Creating Structures of Opportunity Through Proactive Pedagogy: Course Development for Institutional Change in Graduate STEMM Education

Abstract

Students’ agency and assets are increasingly recognized as central to advancing equitable educational opportunities and fostering a sense of community belonging in graduate STEMM education. However, a key question remains: where and how can students’ assets and agency be translated into forms of institutional engagement and change? We argue that course innovation and proactive pedagogy are critical sites for creating such opportunities. This article presents a case study of the design and implementation of a graduate-level JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) course. Drawing on retrospective course records from 2021 to 2025, this study demonstrates how course innovation and proactive pedagogy can foster community building while bridging students’ knowledge and skill development to institutional engagement. Within this course, proactivity, understood as a future-oriented and intentional process, emerged as a shared theme within major domains of the course design and implementation: (1) application process, (2) interdisciplinary collaboration and community building, (3) mentoring circles, (4) evaluation, and (5) supported capstone projects that help learners practice navigating institutions and leading change with the community. The course creates opportunities for institutional change, positions students as partners in reform, and translates their assets and insights into sustained institutional practices. By making the “how” of institutional change visible, this case offers generalizable, actionable design principles for curriculum reform in graduate STEMM education.

1. Introduction

Over the past several decades, scholarship on science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM) education has highlighted diverse efforts to advance fairness in educational access and opportunities for all individuals, fostering an equitable training environment and cultivating a sense of community belonging. These efforts share a goal: improving academic success for all students. They have often centered on three interrelated domains: individual academic preparation, campus climate and culture, and institutional structures such as admissions policies and resource (re)distribution (Palid et al., 2023). In educational programming, these domains are often treated as distinct and not systematically embedded in practice. In contrast, the broader literature emphasizes that these domains are deeply interconnected in everyday learning and training, requiring an integrated understanding of systemic challenges. The tendency to operate separately hampered progress toward inclusive STEMM environments and prompted calls for holistic doctoral-level support and systemic equity (Reggiani et al., 2024).

Recent studies demonstrate how students’ trajectories are shaped by campus culture, norms, and broader institutional conditions. Wolford et al. (2025), for example, show how trainees and students experience unofficial “hidden curriculum” shaped by dominant US White cultural values, including the focus on individualism and the lack of space for minoritized students to engage how identity shapes their training experience. Similarly, Pearson et al. (2022) demonstrate that quantitative equity work often narrows its focus to outcome gaps and “excellence-as-grades.” These dynamics indicate how dominant ideals of professionalism and scientific excellence are constructed, echoing Schummer and Børsen’s (2021) critique of their misalignment with the heterogeneity of the scientific community and limited societal relevance.

Attention to campus culture and norms, in turn, directs analysis toward institutional structures and accountability. Within graduate STEM, scholars have documented “racially hostile” climates that try to fix/assimilate students rather than transform departments or institutions, which ultimately diminishes scientific community’s capacity to solve complex challenges (McGee, 2020, 2021). In health science training, Tiako et al. (2022) synthesize how “race-neutral” structures in medical schools, such as reliance on standardized tests and biased evaluations, reproduce racial inequality from admission through residency. A systematic review by Lam et al. (2024) further shows that inviting trainees from racialized backgrounds into a hostile learning environment (whether intentional or not) negatively affects well-being and belonging, while increasing burnout and attrition.

These institutional conditions also shape students’ everyday experiences and outcomes. Weatherton and Schussler’s (2022) survey findings show that the unmet basic physiological, safety, and social needs continue to have cascading impacts on graduate students’ performance and success. Institutional resources, such as university career centers and student cultural centers, also play a critical role in supporting Black and Latino students in building community and identifying pathways to success (Serrano, 2020). This group of scholars emphasizes STEMM graduate education reform at universities, requiring reorganization of resources and structures rather than relying solely on individual-level interventions.

These strands of scholarship challenge deficit-oriented assumptions that view students as lacking and rely on assimilationist strategies. As Kolluri and Tichavakunda (2022) argue, approaches that locate problems within students and seek to “fix” them have been widely critiqued in recent educational scholarship. In response, anti-deficit, counter-deficit, or asset-based perspectives have redirected attention toward students’ strengths, assets, and forms of agency that were often undervalued or different since they are not aligned with the dominant professional cultural norm (Duncan et al., 2023; Harper, 2010; Asai, 2020; Rocha et al., 2022). Márquez-Magaña (2024), for example, argues that socially transformative science requires uplifting the value and strength of nonwhite learners and communities. Similarly, Shukla et al. (2022) call for frameworks that explicitly name racial systemic inequities and embrace students’ identities. Kolluri and Tichavakunda’s (2022) review summarizes the goal of counter-deficit scholarship as challenging racism in schools and improving opportunities for all.

