My work broadly focuses on understanding culture, community, and identity toward the goal of improving equity and justice within undergraduate STEM Education.
Learning Assistant-Faculty Partnerships
What is the role that undergraduate peer educators play in creating sustained institutional improvements to STEM education? Learning Assistants (LAs) are undergraduate peer educators who support in-class discussions in active learning classrooms. LAs have been widely shown to improve student learning, engagement, and experiences. This project, in collaboration with Cassandra Paul (SJSU), Resa Kelly (SJSU), Jennifer Avena (SJSU), Laura Ríos (Cal Poly) and Kim Coble (SFSU) studies the different forms of partnership between LAs and faculty—and the impact of different partnerships on the classroom. We are iteratively implementing new support structures for faculty in LA-supported classes, studying how these structures enable new kinds of relationships between LAs and faculty to form, and modeling how those relationships lead to shifts in LA and faculty beliefs about teaching. A significant arm of our work involves researching and institutionalizing the most impactful programmatic elements at our respective campuses.
- Juanson, A., Quan, G., Avena, J., & Chakarov, A. (2023, July 19-20). Research on a faculty support program for working with learning assistants. In Proceedings of the Physics Education Research Conference 2023. https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2023.pr.Juanson
- Indukuri, S., & Quan, G. (2022, July 13-14). Characterizing the feedback that learning assistants give to faculty. In Proceedings of the 2022 Physics Education Research Conference. https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Indukuri
This project is funded by a 2022-2023 CSU CREATE award and NSF-DUE 2234071
Transfer Advocacy Groups: Supporting Transfer Students of Color in STEM
How can bachelor’s granting institutions transform to better support students of color transferring from community colleges? While nearly half of community college students are students of color, white students transfer to bachelor’s granting institutions at higher rates. This project creates Transfer Advocacy Groups (TAGs)—collaborations of faculty, students, and staff working toward developing and implementing concrete changes to support transfer students of color (TSOC) in STEM. This project centers the experiences of transfer students of color as a necessary condition to achieve meaningful change.
This project is funded by NSF-EES 2224296
The Access Network
As an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, I was a participant and student leader in The Berkeley Compass Project, where I learned the importance of community and student agency in undergraduate physics. Compass seeks to foster community building, participation in authentic STEM practices, and student leadership, all toward the goal of supporting equity and inclusiveness in STEM.
Compass has inspired and influenced similar program at other institutions, including the S-STEM Scholars Program at the University of Maryland. Part of UMD’s S-STEM program is Physics 299B, a seminar that gets students started in undergraduate research experiences, which I co-designed.
I am a co-founder of the Access Network, a NSF-funded research-practice community of Compass-like programs. The Access Network supports sites through conference travel, fellowships to document and disseminate innovations, travel between member sites, and an Annual Assembly where we gather to share ideas.
- Quan, G., Gutman, B., Corbo, J., Pollard, B., & Turpen, C. (2019, January). The Access Network: Cultivating equity and student leadership in STEM. In Proceedings of the 2019 Physics Education Research Conference. https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2019.pr.Quan
- Amezcua, F., Quan, G., & Turpen, C. (2020, July). Students’ exploring and refining their equity ethic within the Access Network. In Proceedings of the 2020 Physics Education Research Conference. https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2020.pr.Amezcua
Funding information for the Access Network is linked here.
Gina M. Quan 