CoPs as One Part of a Larger Strategy

The CoPs reflected the authors’ belief in faculty as key levers for institutional change. Providing faculty with learning opportunities to enhance their understanding of specific support systems that facilitate diversity and equity in graduate education is fundamental to driving institutional change (Posselt et al., 2021). The logic driving our CoPs is that the development of programs that educate faculty on issues surrounding both cultural identity and the historical and ongoing impacts of racism will provide faculty with better tools for mentorship and student support (Basile & Azevedo, 2022; Bensimon, 2007; Dewsbury, 2017; Ruiz et al., 2019). However, many faculty development programs are aimed solely at providing resources to faculty from historically excluded groups to improve their chances of success (Laursen & Austin, 2020), rather than directed at the broader faculty community, and especially faculty from majority groups. To empower institutional change, we developed CoPs (Probst & Borzillo, 2008; Wenger, 2000) that focused on the collective generation of knowledge and skills related to anti-racist and equity-oriented education, and we offered this to all Northern Arizona University (NAU) STEM faculty to ultimately support a broader range of students as they move through their academic careers.

Indigenous and Latine students¹ are significantly underrepresented in graduate programs, given their numbers within the general U.S. population. In the United States between 2015 and 2016, only 10% of all MS degrees were awarded to Latine students and a stunning 1% to Indigenous students. The situation for Ph.D. students is even more dire, with only 8% of Ph.D. graduates coming from Latine and less than 1% from Indigenous populations (de Brey et al., 2019). In turn, this low output of graduate degrees is reflected in the underrepresentation of Indigenous and Latine professionals in STEM careers, leading to continued disparities in opportunities, wealth, and status. Among the issues causing this underrepresentation are systemic racism, exclusionary admissions practices, microaggressions, and lack of cultural competencies within institutions of higher learning—all of which lead to negative experiences for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students in graduate programs, including at the application stage and in their classes, research, mentoring relationships, and co-curricular experiences (Burt et al., 2019; Furst et al., 2021; Page-Reeves et al., 2019; Wilson et al., 2019). Faculty play a key role in whether students enroll in programs, complete their degrees, and pursue careers in science. They also hold positions of power and influence to create more equitable and anti-racist systems.

In 2022–2023, the authors endeavored to address these issues through the creation of a program² that was multi-pronged and intentional about addressing various elements needed for institutional change. As a whole, the MITSI project had four objectives that collectively contributed to the goal of systemic institutional change toward greater equity:

1. Engage and grow faculty capacity to understand and engage issues surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion by creating CoPs with targeted training and engagement of faculty.

2. Reduce barriers to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color applications to NAU graduate programs by removing fees and GRE (Graduate Record of Examinations) requirements, and by including holistic admissions criteria.

3. Introduce senior STEM majors to pathways toward STEM graduate degrees and provide programmatic, peer, and financial support to BIPOC STEM graduate students to increase racial diversity within STEM graduate programs.

4. Implement a bilateral model³ of family engagement to ensure holistic student support and faculty learning.

Each of the four objectives make up a part of the larger MITSI project; however, in this article, we describe and share lessons learned from the development and execution of the two year-long anti-racist, equity-oriented CoP with STEM faculty.

A number of foundational beliefs informed the CoP development—all of which stem from the premises of Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; West et al., 1995), Systemic Change in Higher Education (Kezar & Eckle, 2002; White et al., 2020), and DEI-focused STEM Intervention Programs (Palid et al., 2023). First, we believe that understanding the history of race in the United States is crucial in the work toward institutional change. Thus, faculty—as key levers for institutional change—must grow in our understanding of this history. Second, we know that there is a significant underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and Latine students in graduate STEM programs. This underrepresentation is the result of systemic, legal, and policy-related efforts to create and maintain racialized inequities, and we reject attempts to narrate this underrepresentation as being due to individual deficits or lack of effort. And finally, we believe that the ethnic and racial disparities and biases in postsecondary education are significant and pervasive. As engaged members of higher education institutions, we are called to address systemic barriers that hinder BIPOC student success.

