Speaker: Joel Corbo, Senior Research Associate, Center for STEM Learning, University of Colorado Boulder
Date: Thursday, October 13, 2022
Abstract: Creating change in academia is a difficult challenge, often exacerbated by change strategies that are inappropriate or ineffective. One successful mechanism for creating change is a Departmental Action Team (DAT). A DAT is a working group of faculty, staff, and students that is created by a department to achieve two goals: (1) create sustainable change around a broad-scale issue related to undergraduate education and (2) help grow DAT participants’ capacity for creating future change. Through implementing and studying these groups since 2014, the DAT project team has learned a great deal about the strategies, structures, and principles that lead to successful change efforts. The DAT model has been taken up by a number of initiatives around the country, including the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative, via Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALIs). Starting in January 2021, two faculty members from each of five physics departments joined the first DALI to learn how to lead DATs in their departments. DALI activities were designed to to help the DALI participants engage in a change effort, support a high-functioning team, interface with external stakeholders, and develop change agency. The first DALI cohort wrapped up after a year, the second is nearly complete, and two more launched in September. In this presentation, I will share the DAT model and stories of successful (and not so successful) DATs to provide examples for engaging in departmental change. I will also describe the goals and structure of the pilot DALI, present some initial feedback from our participants, and describe our plans to document the impacts on participants and their departments.
Speaker Bio: Joel is a Senior Research Associate in the Center for STEM Learning at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work focuses on implementing and studying mechanisms for improving undergraduate education in STEM departments, with a particular focus on organizational/institutional change, equity and inclusion, and community. As a graduate student, he helped to found and lead the Berkeley Compass Project, a student-run organization dedicated to supporting students from marginalized groups in physics, and he co-leads the Access Network, a national network of student-centered equity programs inspired by Compass. Before coming to CU, Joel received a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT and a Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley. As a member of the Whaley group at Berkeley, he studied ultracold atomic gases using quantum Monte Carlo simulation techniques.