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The capacity to integrate "Diversity Harnessing" into a STEM course rests upon the ability to allocate time to the procedure. Course infrastructure is necessary to allow portions of the course to run smoothly with minimal instructor guidance. This infrastructure is based on what we call the "three C's".

The "Three C's" are an informal subset of the Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education [Chickering and Gamson, 1987 AAHE Bulletin] believed to be essential in providing the foundation for the implementation of Diversity Harnessing.The term was created by Schmitz in the National Science Foundation Grant DUE-0942331 after recognizing the similarity between the terms used to summarize the required course structure and the "Three R's" of education and believing that connection would make these underlying principles memorable.

    The three c's

  • Community
  • Collaboration
  • Accountability
These three form a basis on which students should be provided the confidence and motivation necessary to freely contribute personal observations and experiences (diversity) to the rest of the class (possibly anonymously) where it can be harnessed to enhance learning. Three improvements in the course are anticipated specifically from the harnessing of diversity: better student engagement in learning, integration of students' experiences directly into the course material as applications, and the ability of students to apply the course knowledge to their lives beyond the semester's end.

Community

For a small enrollment course, community is not difficult to obtain. Yet, many lecturers fail to take advantage of doing so by applying the proper techniques. An instructor must take time from "traditional" lecturing to solicit discussions from the students. This does not mean to ask a question, pause, and then retrieve the answer from the one or two students always willing to provide an answer. Better techniques include Think, Pair, Share, problem-based learning (PBL), or even simple team exercises.

To further facilitate community among the students, online communication should also be accomplished. I like to provide a FORUM for the students, but I have found that the FORUM goes unused unless the students are required to use it for a defined goal for several consecutive weeks and rewarded for usage beyond that. I also like using regularly-scheduled Elluminate (now Blackboard Collaborate) for holding on-line office hours. During the first couple of weeks, I would briefly post an image of the student joining the session so that the others would also get to know them. This allows for students to find others in the class with similar challenges and others who may be able to offer help that goes beyond the people who may coincidentally sit near each other in lecture. Our laboratory provides a third avenue for students to build close relationships in the course. Each laboratory session hosts roughly one-fourth of the entire class and partnering within the lab sessions allows students to make personal bonds.Finally, I like to make use of WIKI pages for small group projects to be recorded in a journal-style. Other teams can visit these project pages to learn more about the interests of other students.

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Source:  OpenStax, Diversity harnessing: content personalization for engaging non-stem students in stem topics. OpenStax CNX. Jun 21, 2013 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11439/1.8
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