WEPAN Newsletter January 2024

ADVANCE EiSCC Early Bird Registration and WEPAN Member Discounts are Stackable‍

Registration is now open for the 2024 ADVANCE EiSCC! Join us in Baltimore, Maryland from June 2-5 at the Hilton Inner Harbor.

The complimentary annual conference registrations that are a part of institutional memberships will be applied to this conference. Additionally, all WEPAN members will receive a $150 discount, which is stackable with the early bird discount ending on February 7. Take advantage of $300 off the general admission price by registering today!‍

Register at https://registration.socio.events/e/adveiscc2024/

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Events

Join WEPAN/ARC Network/ACCESS+ on 2.15 for a Town Hall on on the Current DEI Landscape

WEPAN, the ARC Network, and ACCESS+ are co-hosting a town hall on Thursday, February 15th, from 2-3:30pm ET, in response to the growing list of obstacles to advancing equity, including the attacks on the psychological well-being of marginalized peoples doing this work.

Join us as we:

• come together as a larger community to discuss the issues at hand
• highlight the realities of the personal and professional impacts being experienced
• facilitate exchange of resources and insights
• seed collective effort to address these issues in ways that allow us to be intentional and in community
• share ways WEPAN, ARC Network, and ACCESS+ can support our communities

Register at: https://registration.socio.events/e/2024townhall

The ADVANCE Resource and Coordination (ARC) Network, funded by the NSF ADVANCE Program, Awards HRD-2121468 and HRD-1740860, seeks to achieve gender equity for faculty in higher education STEM disciplines through an intersectional, intentional, and inclusive lens.

ACCESS+, commenced by an NSF ADVANCE grant (HRD-2017953) and also funded through support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, works to increase the number of STEM professional societies engaged in advancing intersectional gender equity in STEM.

WEPAN is a non-profit organization founded in 1990 dedicated to advancing cultures of equity and inclusion in engineering higher education and applied professions.

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News

Check Out the WEPAN Career Center

Whether you're looking for a job or looking to expand your team, the WEPAN Career Center is a great asset as you prepare for your next employment opportunity. Search for jobs tailored to your industry, upload a resume, or search through the resume database. Our career portal has a number of resources, including resume and interview prep, career advice articles, and personalized guidance from certified and experienced career coaches. WEPAN members also enjoy a discount on recruitment services!

QUEERING STEM Interdisciplinary Post-doctoral and Faculty Training Fellowship

STEM education research on inclusive environments and interdisciplinary STEM research is growing. As the field continues to reflect dynamic communities and community research priorities, this novel post-doctoral program seeks to bring to the center critical frameworks. Through a thematic of “Queering STEM Education” we propose to bring together a cohort of STEM education and science studies scholars who take seriously critical frameworks of queer, decolonial, transnational, and / or intersectionality.

This two-year program will train three postdoctoral fellows in formal queer frameworks in science education, with research rotations with critical studies and science education scholars, that will lead to the completion of a research project during the two-year fellowship.

To read more and apply, visit https://www.queeringstem.com/apply.

THRIVE Change Team Cohort Opportunity

The THRIVE Partnership (NSF ADVANCE #2204577) is seeking applicants for 2024-25 cohort. THRIVE supports Hispanic Serving Institution STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) chairs and their change teams in developing and enacting a plan to promote a psychologically healthy workplace where faculty, especially Latinas, thrive.  

BENEFITS INCLUDE:

• A $6,000.00 stipend (department chair or change team lead designee)
• Engagement with other HSI STEM department chairs
• Learning Circles facilitated by organizational change experts
• Access to Executive Coaching
• Travel support for participation in the 2024 and 2025 Latina THRIVE Annual Summit, and
• Networking opportunities to engage with STEM Latinas and diverse/Latina organizations

ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS:

• STEM department chair at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (Note: Chairs at emerging HSIs will be included as space allows);
• Commitment to the THRIVE year-long program (see THRIVE Change Team Application Overview)
• Chairs who are selected as part of the THRIVE Cohort will be expected to participate in the THRIVE Summit May 16-17, 2024 on South Padre Island, TX; as well as THRIVE Summit May TBD, 2025 (as noted above, travel expenses are covered.)