Indeed, faculty members are critical stakeholders in the effort to build an inclusive and equity-oriented university culture and climate (Hirst et al., 2021; Killpack & Melón, 2017; Museus et al., 2017). Although STEM faculty generally have good intentions and a desire to contribute to DEI efforts, most have not been given opportunities to learn about what this means, why it is important, and what role they play in promoting equity in STEM (Austin, 2011; Farrell et al., 2017; Gehrke & Kezar, 2017; Killpack & Melón, 2017; Macdonald et al., 2019; Mack & Winter, 2015). Thus, a primary strategy for advancing systemic change toward equity was to offer all NAU STEM faculty (including department chairs) a long-term, focused, and courageous space to focus on their own learning of equity-oriented, anti-racist, and inclusive mentoring and teaching practices. The CoPs met monthly and followed a curriculum developed and facilitated by Castagno and Brown. The curriculum focused, first, on self-reflection and self-examination so that STEM faculty more fully understand their own positionality and role in campus culture and climate. Next, the curriculum drew on equity-oriented principles and anti-racist worldview development within the context of higher education. Finally, the curriculum explored the applicability of these ideas to STEM teaching, mentoring, research collaborations, and administration of programs (including admissions processes) so that faculty understand how they can build individual leadership capacity to shift their own practices and role model for other faculty how to contribute to institutional change, eliminate structural barriers, and reduce disproportionality and systemic inequities in STEM fields.

CoPs require intentional engagement and agency on the part of the members. Although the CoPs described here were conceptualized at the outset by Brown and Castagno, they relied heavily on the collaborative learning within the group, and they were responsive to the background knowledge and experiences of the community members. Throughout the course of the year, faculty participants worked to better understand issues of inequity and structural racism within STEM spaces in higher education; to reflect on our own role(s) in dismantling inequities in STEM education; and finally, to develop Personal Action Plans for each participating faculty member to directly strengthen STEM pathways and remove structural barriers to success for historically underrepresented students.

Working Within a Particular Time and Place

Before describing the CoP, its curriculum, the impact, and lessons learned, it is important to situate this work in both time and place. The larger MITSI project includes three post-secondary institutions: NAU’s main Flagstaff campus, NAU’s Yuma campus, and Diné College. All three are in the state of Arizona; the first two are HSIs, and the last is a tribal college on the Navajo Nation. This tri-institutional partnership was intentional because of the desire to steward pathways into STEM graduate programs among undergraduate students from each of the three institutions. The faculty CoPs, however, have thus far only included STEM faculty from the first institution: NAU’s Flagstaff campus. Although we considered how we might ensure the CoPs were available and accessible to faculty across the three postsecondary institutions, we ultimately prioritized in-person learning, which meant participants had to be in (or be able to get to) Flagstaff for our monthly meetings.

Arizona, like many other states, is a deeply contested space and has long been the site of intense political and community-based action around immigration, language rights, racial profiling by law enforcement, ethnic studies in schools, Indigenous sovereignty, land disputes, and natural resources acquisition. Most recently, in elementary schools, dual language programs were declared in violation of the law by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne (Gonzalez, 2023), and Governor Katie Hobbs was forced to veto Senate Bill 1305 (Sievers, 2023), which would have banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory in K12 classrooms. At Arizona public universities, political pushback against diversity statements has impacted hiring practices (Schermele, 2023). Since January 2025, the efforts to delegitimize and halt initiatives perceived as “DEI” have come on faster and stronger in Arizona and across the United States.

Context always matters. This is why, for example, we focus primarily on Indigenous and Latine student populations, and why we partnered with institutions located near the southern border and the northern Indigenous nations within Arizona. However, our political context also means that this equity-oriented, anti-racist work could (and subsequently has) come under attack. As co-PIs and facilitators of the CoPs, we are keenly aware of this reality. One of the many unanticipated benefits of this project was cultivating relationships with a new set of faculty colleagues who are similarly committed to this work, aware of the risks, and now part of a larger community who will steward this work into the future. We return to a discussion of the associated lessons and risks later in the paper.

