2021-2022 Events
Please see below for our schedule of events for 2021-2022. These events include talks organized by SEISMIC and SEISMIC institutions, as well as events SEISMIC is co-sponsoring, and are open to anyone interested to attend. For more information, please contact our Speaker Events Bureau at seismic.speakers.bureau@umich.edu
Thursday
Sept. 16
12 pm EST
Sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) and co-sponsored by the SEISMIC Collaboration, and the ASU RISE Center.
“Understanding oppression faced by Asian Americans”
Speaker: Sapna Cheryan, PhD, University of Washington
Different racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. have been subordinated in different ways. This work integrates a dimension of cultural foreignness (Zou & Cheryan, 2017) along with the more commonly studied dimension of perceived status to understand forms of prejudice faced by Asian Americans. Using controlled laboratory and field experiments, self-generated discrimination experiences, and U.S. court cases, I will demonstrate Asian Americans’ perceived positioning as high status and culturally foreign in U.S society and consequences for the forms of discrimination they face. I will further provide experimental evidence that discrimination-based cultural foreignness may be seen by White Americans as less harmful than other forms of discrimination. This work moves beyond a “one size fits all” approach to discrimination to document the distinct forms of discrimination faced by Asian Americans in U.S. society and the accompanying challenges in addressing these forms of discrimination.
Monday
Oct. 4
12 pm EST
Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh
Speaker: Eduardo Gonzalez, UC Santa Barbara
The University of Pittsburgh is hosting a SEISMIC talk with Eduardo Gonzalez. Please join using the link below. The link will be updated with a signup for the Zoom link a week prior to this event.
Thursday
Oct. 21
12 pm EST
Sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) and co-sponsored by the SEISMIC Collaboration, and the ASU RISE Center.
“The meaning beyond the words: How language, race, & culture impact science teaching & learning”
Speaker: Bryan Brown, PhD, Stanford University
This presentation explores how race, culture, and language intersect to create the condition of contemporary learning. For years, research on the language of classrooms explored how the way we say things impacts students’ sense of belonging. Despite this research, STEM education has failed to adequately explore how issues of race, language, and culture shape the outcomes of teaching and learning in science. Through a sequence of research, this presentation explores the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of this dilemma. From a theoretical perspective, the talk will explore the Language-Identity dilemma. As students learn, the way academic language is taught to them can present a cognitive and cultural conflict. From a cognitive perspective, if science is taught without respect to the implications of how language is learned, students can be misunderstood and misunderstand the teacher’s complex discourse. From a cultural conflict perspective, students may feel they are cultural outsiders when the language of the classroom positions them as outsiders. The presentation provides an overview of a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments that document the realities of this complex interaction.
Thursday
Oct. 28
4 pm EST
Sponsored by the University of California Irvine
“Intervention on providing behavioral information to students”
Speaker: Qiujie Li (and Di)
The UCI Education Research Initiative is launching its seminar series titled “Currently in Education Research.” The Currently seminar series is an opportunity to hear about the cutting edge work happening at UCI and beyond, and is a great way to receive feedback from an interdisciplinary audience of education researchers. We are excited to welcome an array of leading education researchers to UCI from across the country along with UCI faculty, postdocs, and students presenting projects of all stages, from a research idea that is still in its infancy to a project that is near completion.
Thursday
Nov. 4
4 pm EST
“Cracking the diversity code: Understanding computing pathways of those least represented in order to foster their representation”
Speaker: Monique Ross
A significant gap exists in the understanding of factors that influence the participation of Black and Hispanic women in computer science. The objective is to listen to those often unheard in the conversation around broadening participation in computer science, in order to critically examine efforts and initiatives that impact engagement. This talk will describe the journey towards this objective and preliminary results. The outcomes of this work have the potential to reshape the community’s perceptions of what and who are computer scientists as well as crack the code to diversifying this lucrative and impactful discipline.
Friday
Nov. 5
1-2pm EST
Sponsored by AIM Research by the Center for Academic Innovation.