The application can be found at: https://wepan.b-cdn.net/thrive-change-team-application.docx. Please submit a PDF of the completed application to Gretalyn.Leibnitz@utrgv.edu, by March 1, 2024.

HERO Code Camp

HER Academy brings you their fifth HERO Code Camp for girls in grades 3 – 12. This two-day virtual camp with tracks exploring Scratch, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, JavaScript, and Python offers girls a fun and creative learning experience with computer science!

There is a $45 registration fee. Read more and register at: https://theheracademy.org/hero-code-camp/

WEPAN Survey

As WEPAN continues to grow, we want to gain a deeper understanding of the WEPAN community. Whether you’re a WEPAN member, event attendee, program participant, partner, newsletter subscriber, social media follower, or more – we want to hear from you!

Take just five minutes to share more about yourself and your engagement with WEPAN in our community survey. In addition to providing insights about the WEPAN community, your responses will help also shape our future outreach goals and programming priorities.

Take the survey at: https://www.wepan.org/survey. Your responses will remain confidential and will be for internal use only.

WEPAN Listserv

Do you have something to tell the WEPAN community? Remember that subscription to the WEPAN-L listserv is a member benefit! Share announcements, post publication opportunities, and collaborate with colleagues from different institutions and organizations on special projects.

To subscribe to the WEPAN-L listserv, visit: lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/wepan-l

Resources

Publications, reports, or communications relevant to women in engineering and STEM equity. All resources listed below are available in the ARC Network online resource library. If you need help accessing the library, please contact ARC Librarian Bethany Farmer at bethany@wepan.org.  

• "Equitable Pre-College Engineering Education: Teaching with Racism in Mind" by J. Holly

"Engineering educators must consider how the cultural backgrounds of students coincide (or diverge) with the epistemological and ontological formation of an engineer. Hence, this work is presented as an exhortation to engineering educators, particularly in a pre-college context, to critically evaluate how race-conscious pedagogies can be exerted in this field. In this autoethnographic study, I convey my attempt to teach engineering with explicit consideration of the sociopolitical context of the Black male youth I taught. As a Black male, I have an insider perspective into the realities that must be navigated to succeed in a racialized society, where Black males are a demographic that has been mercilessly underserved and over-criminalized in the educational system."

ARC Network

Funded by the National Science Foundation ADVANCE Program, Awards HRD-2121468 and HRD-1740860, the ADVANCE Resource and Coordination (ARC) Network seeks to achieve gender equity for faculty in higher education science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. WEPAN serves as the backbone organization of the ARC Network.‍

Read and Give Feedback on the Latest ARC Emerging Research Workshop Reports

The two newest reports from the ARC Network's Emerging Research Workshops have been released. The reports, "Using Big Data and Algorithms to Foster Equity in STEM" and "Cultivating Equity In STEM Through Inclusive Language," cover research and promising practices on each of the topics and suggest new directions for future work. We invite the community to share their expertise on the topics. To read the reports and share your input visit https://www.equityinstem.org/about-emerging-research-workshops.

Institutional WEPAN Membership

Want to encourage your institution to deepen its commitment to equity and excellence?

Consider becoming a 30 for 30 Institutional Champion Member. At this membership level, institutions have unlimited member representatives who get to dive into critical diversity, equity, and inclusion issues through custom workshops. These members also get the opportunity to strengthen their inclusive leadership capacity as part of the Equity and Excellence Council. Additional 30 for 30 Institutional Champion member benefits include:

• Professional Development
• Decades of resources in the WEPAN Knowledge Center
• Professional development webinars, including one featuring an invited speaker from your institution
• Free and discounted workshops, including one customized for your institution
• Free and discounted access to WEPAN’s Program Days
• Three annual convening registrations
• Communication & Networking
• WEPAN-L listserv
• Slack
• WEPAN member directory
• Social media spotlights of your institution
• Workforce
• Free and discounted job postings for your institution in WEPAN’s Career Center

For more information on how to become a 30 for 30 Institutional Member, please email membership@wepan.org.

Get Involved

Committees

We are looking for visionary members to join our committees and influence programming and member experiences. If you are interested in being a member of a WEPAN committee, please complete this survey: https://forms.gle/ZQyijAGNtPYYtNTV9

Slack Channel

Please join us on Slack to drive that connectivity across our membership during a critical time for connection. Join our Slack community today!

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