Professor of Higher Education; Department Head of Educational Policy Studies and Practices; and Director for the Study of Higher Education University of Arizona
This interactive plenary session will feature a historical review of the foundations of U.S. higher education, the academic disciplines, and the academic profession – with a targeted focus on STEM. Here, we will highlight how U.S. higher education has always been an exclusionary system structured by, and complicit in, a harmful racial hierarchy, where Communities of Color and their knowledge have, far too often, been marginalized and dismissed. Channeling the late Maya Angelou, we must become convinced that once we know better, we can (and should) do better. What’s next is for us to learn and adapt the powerful asset-based ideas and tools to support our work as equity-committed educators and informed reformers (or revolutionaries) of undergraduate STEM education.