Participation in the CoPs was voluntary and open to any full-time faculty member in one of two STEM-related colleges at NAU: the College of the Environment, Forestry and Natural Sciences and the College of Engineering, Informatics and Applied Sciences.⁴ As part of our initial grant proposal for MITSI, we worked with university leadership to secure support for faculty in the CoPs to have 10% of their time allocated to this commitment. Given the typical structure for reporting faculty time, this meant that a faculty member could either have one less class to teach or fewer service requirements during the year they participated in the CoPs. Securing this support from university leadership was critical because we did not want to rely solely on faculty goodwill and/or desire to participate. Rather, if the university was committed to expanding access to STEM graduate pathways, it needed to recognize the time such efforts require and formally acknowledge that time within legitimate faculty employment structures. Despite the terms of the grant, not all faculty felt they could utilize the 10% reallocation of time that was offered because projects could not be put on hold, their classes were not ones that could be taught by any other faculty, and/or they felt constrained by other institutional pressures. There were two CoP cohorts, with 19 faculty completing the program in year 1 and 10 faculty or post-docs completing the program in year 2. Nine of the CoP completers were men (31%) and 20 were women (69%). Participants represented seven departments.

The general structure of each CoP included a day-long opening meeting in August, monthly 2.5-hour meetings from September through April, and a final half-day symposium in May. In other words, the CoP stretched out over the academic year and required roughly the same amount of in-person meeting time as a standard 3-credit class at NAU. In addition to class time, there were required readings and/or videos for faculty to complete each month, plus short written assignments that were due prior to each of our meetings. Attendance at all class meetings was expected, but we offered a single makeup day at the end of each semester for participants who may have missed a day that semester. All faculty met the benchmark of participating in at least 75% of the meetings. As facilitators, Castagno and Brown alternated taking primary responsibility for each month, which included reading each submitted assignment and providing written feedback. The alternative schedule for primary responsibility allowed each of us to draw on our particular areas of expertise and experiential knowledge, manage time as co-leaders, and effectively support each other.

Creating the CoP Curriculum

The CoP curriculum was ambitious in scope and organized around three pedagogical questions: (1) Who am I, and what does my positionality have to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in STEM?, (2) What do we know from research, theory, and practice about DEI in STEM?, and (3) What is my role in advancing greater equity and an anti-racist community of STEM scholars, students, and practitioners? We drew heavily on the literature in adult learning, anti-racist teaching, culturally responsive pedagogy, and DEI in STEM, as well as our own experiences leading similar professional development sessions in other settings. Northern Arizona University had not previously offered this sort of long-term, equity-oriented, anti-racist professional development for faculty, so we knew we would be asking our colleagues to engage in a learning journey that required vulnerability, courage, and time.

Each month focused on a particular theme; by way of providing a case study and potential building blocks for others, we provide a brief overview of each unit below. Across all of the units, we were mindful of the representation of authors, editors, and creators of the materials we assigned, and we prioritized materials that were developed by members of the communities referenced in the material. We were also mindful of including diverse types of materials and data sources across the units, including research articles (qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods), conceptual articles, videos, and creative nonfiction throughout the year. We built out a year-long curriculum with the first five meetings building knowledge and capacity, and the second five focusing on writing, planning, and executing the Personal Action Plans.

Given the demographic and geographic context of the region where we work, we had a purposeful focus on Indigenous and Latine students in our CoPs. Alongside this focus, however, we were also intentional about making connections to other underrepresented student groups, including other racialized students, LGBTQ+ students, women in STEM, and students with disabilities. While there are important shared experiences, histories, and equity-oriented guidance across diverse groups, there are also important nuances and specificities that we wanted to highlight in the CoPs.

In the following sections, we highlight key content and activities for each of the units. We also provide a list of the associated materials and written homework prompts in Table 2.⁵ While we highlight some of our pedagogical strategies in the unit descriptions below, it is worth noting that throughout the entire CoP, Authors 1 and 2 incorporated best practices for adult learning and engagement throughout. For example, we structured discussions and activities to encourage diverse participation; we transitioned between individual, small group, and whole group experiences; we asked participants to relate and apply readings to their own experiences; and we shared our own experiences, including mistakes and challenges.

Leveraging Program Evaluation to Improve our Work

The evaluator conducted an independent evaluation of the CoPs, using a combination of surveys, observations, and interviews to collect program evaluation data. The evaluation received the IRB approval and appropriate guidelines were followed. All participants completed an anonymized pre-program survey before participation, and 24 of the 29 participants completed a post-survey after participation in the CoP (83% response rate). The surveys included matching pre- and post-program questions about participant understanding of and confidence in several of the CoP foundational concepts. The post-program survey also included open-ended questions about participant experiences in the CoP, and it elicited suggestions for improvement. Cohort responses were combined for analysis. Overall, results indicated that program participation increased both understanding of foundational concepts and confidence in related areas. Since our focus in this article is on describing the CoP, we only briefly share some of the qualitative responses from the participants.

