Collaborative Research: The Hispanic AGEP Alliance for the Environmental Science and Engineering Professoriate in Community Colleges and Associate Degree Programs

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The City College of New York and the University of Texas at El Paso will collaborate to develop, implement and study a model for training and transitioning Hispanic Environmental Sciences and Engineering (ESE) doctoral students, who have completed all coursework and who are dissertating, as they transition to STEM instructional faculty or staff positions at community colleges or other associate degree granting institutions. The Hispanic AGEP Alliance (H-AGEP) was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 16-552) The AGEP program seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and success of historically underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields. AGEP Transformation Alliances develop, replicate or reproduce, implement, and study, via integrated educational and social science research, models to transform the dissertator phase of doctoral education, postdoctoral training and/or faculty advancement, and the transitions within and across the pathway levels, of URMs in STEM and/or STEM education research careers.As the nation is confronted with a STEM achievement gap between URM and non-URM undergraduate and graduate students, universities and colleges struggle to recruit, retain and promote URM STEM faculty who serve as role models and academic leaders for URM students to learn from, work with and emulate. Recent NSF reports indicate that URM STEM associate and full professors occupy 8% of these senior faculty positions at all 4-year colleges and universities and about 6% of these positions at the nation's most research-intensive institutions. The H-AGEP Alliance has potential to advance a model to improve the teaching preparation and transitions for Hispanic STEM doctoral students entering community college faculty positions, and providing Hispanic STEM faculty, mentors and role models for STEM undergraduate students.The H-AGEP Alliance plans to develop, implement and study a model for training and transitioning Hispanic Environmental Sciences and Engineering (ESE) doctoral students, who have completed all coursework and who are dissertating, as they progress to STEM instructional faculty or staff positions at community colleges or other associate degree granting institutions. Participants primarily include Hispanic-American doctoral students who are advanced level doctoral candidates majoring in ESE fields, including but not limited to: civil engineering; electrical engineering; mechanical engineering; biomedical engineering; earth and atmospheric sciences; ecology, evolutionary biology, and behavior; computer sciences; electrical and computer engineering; and environmental science and engineering. The community college partners in the H-AGEP Alliance are LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, NY; Queensborough Community College in Bayside, NY; and El Paso Community College in El Paso, TX. The project includes developing and testing three primary intervention components in the model: a training and mentoring program for effectively teaching ESE courses at community colleges; training to mentor undergraduate student researchers; and a professional development program to address career advancement in ESE and academia. The integrated research will examine the factors that influence the success of Hispanic doctoral students as they complete doctoral degrees and enter their professions. The formative and summative evaluation is being conducted by Drs. Ellen Meier and Dawn Horton, at the Teachers College, Columbia University's Center for Technology and School Change. An external advisory committee will provide feedback to the team on the effectiveness and outcomes of the project activities to develop, implement and test the H-AGEP Alliance model.