“AIM Research: AI for Scalable Course Articulation Recommendation”
Speaker: Zachary A. Pardos, PhD
Articulations serve as the gatekeepers to socio-economic mobility in systems of higher education. However, determining which course at one institution is academically equivalent to a course at another institution can be an intractable task when attempting to articulate and maintain articulations comprehensively and precisely between even a small set of institutions. In this talk, Dr. Pardos will present research on using AI to scale articulation recommendation by leveraging course catalog descriptions complimented by information contained within historic enrollment patterns to infer cross-institutional course equivalencies. Early pilots of this AI articulation involving faculty engagement will be discussed as well as its current limitations and productive challenges ahead.
Monday
Nov. 15
12 pm EDT
Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh
Speaker: Sarah Castle, Michigan State University
The University of Pittsburgh is hosting a SEISMIC talk with Sarah Castle. Please join using the link below. The link will be updated with a signup for the Zoom link a week prior to this event.
Thursday
Nov. 18
4 pm EDT
Sponsored by the University of California Irvine
TBD
Speaker: Soo Jeong
The UCI Education Research Initiative is launching its seminar series titled “Currently in Education Research.” The Currently seminar series is an opportunity to hear about the cutting edge work happening at UCI and beyond, and is a great way to receive feedback from an interdisciplinary audience of education researchers. We are excited to welcome an array of leading education researchers to UCI from across the country along with UCI faculty, postdocs, and students presenting projects of all stages, from a research idea that is still in its infancy to a project that is near completion.
Thursday
Nov. 18
12 pm EDT
Sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) and co-sponsored by the SEISMIC Collaboration, and the ASU RISE Center.
“Mapping the terrain of othering: Religious, gendered, and racial exclusion on historically white campuses”
Speakers: Kameelah Mu’Min Rashad, PhD, Muslim Wellness Foundation (top) & Keon M. McGuire, PhD, Arizona State University (bottom)
On historically white campuses, too often conversations related to human diversity are most concerned with increasing cultural appreciation and awareness for non-dominant groups. Relatedly, discussions of inclusion for marginalized individuals focus on perceived economic, social, and cultural deficiencies of underrepresented students. However, these approaches often fail to interrogate the ways institutions are structured – both physically and intellectually – to exclude religious, gender, and racially minoritized students. Drawing on our work and research with Black students from various religious and spiritual backgrounds, we will make visible the various ways in which Whiteness, Christian hegemony, and heteropatriarchy work, and how we might respond in ways rooted in equity and justice.
Monday
Nov. 29
12 pm EDT
Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh
Speaker: Linda Adler-Kassner, UC Santa Barbara
The University of Pittsburgh is hosting a SEISMIC talk with Linda Adler-Kassner. Please join using the link below. The link will be updated with a signup for the Zoom link a week prior to this event.
Thursday
Dec. 2
4 pm EDT
Sponsored by the University of California Irvine
TBD
Speaker: Laura Tucker
The UCI Education Research Initiative is launching its seminar series titled “Currently in Education Research.” The Currently seminar series is an opportunity to hear about the cutting edge work happening at UCI and beyond, and is a great way to receive feedback from an interdisciplinary audience of education researchers. We are excited to welcome an array of leading education researchers to UCI from across the country along with UCI faculty, postdocs, and students presenting projects of all stages, from a research idea that is still in its infancy to a project that is near completion.
Monday
Dec. 6
1-2pm EDT
Sponsored by AIM Research by the Center for Academic Innovation.
“AIM Research: Course Choice and Inequality: Investigating First Math Choice”
Speaker: Monique Harrison
Upon entry into college, and every term thereafter, students are confronted with the task of making choices – choosing extracurriculars, ranking dorms, and selecting courses (the topic of this talk). That discretion brings agency and a sense of freedom, but also the potential for stalled academic progress and the perpetuation of inequality. In this talk Monique Harrison will discuss the various course selection strategies first year students utilize to choose their first math class, and how this choice led to disparate experiences of their math courses and altered student trajectories. Harrisown will focus on first math courses in college because of the substantial importance of math in STEM pathways and the potential of positively impacting underrepresented students.
