Teaching transparently and leveraging community assets to increase educational equity in STEM - CPET Seminar by Dr. Kirsten Fisher (Cal State LA)

From 2014-16, Dr. Kirsten Fisher was part of a team of five faculty members from Cal State LA invited to participate in an AAC&U sponsored project, Enhancing Underserved Student Success Through Faculty Intentionality in Problem-Centered Learning. Through this project, she redesigned one of her General Education Plant Biology lab sections to incorporate transparent assignment design and projects that leveraged students' cultural and experiential assets to promote their agency as scientists. Here, Dr. Fisher will talk about her experiences with transparent assignment design and provide some perspectives on student motivation and scientific agency that she gained through the project.

Speaker Bio: Since 2008, Dr. Kirsten Fisher has been a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Cal State LA, where she teaches a variety of courses in botany, ecology, evolution, and scientific writing. Since 2014, Dr. Fisher has been committed to improving the general education life science lecture and lab experience for students on the Cal State LA campus. Prior to arriving at Cal State LA, she earned her Ph.D. in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley and spent several years as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC. Dr. Fisher's research interests focus on the evolutionary consequences of trade-offs between growth, reproduction, and physiological specialization in plants of extreme environments.