Collaborative Research: The Willow AGEP Alliance: A Model to Advance Native American STEM Faculty

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The University of Montana, Salish Kootenai College, and Sitting Bull College will collaborate in the Willow Alliance to develop, implement, and study a model for the professional success of STEM instructional faculty and staff who are enrolled in, or descendants of, Native American tribes. This alliance was created in response to the 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.Recent reports indicate that only 700 Native American science and engineering doctoral degree holders are employed full time in our nation's universities and colleges. Universities and colleges are endeavoring to recruit, retain, and promote Native American STEM faculty who serve as role models and academic leaders for Native American students to learn from, to work with, and to emulate in order to address the STEM achievement gap between native and non-native undergraduate and graduate students in our nation. The Willow AGEP Alliance has the potential to advance a model to improve the success and retention of Native Americans in instructional STEM faculty positions, contributing to native STEM role models for native STEM undergraduate and graduate students at postsecondary academic institutions.The Willow AGEP Alliance plans to develop, implement, and study a model for the professional success of Native American STEM faculty. Participants include Native American STEM faculty working at one of the three partnering colleges. The project includes three intervention components in the model: a mentoring program; grant preparation and management training activities; and an institutional support program, which focuses on retention efforts. The integrated qualitative research will examine the personal, relational, and collective experiences of the native STEM instructional faculty and staff that enhance or inhibit professional development and career advancement; examine the underlying institutional issues affecting promotion and advancement; examine the approaches the faculty and staff use to increase promotion and advancement; examine the how different types of universities and colleges (tribal vs. non-tribal) support Native American STEM instructional faculty and staff; and examine the climate of STEM departments to compare how non-native STEM instructional faculty and staff and native STEM instructional faculty and staff experience professional development, promotion and advancement. The formative and summative evaluation plan follows an indigenous evaluation framework. There is an advisory board for feedback to the team, and a dissemination plan to include sharing with other tribal colleges and non-tribal universities in Montana, North Dakota, Idaho and Washington.