Monday
Dec. 6
12 pm EDT
Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh
Speaker: Natalia Caporale, UC Davis
The University of Pittsburgh is hosting a SEISMIC talk with Natalia Caporale. Please join using the link below. The link will be updated with a signup for the Zoom link a week prior to this event.
Thursday
Jan. 20
12 pm EDT
Sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) and co-sponsored by the SEISMIC Collaboration, and the ASU RISE Center.
“Effective, culturally responsive mentorship”
Speakers: Angela Byars-Winston, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Effective mentorship matters in the talent development of future STEM professionals. Effective mentorship includes being culturally responsive to the differing social identities of trainees, especially related to racial and ethnic identity. This session will highlight supporting research on the facilitative role of culturally responsive practice and its relevance to mentorship of STEM trainees.
Thursday
Feb. 10
12 pm EDT
Sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) and co-sponsored by the SEISMIC Collaboration, and the ASU RISE Center.
“Reframing equity in STEM education with historically minoritized communities: Seeding rightful presence”
Speaker: Edna Tan, PhD, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
This talk explores the inadequacy of framing equity in STEM education merely as inclusion into the established culture of canonical STEM reflexive solely of the epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies of White middle-class heteropatriarchy. I introduce the framework of Rightful Presence as an approach to more critically, 1) survey the terrain of inequities in STEM education for minoritized populations as historical, systemic, and enduring that are manifested in particular, local ways, and the role of fostering more expansive epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies in disrupting such inequities; 2) highlight the need to consider the temporal arc – past, present, future – of how minoritized youth engage with STEM across spaces as negotiated through particular social-spatial relationalities; and 3) consider what is entailed in terms of the design of justice-oriented STEM learning environments and pedagogical approach, to expand the epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies of STEM to be reflexive of historically underrepresented Youth of Color and minoritized groups in STEM.
Tuesday
Feb. 22
12pm PST
Sponsored by UC Irvine
“Testing the Generalizability of Embedded Educational Interventions”
Speaker: Benjamin Motz, Research Scientist, Indiana University
Psychological research on student learning is often conducted in the interests of recommending “what works” in education. But this research carries the rather bold assumption that researchers’ isolated studies will generalize out-of-sample to unmeasured educational settings. Considering that teachers matter, tasks matter, and student populations are different from one another, the assumption that isolated research studies would generalize to unmeasured educational contexts merits scrutiny. In this presentation, I’ll describe our ManyClasses research study, a first-of-its-kind effort to evaluate the generalizability of an instructional intervention across 38 dissimilar classes spanning 15 different college campuses.
Thursday
Feb. 24
2 pm EDT
Sponsored by Indiana University
“People & Purpose: Highlighting Communal Aspects of STEM to Foster Diversity and Engagement”
Speaker: Amanda Diekman, PhD, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
What matters to students, and how do they see different career pathways as fulfilling what matters to them? Our research investigates how people perceive social roles as fulfilling their valued goals; examining these perceived affordances allows a deeper understanding of role entry, engagement, and exit. In this talk, I will explore women’s lower representation in certain STEM fields, relative to men and to other fields, through the lens of goal congruity. Gender roles emphasize communality for women, but STEM fields are consensually perceived as unlikely to afford communal goals such as pro-sociality or collaboration. These stereotypes about careers present both challenges and opportunities: When STEM activities integrate communal activities and purpose, individuals show greater interest, belonging, and engagement. Overall, science and engineering contexts that signal opportunities for both communal and agentic goals maximize flexibility and favorability. Considering the structural opportunities for individual goal pursuit provides a valuable vantage point to foster both broader participation and deeper engagement in STEM.
Zoom link (passcode: 2002)
Thursday
March 17
12 pm EDT
Sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) and co-sponsored by the SEISMIC Collaboration, and the ASU RISE Center.
