Webinar - The Confounding Promise of “Community” in Divisive Times and Why It Matters More Than Ever for Student Success.

This webinar is part of a Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP) project on the links between student well-being and educational equity. Academic research and campus practice have emphasized the importance of well-being as a condition of student success and a core goal of educating the whole student. In recent years, the importance of student well-being as an equity imperative has become more and more evident, often due to the advocacy and activism of students themselves. What does it mean to place support for student flourishing at the center of the equity agenda? What does it mean to place equity, diversity, and inclusion at the heart of our understanding of student well-being? This webinar will explore both questions, with a focus on students whose experience of marginality often undermines their success and thriving: students of color, first-generation students, low-income students, and adult working students.

Today, the demand for global competitiveness in undergraduate science education is situated within a shifting sociopolitical context that is increasingly made complex by the troubling history of race relations in America. This contemporary reality requires that we boldly embrace a more dynamic conceptualization of excellence in undergraduate science education—one that advances innovation and rightfully positions inclusion as its necessary precondition. This shift must begin with a set of standards, or agreements, that release us from the conventional workaround approaches that we have become so accustomed to. Collectively, our Agreements for Excellence point toward far more daring shifts in institutional change strategies that can design, create, and support a new institutional stance for undergraduate science education—predisposing and positioning it, and the STEM faculty within it, to hold themselves accountable for desiring, fostering, recognizing, and requiring the actions and outcomes that are quintessential for inclusion and indistinguishable from excellence.