United States

Our higher education system is in danger. At many of our universities, top-down decision-making, austerity thinking and repeated budget cuts have led to declines in educational quality, research, and faculty well-being. The pandemic has increased workloads and deepened existing inequities, bringing the need for changes in institutional priorities into sharp focus. How can faculty build collective power to counter harmful policies and practices and seek effective shared governance on campus? This talk will explain how AAUP advocacy chapters can promote our educational mission and support faculty by sharing information, using media pressure and existing governance structures as tools for change, and building power through solidarity. The talk will also address differences between advocacy chapters and unions. While advocacy chapters can be powerful forces for positive change, collective bargaining units can negotiate binding agreements that have more power to improve faculty lives.

AAPT SM 21

Supporting Faculty During the Pandemic and Beyond

shared governance

collective action

aaup chapter

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques.

Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. Attending the virtual summer meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

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technical paper

As with any form of communication, advocacy for science and science policy requires identifying key audiences and opportunities. In this presentation, some of the main opportunities for advocacy with the Executive and Legislative Branches are identified and illustrated. As a preface and because of the tight coupling with advocacy opportunities, the Federal budgetary cycle is briefly reviewed. The speaker participated in science advocacy and policy development from multiple perspective as a member of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and with responsibility for university federal relations at Northern Illinois University.

Perspectives from Inside and Outside: Advocating for Science and Policy

In this presentation, simulations of some physics experiments will be presented. The simulations are based on mathematica.

Simulation lab with mathematica

The APS Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) project team surveyed department chairs nationwide to assess the status of physics-degree-granting departments. The results give insight into how chairs view the current state of their undergraduate programs. The findings cover a range of areas, including the problems departments face, the departmental cultures of assessment, and attitudes towards program review. Recruitment and retention of minoritized students and overall student enrollment and preparation were the most prevalent and severe departmental problems reported. Note, pandemic related issues were not addressed as at the time of this survey as it was unclear what the total effect of the pandemic would be. Additionally, there is substantial misalignment between chairs’ current and ideal departments, indicating room for improvement in departmental practices and change processes. In this talk, I will share these survey results and discuss the implications for the EP3 project and the larger physics community.

Department chairs report misalignment between their current and ideal departments

Collecting effective practices across all areas of a physics department’s operations is a daunting task for any chair or faculty member bent on improving their program. EP3 (Effective Practices for Physics Programs) is a community-sourced guide to help chairs and members of their department improve. The guide includes sections on topics including recruitment, retention, introductory-courses, laboratory and computational skills, undergraduate research, culture and climate, equity and inclusion, leadership, program review, capstone experiences and much more. Guide development is ongoing, but a substantial portion is now available at EP3guide.org and the national task force is set to complete all sections by early 2022. This talk will provide an overview of the guide, its design, and how to begin to use the practices. Our interactive session will provide an opportunity for attendees to provide feedback on design and content, and to see how you can use the guide most effectively.

EP3: A Comprehensive, Community-Sourced Guide for Improving Departments

APS has recognized that physics programs and departments have increasingly come under threat in the current climate in higher education, a circumstance exacerbated by COVID. This has particularly impacted regional public institutions and private colleges. In response, APS tasked the authors to develop a resource that could aid departments experiencing such pressures. We conducted over 50 interviews with faculty and administrators, gathering practices that worked, or did not work. These practices served as feedstock for the resulting web-based resource: the Toolkit for Departments Under Threat. The Toolkit provides guidance on effective practices, and presents these findings in structures that can easily be adopted by departmental leaders. While each individual program constitutes a unique ecosystem, thematic elements emerged, forming the backbone of the Toolkit. We will describe the structure and content of the Toolkit, and invite any feedback.


Toolkit for Departments Under Threat

The APS Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative aims to help physics programs respond to challenges with a collection of knowledge, experience, and proven good practice disseminated via the EP3 Guide. As part of the project, we are piloting Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALIs), which support faculty members and their departments in implementing significant changes to their undergraduate programs. Starting in January 2021, two faculty members from each of five departments joined the first DALI. These faculty members were charged with leading cross-constituency teams in their departments to engage in a change effort, following the Departmental Action Team (DAT) model. This DALI started with an intensive virtual kickoff workshop, followed by twice monthly meetings and the opportunity for individual consultations with the DALI facilitators. These activities were designed to to help the DALI participants learn about and implement critical aspects of engaging in a change effort, of supporting a high-functioning team, of interfacing with stakeholders outside the team, and of growing as change agents. These are all practices that align with the literature on organizational change and effective teams, both within and beyond the higher education context. In this presentation, we will describe the goals, structure, and curriculum of the pilot DALI. We will also present some initial feedback from our participants about their experiences with the DALI and with leading their change efforts.

Supporting departmental change efforts with Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALIs)

In March 2020, all teachers were asked to shift to a virtual world of instruction. While there were resources available, it was overwhelming to decide what to do, who to listen to, and try to figure out how students would respond. The 2020-2021 school year was no less challenging with various combinations of remote, hybrid, and in-person instruction. Deciding how to mix online activities instruction with face to face instruction that still had to be socially distanced became an opportunity for two teachers at different schools in one Ohio district to collaborate closer than they had before. Doug Forrest and Kevin McChesney will take you through their journey while providing details of the unique challenges and opportunities available in their school district. With collaboration, perseverance, and grace we feel we provided a year to students that was meaningful and will have long-lasting impacts on our instruction.

Fifteen months of making physics relevant during a pandemic

Our introductory astronomy courses have made use of our planetarium for the "standard" lessons, such as teaching students about celestial coordinates, the ecliptic, etc. We have several advanced courses in our minor in astronomy, including a sophomore-level course on the solar system and exoplanets, and introductory astrophysics, and junior courses on observational astronomy, stellar astrophysics, and galactic astronomy. We recently began thinking about using the planetarium to help with instruction at these higher levels.

In the fall of 2019, we started teaching lessons for our solar system course in the planetarium, which would have been modified and expanded upon in 2020, but for the COVID-19 shutdown. We will present our initial work from 2019 and plans for improvements and additions for fall 2021, and preliminary ideas for our stellar astrophysics course planned for spring 2022. We hope to spark a further discussion on the use of planetaria for higher-level courses.


Planetaria beyond the Introductory Level

What are your #LeadershipGoals? All educators are leaders: in their classroom, department, institution, and personal life. During this talk, participants will reflect on how they envision themselves as a leader, engage with a self evaluation tool, and consider the steps in developing an action plan for making change in their leadership life. In anticipation of the soon-to-be-published guide Honoring Teachers as Professionals: Stories and Pathways for Growth in Your Classroom and Career through AIP Publishing, the authors will share how university/K-12 partnerships led to increases in their own leadership capacity, professional networks, and improved professional development opportunities through self-reflective classroom research. We will discuss research and experiences around these partnerships, leadership in education, goal setting, and how participants can work towards the same.

#Leadershipgoals

Modern technology is based on well-developed fabrication techniques. Among these techniques, photolithography is one of the most used in industry and research. Unfortunately, the experiences that undergraduate students can have using these fabrication techniques is still limited. In this sense, I have developed an intensive course that allows students to get experience on the equipment, parameters, and skills that are required to successfully create patterned structures based on photolithography by using easily accessible equipment. Over one semester, the students have gotten structures that can reach dimensions in the order of tens of microns. This intensive opens the opportunity in undergraduate institutions to provide required skills to students that will be part of the upcoming workforce.

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