“Creating a culture of access in academic biology: A focus on disability”
Speaker: M. Remi Yergeau, PhD, University of Michigan
(Description coming soon).
Monday
March 21
4:30-6 pm EDT
Hosted by the Science, Technology & Public Policy Program and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and co-sponsored by Public Interest Technology University Network, Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences (NERS), Michigan Engineering, Engineering Education Research (EER), Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC), Women in Science and Engineering (WISE), ADVANCE, Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses (SEISMIC), and BLUElab.
“Cultivating socially responsible engineers: The role of universities and public policy”
Speakers:
- Amy Ko, Professor, Information School, University of Washington-Seattle
- Tim McKay, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics, Astronomy, and Education, University of Michigan
- Johanna Okerlund, Postdoctoral Fellow, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan
- José Zayas-Castro, Division Director, NSF Division of Engineering Education and Centers, National Science Foundation
- Moderator: Alec Gallimore, Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering, University of Michigan
Join STPP for a panel discussion that will convene leaders in academia and government working in the field of public interest technology to discuss the role of universities and public policy in cultivating socially responsible engineers. They will focus on what needs to change in STEM education policy to center equity and justice in the training of the next generation of scientists and technologists.
Monday
March 21
4 -5:30pm EDT
These mini-workshops are sponsored by FLAMEnet and by Research Corporation through the Cottrell Scholar Collaborative program.
“Creating Pathways of Kindness and Inclusion in STEM Education”
Speaker: Prof. Mica Estrada, Institute for Health and Aging, University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Estrada will talk about how shift to classrooms, training programs and mentorship relationships that provide kindness cues that affirm social inclusion may impact the integration experience for students, faculty, and administrators. She will particularly focus on how these shifts impact people historically excluded because of their ethnicity and race (PEER) in academia and underrepresented among Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) degree earners and career pathways.
Thursday
March 28
12 -1pm EDT
“Towards Dialogical Pedagogy: Capturing Instructor Talk Moves and Student Reasoning in Undergraduate STEM Classrooms”
Speaker: Dr. Abdi Warfa, Professor of Biology teaching and learning, University of Minnesota
Classrooms are dynamic and complex social environments with multiple factors that can influence student learning. A persistent barrier to student success in undergraduate foundational STEM courses is related to faculty instructional practices that leverage teacher-led talk over dialogic discourse. In this talk, I will describe recent data we collected from STEM faculty across three institutions to examine their classroom discourse behavior. Our findings suggest dialogical pedagogy, though rarely occurring, invokes the most reasoned thinking in student responses during classroom instruction. The talk will describe this data and its implication for undergraduate STEM classroom instruction.
Tuesday
April 19
4 -5:30pm EDT
These mini-workshops are sponsored by FLAMEnet and by Research Corporation through the Cottrell Scholar Collaborative program.
“Promoting Equity in Science Learning”
Speaker: Prof. Chandralekha Singh, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh
Instructors often only focus on content knowledge and skills to improve student engagement and learning in science courses. However, students’ sense-of-belonging, self-efficacy and mindset can also play an important role in their engagement and success in science. For example, students’ sense of belonging in a science class, their self-efficacy, and views about whether intelligence in science is “fixed” or “malleable” can affect engagement and learning. These types of concerns can especially impact the learning outcomes of marginalized students and stereotype threats can exacerbate these issues. I will discuss prior research studies that show how different types of social psychological interventions (e.g., social belonging and growth mindset) have improved the learning outcomes of all students, and this is especially true for marginalized students in science fields. I will discuss how ecological belonging interventions can be adapted and implemented in science classes to make them more equitable and inclusive. These types of interventions are short even though they have the potential to impact student outcomes significantly—especially for marginalized students in science classes.
Wednesday
May 11
4 -5:30pm EDT
These mini-workshops are sponsored by FLAMEnet and by Research Corporation through the Cottrell Scholar Collaborative program.
“Whiteness and Structural Racism in Introductory STEM courses”
Speaker: Prof. Terrell Morton, College of Education and Human Development, University of Missouri
(Description forthcoming.)