When asked to name their most impactful experiences over the year, faculty participants pointed to the community aspects of the CoP. For example, one participant pointed to “being part of that cohort. I now know 19 other people that I know are hoping to bring about some of the same changes as me.” Another participant noted the importance of “connecting with a cohort of faculty at NAU that are committed to improving inclusivity in STEM at NAU.” This sense of community went beyond formal discussions during our monthly CoP meetings. One participant expressed this by saying, “the organic conversations in hallways, restrooms, and parking lots with colleagues I didn’t know well before. There is so much motivation to do something substantial in this arena.” And yet another said, “the readings were powerful, but it was the discussions with others and processing all that information and putting it in the context of our university, that made the big difference.”

Participants also commented on the relevance and learning they experienced as a result of the curriculum itself. Overall, the structure and order of the curriculum worked well and allowed learning to build in an iterative way from one month to the next. As mentioned above, participants expressed some anxiousness in the early months about the Personal Action Plans and about wanting to jump right into “solving problems,” but Castagno and Brown gently encouraged trust in the process and felt that it was this process that contributed to the thoughtful and compelling final Personal Action Plans. During the first semester, faculty participants noted how they had not previously taken the time to explore the specific issues and experiences related to Indigenous and Latine student experiences in STEM, so these units were particularly important. For example, one faculty participant noted the impact of “learning more about Latine challenges. I did not even consider some of their challenges such as language and citizen status.” We received similar feedback about the conversations related to culturally, spiritually, and ethically informed conflicts experienced by Indigenous students in STEM, as well as the material related to Indigenous representation in higher education.

Changes in practice began to take place during the year-long CoP. As one participant noted “we’re using many of the Indigenous and anti-racist resources for mentoring our new [program] faculty.” However, it was especially during the Spring semester that participants engaged deeply with concrete practice ideas and action planning. Referring to the first unit of the Spring semester, one participant noted, “I think understanding my sphere of influence and the importance of action in order to be anti-racist was eye-opening. I hope I can more actively leverage my systems of influence toward positive change.”

Participants had several suggestions for improvement, including starting the Personal Action Plans earlier in the academic year, providing more time earlier in the year to build community to facilitate collaboration, and allowing more time for small group discussion during the monthly sessions. In response, CoP facilitators⁷ made some adjustments to the year two CoP, including creating more time for group work and informal socializing during each monthly meeting and decentering the facilitators’ voices while simultaneously seeking greater engagement from participants. While recognizing this is outside of the power of the CoP facilitators and participants, one participant identified that there needed to be other structural changes at the institutional level to implement their Action Plans:

One challenge will undoubtedly be that the participants are all among the most dedicated and passionate STEM faculty, and this means they are also all already overworked – advising large numbers of students, teaching heavy class loads, and in particular carrying heavy service loads in their effort to reach and assist all communities within the university. Whether these participants will be able to carry out their action plans in the middle of the rest of their demands remains unproven and will be challenging.

Indeed, the participants in the CoPs were widely regarded as some of the most engaged faculty in STEM departments—both in terms of student engagement and research.

