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HARVARD SYMPOSIUM:
Both Sides of the Fence:
Student and Faculty Perspectives
In college at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Yasmine Colday dreaded the idea of taking an introductory physics course. “I knew I needed to do something different. I thought the best way to fight my apprehension was to meet my future physics teacher. I stated the problem, and then I just waited,” she said. Her professor spent the next two hours calming her fears and relating physics to her interests in biology.
“When I left, I knew I could do it, if only because someone other than my mother believed that I could excel in this class,” said Colday, now a doctoral candidate in biophysics at Harvard University.
Colday’s story exemplified an important dynamic at the Harvard symposium—students and faculty sharing stories of their successful experiences or the challenges they faced. Participants said they see the following recurring issues as critical to recruiting and retaining underrepresented minority (URM) students in the sciences:
PAYING FOR IT
“Everything does take money,” said Freeman Hrabowski, president of UMBC. The most successful diversity programs have dedicated staff members who stay on top of student participation and data. Getting a university to create new staff positions is nearly impossible, many faculty acknowledged, which means they must find outside private or federal funds.
Administrators are not the only ones vying for funds. Many URM students struggle with financial issues as well. Most URM students who participate in research during the school year or over the summer need to earn about $8 per hour. Whether they must pay school-related bills or help a financially strapped family—the bottom line is that students who work their way through school are unlikely to participate in volunteer research.
Asking working students to add extra problem sessions, tutoring, group meetings, and unpaid research to their schedules is too high a barrier, a faculty member said. Another responded that perhaps the problem is even more general: “Science takes time, period. We have to make students understand that there is no way around that if you want to be in this discipline.”
WORKING COOPERATIVELY
Some diversity programs require students to work together to solve problems during class or in after-class study groups because collaborative work is one proven element in academic success—especially in introductory, so-called gateway, science courses.* Program leaders contended that working in groups builds confidence, increases classroom participation, and encourages students to seek help from their peers.
Jasmine McDonald, an alumna of the Meyerhoff Scholarship Program at UMBC, recalled that group work showed her that being an independent student was not necessarily the best route to success. “If someone failed in the group, then the entire group had failed. I learned that any successful person has someone backing them and pushing their potential,” she said.
But faculty members said that they struggle with incorporating group work into curricula: Should group work be mandatory or voluntary? How can a professor ensure that group work goes at the right pace for everyone? How does a faculty member get minority students to participate, when traditionally they shy away from groups composed of mostly majority students? How do colleges avoid adding more time to overextended student schedules?
Incorporating group learning, or cooperative learning, directly into course content and classroom activities is one way to overcome these hurdles, some faculty members said. Although “active learning” is gaining currency on many college and university campuses, the concept calls for professors to significantly alter their approach to teaching large lecture courses—a trend that many resist.
CHANGING THE CULTURE OF GATEWAY COURSES
Another major concern is that gateway courses create a sink-or-swim environment that weeds students out rather than prepares them for higher-level courses. Many students—minority and majority alike—have not acquired the study skills required for the intense introductory science courses they must take. By the time they make a change in their habits, students may find it’s too late in the semester to improve their grades.
“Students who earn C’s in the first-year courses are never going to make A’s and B’s in the upper-level courses because they have no good basis,” said Hrabowski. He admitted, however, that UMBC’s practice of encouraging C-students to retake introductory courses is controversial.
Faculty participants pointed out that many fairly simple measures could help demystify the process of learning and test taking. Academic departments could develop test-preparation resources, such as banks of old tests or practice problems.
Also, many URM students admitted that they are “terrified of their professors’ accomplishments” and feel too intimidated to approach a professor about a research position. To address that issue, a participant at a major research university suggested hosting a seminar for freshmen that would explain the etiquette of asking professors on campus about research opportunities.
BRINGING FACULTY ON BOARD
Colday’s comments made it clear that a professor who is willing to spend time with a student can have a major impact on that student’s college and graduate school career. Of course, participants noted, faculty time is a precious commodity, and mentoring students well takes lots of it. Unfortunately, mentoring undergraduate students is not usually rewarded in the current tenure-decision system. While most of the symposium participants said that they recognize the value in mentoring, they also said that they need most of their colleagues on board in order to have a campus-wide impact.
“Nothing is more important than faculty—and it usually means getting people who are already too busy to do it,” noted Hrabowski. Students echoed that sentiment, saying that the key to seeing themselves as researchers usually means having a faculty mentor taking time to show them how they fit into a lab or research project. But students added that they would also like to see more faculty who look like them and who will “look at my intelligence first, before my color,” said a Harvard University freshman.
To create the time for mentoring, faculty said they need incentives that go beyond simply “doing the right thing.” One mid-Atlantic university, for example, has proposed a program in which professors who mentor 30 students in a semester can drop part of their teaching load. Others said it might be a matter of convincing departments to see mentoring as part of the teaching, service, and research requirements for tenure.
CREATING A CAMPUS FAMILY
“We are not just a research group, but a family that will rise together,” said Iona Black, repeating the motto of the Science Technology and Research Scholars group at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The analogy to a family of scholars, working together for everyone to succeed, came up again and again in student comments.
Critical mass counts in diversity work, participants said. While URM students may find themselves isolated in individual classes, they find great help in having a larger group of peers with shared experiences and cultural backgrounds on campus. The group provides emotional and social, as well as academic, support.
* Information on collaborative work as an element in academic success is contained in Mathematics Achievement Among African American Undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley: An Evaluation of the Mathematics Workshop Program, by Robert E. Fullilove and Philip Uri Treisman, 1990, Journal of Negro Education 59, 463-478.
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