If the need for institutional transformation and the value of students’ agency and assets is now widely recognized, the question becomes the following: where and how can such change take place? How can students’ assets and agency be translated into forms of institutional engagement and reform? Recent scholarship suggests that many equity-oriented initiatives continue to focus on undergraduate populations, leaving a gap in support for graduate students (Miles et al., 2024; White et al., 2023). In response, we argue that curriculum and pedagogy should be understood as key sites for creating opportunities for institutional change within graduate STEMM education.

From DEI to JEDI Curriculum Reform in Graduate STEMM Education

Curriculum reform in graduate STEMM education aims to address campus climate, cultural norms, and equity issues through inclusive teaching and training, often under a few closely related labels: DEI/EDI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), JEDI/DEIJ (Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion), DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Anti-Racism, or Anti-Oppression). Compared to traditional DEI/EDI approach, JEDI/DEIJ and DEIA frameworks more explicitly emphasize social justice, power, systemic oppression, and structural transformation as core aims of the curriculum design. These developments respond to growing critiques that many DEI initiatives remain performative, fail to engage institutional power structures, undervalue the role of community (Miller et al., 2022), misalign with equity ethics (McGee et al., 2023), and do not support, repair, or center white comfort (Chambers & O’Brien, 2025).

The existing literature often treats curriculum design and its impact as distinct yet related contributions. Many studies examine the design and implementation of pilot JEDI curricula that emerged following the 2020 racial justice movements. For instance, Maclatchy et al. (2025) position life sciences curricula as tools for “education through and for social justice,” co-created with students to challenge structural racism. Shields (2022) examines an interdisciplinary approach to embedding JEDI into newly developed engineering ethics curricula as core courses in bioengineering. Flanigan et al. (2023) examine a six-week course requirement for computer science PhD students as an example of student-driven curricular innovation.

Although graduate STEM and medical education share overlapping commitments to curriculum development and pedagogical reform, their goals differ. Across both domains, curriculum reform has aimed to empower individual students through inclusive teaching practices and reframing course content and its presentation (Xia et al., 2025). In graduate STEM, goals tend to emphasize research practice, lab culture, mentoring, and academic climate (Xia et al., 2025; Okolie, 2022; Khan et al., 2023); in graduate medical education, the goals are tied to cultural humility and competencies improvement with the ultimate outcome of patient care and health equity (Boatright et al., 2023). This differentiation is reflective of the distinct nature of the two career pathways. These efforts also build on earlier waves of curriculum reform in bioethics, research ethics, and interdisciplinary learning (Joyce et al., 2018; Douglas & Holbrook, 2020; Bosch & Casadevall, 2017).

Systematic reviews further highlight a more extensive scholarship in graduate medical education. Compared to graduate STEM education, medical and health science education offers more structured models and guidance on best practices (Boatright et al., 2023; Burbage et al., 2023). For instance, Ryan and Rashid (2023) show that early, program-wide participation and longitudinal integration are more effective than stand-alone workshops or one-time interventions. At the same time, a recent scoping review of inclusion health in medical education indicates that such content is often an option, brief, and not integrated across all programs (Ashwell et al., 2025).

Measures of success in curriculum reform, particularly DEI courses and training, are typically centered on individual learners’ gains, often assessed pre- and post-course or across sessions. These outcomes are commonly categorized into three domains: knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Weller et al., 2024; Purkayastha et al., 2024; Corsino & Fuller, 2021). Many studies focus on changes in DEI knowledge and perceived competencies, while others rely on grades or test scores as indicators of success (Pai et al., 2024). Mukhopadhyay et al. (2024) highlight that Likert-scale self-reports are the dominant form of evaluation and note misalignments between intervention outcomes and learning objectives. More broadly, many initiatives remain short-term and fragmented, with limited evidence of sustained impact on behavior or institutional structures. While some studies offer more longitudinal analyses, for example, Dewsbury et al. (2022), examine academic performance in biology courses using inclusive teaching practices, these approaches remain relatively limited in capturing broader institutional implications.

Building on this body of work, we identify a key gap in the existing literature. The evaluation frameworks continue to prioritize changes in individual learners’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes, with limited attention to how learning translates into practice. Recent scholarship reinforces this concern. Ashwell’s (2026) “When Training Reinforces Inequity” shows that well-intentioned DEI or JEDI content may stay at the level of “awareness” without translating into action or structural change. Despite the growing body of work on JEDI curriculum development and pedagogical reform in graduate STEMM education, the mechanisms through which such efforts connect individual learning to institutional change remain underexamined. Emerging scholarship has begun to gesture toward this connection. Maclatchy et al. (2025), for instance, emphasize the role of student co-creation in curriculum development that extends into social change. Similarly, Milligan-McClellan (2024), drawing on her identity as an Inupiaq scholar, highlights dialogical curriculum design that evolves through learners’ feedback and centers their contributions to shaping the future of STEMM. Addressing this gap requires examining how curriculum development serves as a bridge between knowledge, skills, and action, particularly how course innovation and proactive pedagogy can create opportunities for students to engage with and reshape institutional structures.

