Say It LOUD

As part of our investment into developing HBCU STEM Leaders during Residency III, the Knowledge Transfer and Outreach arm of the Center hosted a Twitter chat to empower our Faculty Fellows to be public scholar-leaders.

Will you be joining us for our inaugural #HBCU_CASL Twitter chat “Say It Loud”📢 on Sunday, February 2 from 9:30-10:30 EST? Our Fellows plus @A2Arnett, @HBCUstorian, @JLCS06, & @STEMhasSoul will share their thoughts on broadening participation in #STEM through leadership! #HBCU

— Center for the Advancement of STEM Leadership (@weareCASL) January 29, 2020

What is a Twitter chat?
A synchronous or an asynchronous guided conversation that is open to the public and centered around a topic with a hashtag (#HBCU_CASL)

Why use a Twitter chat?
To empower the Fellows to be public scholar-leaders, find their voice with a safety net of our team, our guests, and each other

Who were our distinguished guests?
We reached out to four of our speakers during the past residencies who are active on Twitter and asked them to join us to share their perspectives on issues related to HBCU leadership.

• Autumn A. Arnett, Senior Writer for Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
• Jarrett Carter, Sr., Founding Editor, HBCU Digest
• Crystal A. deGregory, Ph.D., Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University, Research Fellow
• Claudia Rankins, Ph.D., National Science Foundation, Program Director HBCU Undergraduate Program

How did we prepare the Fellows?
At Residency 2, we offered a practical session “Into the Spotlight” on building a LinkedIn profile and Twitter account. Before the “Say It LOUD” chat at Residency 3, we introduced the CASL lists of contacts (each other, past speakers, and team members) along with a brief guide on chat etiquette and a web tool to tune into the feed and participate in real-time.

What were our questions?

• Who do you think is the greatest leader of all time?
• What’s one word to describe your HBCU and why?
• Who or what was THE turning point in your leadership journey?
• If you were president of an HBCU and Charles Barkley gave you one million dollars, what would be the first thing you would do?
• What can we do to better support STEM women faculty and administrators of color at HBCUs?
• Poor health outcomes are common for STEM faculty of color as a result of the stress of white-centered academia. How do you as an HBCU leader of STEM reform add self-care to your schedule?
• The description of HBCUs begins with Historically. 100 years from now what would you like your legacy as a leader to be?
• What does leading with soul mean to you?

In our following post, we’ll discuss some of the responses to the first four questions and if you can’t wait, see all the tweets.