Off Campus Costs for SP0050376

NSF AGEP Alliance Conference Proposal: Building AGEP partnerships through experiential learning The Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program funds research that explores the development, implementation, and investigation of models that will transform the advancement of historically underrepresented minorities (URMs) in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines and/or education research. This conference will advance knowledge about research as it relates to the AGEP program by emphasizing sustainability, institutional change, and scaling of AGEP interventions and programs. Over 200 PIs and co-PIs of funded AGEP awards will: 1) disseminate, adopt and adapt research findings, tools, and program resources generated by AGEP alliances; 2) intentionally identify and begin construction of opportunities for large-scale AGEP alliance formation. Two and a half days of conference sessions will be experiential learning based – conference participants will learn through their reflections on how other AGEP Alliances do their work. Sessions will focus on three broad themes: intervention / initiative design, evaluation tools, and institutional change. There will also be action-oriented workshops facilitated by members of the organizing committee that will explore opportunities to create new initiatives and develop collaborations between AGEP alliances. We will follow a collective impact approach - deliberately working to align mutually reinforcing activities to identify synergies and nascent collaborations. Intellectual merit - This conference will advance knowledge of AGEP research findings within the AGEP community both in the dissemination of research results as well as in the dissemination of our practices within our programs. Though research and program outcomes are often well-documented, sustainability and institutional change within and across institutions is harder to achieve. Making the leap from listening to research results at a conference to actually implementing new initiatives is a difficult launch step. This conference will push beyond the sharing of published research results to active sessions focused on the work we do in our institutional settings. By providing the tools and resources in tangible “hands-on” sessions, we will lower the barrier to scaling AGEP programs beyond their original institution and/or Alliance and spark new opportunities for collaboration. On the final day of the meeting, there will be facilitated workshop sessions designed to emphasize these principles of collaboration, sustainability, and scaling of AGEP programs to achieve institutional and national change. Broader impacts - This conference will make AGEP-generated resources and tools publicly available via the NSF Open Forum so that non-AGEP institutions may partner with our alliances to create change on their campuses. We will also propose a book to Elsevier to summarize the conference findings or submit for a special issue in Innovative Higher Education. The book or special issue will cover three themes - intervention design and research findings, evaluation tools, and creating institutional change - and each section will feature an AGEP program with an accepted conference workshop session. Contributing to the final product will be a requirement for accepted workshop proposals.