Thus, in this study, we use a case study of a graduate-level course on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (hereafter the JEDI course) design and implementation to examine how innovative pedagogy and course design extend the anti-deficit framework beyond supporting student learning to create opportunities for students to engage in equity-oriented institutional change. Specifically, we focus on the processes and mechanisms that drive curriculum reform within graduate STEMM education. We argue that proactivity—understood as a future-oriented, intentional, impact-oriented practice—functions as a key mechanism for JEDI curriculum reform, shaping the course implementation as a collaborative, community-building process. In this framing, educational change is an outcome of collective learning and practices among students, educators, campus leaders, and community organizers.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Research Questions and Design

As these questions are woven throughout the engagement with the literature in the Introduction, we outline our research questions explicitly here for clarity: 1. How does JEDI curriculum reform, through innovative pedagogy and course design, create opportunities for graduate STEMM students to translate their assets and agency into forms of institutional engagement and reform? 2. What forms of institutional engagement emerge through the course design and implementation? 3. What processes and mechanisms shape the ways curriculum reform contributes to institutional change within graduate STEMM education?

To examine how the JEDI curriculum reform creates opportunities for institutional reform in graduate STEMM education, this study draws on a graduate-level course as a case study of curriculum reform in graduate education, primarily in the life sciences. Specifically, we focus on analyzing the course design and implementation. A case study is an empirical inquiry that investigates a single subject in its real-life context (Yin, 2003), thereby revealing an in-depth understanding of a “case” or bounded system (Creswell & Creswell, 2017). We apply a case study as a research design, where the intensive study of a single unit is a course, where our aim is to examine the key features and underlying logic of this course development that successfully bridged student learning to institutional change and created opportunities for institutional change in graduate STEMM education. After five years of implementing a Graduate Academic Leadership Course on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) in a real-world setting, we gather multi-layered data to determine whether the course design and pedagogy positively impact student learning and opportunities for institutional change. This paper reports on and reflects on the course’s five-year implementation. We identify underlying logic and key features as course design principles through a reflective thematic analysis that could inform future curriculum reform in graduate STEMM education and whether this course could address the broader equity-oriented problem.

2.2. Study Context

2.2.1. Institutional Setting and Student Advocacy

This Graduate Academic Leadership Course on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (hereafter, the JEDI course) was developed through sustained student-driven collaboration with faculty and campus partners at a University Academic Health Center (hereafter, AHC University). AHC University is located within a state-wide public university system in the United States. An Academic Health Center is defined as an accredited, degree-granting higher-education institution that includes academic, hospital, and clinical practice components (Kohn, 2004; Sanfilippo, 2010). In alignment with scholarship on Academic Health Centers (Edelman et al., 2017; Sanfilippo, 2010; Wartman, 2015), AHC University places a strong emphasis on fostering new discoveries and innovation in biomedical and life sciences through research and serving as a central site for institutional change through graduate education.

Education remains an evolving mission of AHCs in response to shifting social, political, and institutional conditions. At AHC University, campus climate surveys and student petitions prompted a series of institutional action plans to foster equity and inclusion and expand educational and training opportunities. These efforts have since become part of campus-wide values, which emphasize creating conditions for all community members to reach their full potential.

Graduate education at the AHC University has a strong tradition of boundary-pushing innovation, characterized by the Graduate Division’s broader institutional priorities. These include sustaining high-quality graduate training, cultivating an inclusive training environment, responding to societal needs, promoting cross-program collaboration and interdisciplinary learning, and supporting students’ identity formation and alignment. These efforts aim to ensure that every graduate student at AHC can look forward to a meaningful and personally satisfying career. The Graduate Division underwent reorganization in May 2025 and is now named the Division of Graduate Education and Postdoctoral Affairs (GEPA). GEPA continues to serve as the institutional home for graduate education at the AHC University, by offering 20 PhD programs in basic, translational, and social/population sciences; 11 master’s degree programs; two professional doctorates, and several certificate programs. The unit also now encompasses postdoctoral training, career and professional development, and international students and scholar affairs. As this study spans both before and after 2025, we use “Graduate Division” throughout to refer to this institutional unit for consistency.

