Dear colleagues,
I am participating in the CST's Faculty Leadership Seminar, and my project this year has been to develop some new ideas for addressing the under-representation of women and/or students of color in certain disciplines. As the year has worn away, I have chosen to focus first on what I know best, the under-representation of women in science and quantitative fields. I have created a web page to describe my proposal.
To give you a brief summary: I am interested in collaborating with some of you to develop a course for our own majors that would involve reading and discussing the literature on under-representation, from childhood through professional careers. Following this examination of the literature, the students in the class would collaborate to create hands-on activities for late elementary girls that would be designed to appeal to the girls, and to introduce them to the disciplines involved. Students in the class would then serve as role models for the girls we would bring to campus.
I am writing to you to solicit your input, ideas, and help with my project. Please pass this letter along to anyone who you think might be interested. To make this project successful, I expect that some funding would be needed for curricular development, and creating contacts in the community who might have girls we could reach. If you feel strongly that my proposal is not the right way to go, but you have other ideas that you'd like to explore, I would love to hear from you. I am most interested in forming a group of faculty interested in talking and working together on these issues.
Thank you for your time at this busy part of the year.
Sincerely,
Susan Fox
fox@macalester.edu
x6553