Lessons from the CoP Experience: Communities of Care and Praxis

In the book Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color, García Peña (2022) meditates on the spaces of freedom and communities of care that we all need to survive in the academy, in particular for students and faculty of color. Our anti-racist, equity-oriented CoP was meant to create a space of growth and inspiration for faculty committed to being better teachers, mentors, colleagues, and academic leaders, with the shared goal of creating communities of empowerment for their students. While this work is ongoing, the experience gifted us with a number of important lessons that will continue to inform our related work into the future. These lessons derive from a combination of the program evaluation data, the individual and collective reflections of the authors, and the observations and conversations amongst authors and CoP participants in the years following the experience. The first lesson is that faculty are indeed key levers for institutional change within postsecondary institutions. This idea was foundational in the initial thinking that informed the CoP development, and there is certainly a body of literature that supports this idea, but it was brought to life and demonstrated through the experience of the CoP. The evaluation results highlight that faculty participants learned and grew in their knowledge of equity in STEM, and when we follow-up with participants in the years following the CoPs, we hear about the work they are doing and the ways they’ve shifted their own and others’ practice in various and diverse spheres of influence. Of course, this is not without challenges, but it affirms the idea that faculty are critical change agents on college and university campuses. The second lesson is that this work requires significant time and commitment. Our CoPs were nine months of deep learning. It required faculty to show up and be engaged every month for multiple hours. It also required them to read and view material that was not “in their field.” Unfortunately, many DEI-related professional learning and discussion opportunities are single sessions, despite what we know about behavioral and organizational change. Thus, we advocate for models that are similar to our year-long CoP model. And the third lesson is that the relationships and community that were cultivated through the CoP are just as important as the individual learning and action that happened. Just as cohort building supports students with their graduate programs, labs, and scientific community, engaging in equity-oriented, anti-racist praxis is not easy and is far more sustainable when done in community with others. The CoPs were structured to facilitate this community, and over the next few years will generate an even larger network of faculty committed to stewarding this important work.

Such a network is even more important given the nationwide and localized threats to equity-oriented, anti-racist work in educational spaces. Roughly halfway through this grant-funded project, in Spring 2023, we received a direct request from university leadership to remove the term “anti-racist” from our title, the website, and other public-facing documents. We were not surprised by this request. To maintain the integrity of our project, however, we felt compelled to accurately reflect the work we had engaged in and to assert that anti-racist learning and action are still very much needed in higher education.

Thus, a final lesson is that how we name and talk about this work is important, as is calling attention to the focus on equity and anti-racism. Yet the risks, legal and otherwise, for faculty practitioners are elevated, especially for faculty without tenure. As of this writing, Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed⁸ Arizona State Bill 1694,⁹ which would have pulled funding from any state university or community college offering even one course perceived to be about DEI. We also understand that the language of anti-racism may be off-putting to some faculty—particularly those who are either less familiar or less inclined to engage in these topics. While we acknowledge this potential, we also believe in the importance of transparency and clarity.

Our hope is that those involved in the CoPs can find collective strength and support as we continue to engage in this important work. We realize, of course, that context always matters, and our future work—including how it is named and described—will be responsive to our ever-changing context. But these evolutions should continue to center care, equity, intentionality, and greater justice. What are the transformational and empowering possibilities of faculty CoPs? Of words? What does it mean to study race, history, and justice in community? McAlister (2016) asks: “Would we be willing to risk the kind of vulnerability inherent in tuning in to the potential within each emerging moment? Eyes wide open, hearts pounding, awake, on the edge?” (p. 125)— in our equity-oriented, anti-racist CoPs, the answer was yes.¹⁰

Biographies

Monica A. Brown is Professor of English at NAU. She is a specialist in Latine and African American literature and cultural studies and has centered diverse voices in all her scholarship, service, and leadership. Dr. Brown has formal training in mediation, bias, and bystander intervention and is the former Faculty Ombuds at Northern Arizona University. She has served visiting specialist for the U.S. State Department, working with educators via U.S. embassies in Panama, Peru, and Chile.

Angelina E. Castagno is Professor and Chair in the Department of Educational Leadership at Northern Arizona University. Her teaching, research, and consulting focus on equity and diversity in U.S. schools, with a focus on Indigenous education, systemic racism and whiteness, and institutional transformation towards justice. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of American Indian Education, and her most recent book is The price of nice: How good intentions maintain educational inequity.

Anita Antoninka is an Associate Research Professor at Northern Arizona University in the School of Forestry. She has been involved in building pathways for students from backgrounds historically excluded from science for more than 15 years. As an ecologist, her research focuses on using soil organisms to restore ecosystem health in degraded ecosystems.

Catherine Propper is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University. She has been dedicated to the development of programs that provide undergraduate and graduate students from underserved populations with opportunities to grow and develop their STEM careers. Her research focuses on environmental endocrinology and ecotoxicology with the goal of protecting human and wildlife health.

Author Contributions

Both Monica Brown and Angelina Castagno contributed equally to this manuscript and are co-lead authors. All authors have decades of experience working with and mentoring BIPOC students, and the need for a faculty community of practice was imagined during the development of the MITSI grant proposal. All authors made important contributions to the continuous improvement of the CoP and the development of this manuscript.