ABSTRACT
Strategic leadership is necessary for the creation of an equity-centered STEM education culture. Like the two sides of a coin, strategic leadership for equity requires two kinds of leaders who bring complementary and interdependent skills. Campus leaders lead teams that seek to understand their current institutional culture, identify the barriers to equity and inclusion, and design feasible plans to create this equity and inclusion on campus. Funders provide a different kind of leadership. They have the responsibility to set clear expectations and enunciate desired outcomes, and then provide resources to support activities that promise to generate the desired outcomes. Campus leaders and funders must work together to develop and implement an investment strategy guided by several principles, including: learn the skills of equity and inclusion, encourage well-designed experiments, assess progress by measuring the right things, build a diverse community of actors, and reject magical thinking. This brief chapter offers observations and advice to leaders who want to build a more equitable and inclusive STEM education system. The author hopes that both funders and persons seeking funding who are committed to advancing equity will find these ideas useful. For 24 years, he was a grantee as a biology faculty member and department head at Purdue University and Harvey Mudd College. He then underwent a metamorphosis and became a grantor, spending 15+ years at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute where he was senior director for science education. The ideas expressed here are his and do not (although he hopes they do) represent the views of his former employers. Creating equity-centered STEM education requires strategic leadership. More than keeping the trains running on time, a strategic leader understands where the trains should be going and is committed to learning what needs to be done so that they arrive at the desired destination. Defining the direction of STEM education reform depends on the effective partnership between two kinds of strategic leaders: (i) campus leaders—with and without formal administrative titles—whose teams design and implement programs; and (ii) funders—both public agencies and private philanthropies—whose teams determine why and how they invest in programs. It is imperative grantees and grantors reach high, aiming to rid STEM education of the exclusionary beliefs and practices that are born from inequity. Culture change need not always depend on inventing new, elaborate, or grand initiatives. Rather, significant change can be achieved through strategic investments that work to demolish the structures and behaviors that perpetuate STEM’s White-centered culture.
