-based learning: scaffold group goal setting, role delineation, and project milestones (For example, like this interdisciplinary STEM project from Van Orman et al., 2021)

• PBL Works, Buck Institute for Education