Institutional leadership has played a critical role in advancing these priorities. The division has been led predominantly by women, and more recently by women across racial and ethnic backgrounds, reflecting an inclusive leadership culture within graduate STEMM education. Recent scholarship on “intersectional leadership” emphasizes how leadership visions and practices are shaped by the lived experiences of people navigating interlocking systems of oppression (Miles Nash & Peters, 2020; Sim & Bierema, 2025). Pogrebna et al. (2024) note that Black female leaders often face unique forms of racialized sexism or gendered racism that shape both their experiences and leadership approaches to leadership. In this context, intersectional leadership refers not only to representation but also to leadership practices that center equity, relationality, and structural reform (Shakir, 2026). This has been crucial to shaping institutional reform in graduate education, particularly as one of these leaders serves as the JEDI course instructor and designer.

The JEDI course examined in this case study is part of the Graduate Division’s broader portfolio of initiatives that takes a holistic approach, spanning programmatic support, advising and mentoring, data-driven assessment, cross-unit collaboration, and JEDI curriculum development. The courses are offered at multiple stages of graduate training and are closely connected to student advocacy efforts on campus, positioning curriculum as a key site for institutional engagement and future change.

Established in 2015, the Student Leadership Forum at AHC University is an interprofessional, student-led event coordinated by student representatives from all professional and graduate programs. The Forum brings university leadership and students together to address equity and inclusion in graduate education, with the explicit goal of advancing institutional change. Central to its design is an emphasis on sustained, student-driven improvement, enabling all students to articulate concerns, shape the campus culture, and contribute to ongoing institutional dialogue.

Across multiple years, student participants consistently expressed unmet needs related to faculty and staff engagement in graduate education, calling for greater institutional support. In June and October 2020, the Graduate Division at AHC University received two student petitions in response to nationwide racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd. The first petition was submitted by graduate students across programs, and the second by a student organization. During the pandemic, Graduate Division leadership met with students to address these concerns and potential pathways forward. Both petitions built upon longstanding patterns of student advocacy rather than introducing entirely new issues.

Within this broader context, the Graduate Division’s JEDI curriculum reform at AHC University includes multiple coordinated efforts. An introductory course is required for all first-year PhD students in the basic science programs during the Fall quarter, providing historical background and contemporary perspectives on systemic racism in scientific research and training. Built on this foundation, a series of elective mini-courses are offered each Spring by PhD candidates in social and population sciences programs, offering opportunities for reading and discussion around a more specific JEDI topic. Between Fall and Spring Quarters, our JEDI course. While the other JEDI curricular initiatives were developed directly in response to the two student petitions, the JEDI course emerged through a different institutional pathway, as a long-term vision enacted by the course instructor, who advocated for and worked closely with students to advance institutional change at AHC University since 2017.

2.2.2. JEDI Course as a Space for Institutional Change Opportunities

The course instructor’s approach is shaped by a background in neuroscience and later immersion in Black feminist thought and pedagogy, which informs both her teaching practice and her positionality as a Black female campus leader. Drawing on this foundation, the course is designed as a community-oriented learning space where students develop knowledge and skills while engaging in action-oriented, institution-facing work, aligned with broader efforts in justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion in graduate training.

The instructor often reflects that she has “always questioned systems—why we do things the way we do, and who’s missing—but didn’t always have the language,” foregrounding the importance of critical inquiry as a starting point for learning. Rather than functioning as a conventional, reactive DEI training, the course enacts a vision of relationality and engaged pedagogy that challenges long-standing racial and gendered inequities in educational systems (hooks, 1994, 2010).

Under the Graduate Division leadership at AHC University, the JEDI course was launched on 8 January 2021. It is a graduate-level course open to students across health science, basic science, and social science programs. In parallel with other curriculum reforms as a reactive response to students’ demands, this JEDI course is a proactive curriculum intervention that anticipated and engaged ongoing institutional challenges. Grounded in sustained student-educator dialogue and iterative development across cohorts, the JEDI course was structured to move beyond a one-time, short-term response and to provide graduate students with the conceptual frameworks and skills needed to successfully design, implement, and evaluate JEDI interventions in graduate education and training.

Financial support was central to realizing these reform-oriented goals. The course was supported by funding from the statewide university president’s office and by institutional funds dedicated to graduate education at AHC University. Students and postdocs selected for the course receive a $1000 stipend and up to $500 to cover capstone project expenses. Projects are implemented during the spring and summer quarters.

The course was designed with explicit objectives that institutionalized equity-oriented leadership development within the graduate curriculum across disciplines at AHCs. Upon completion of this course, student and postdoc participants can

• Define justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) terminology, theories, and histories, and describe its value in academic and institutional structures.
• Define institutional racism and identify the role of power and oppression broadly and in academic settings.
• Acquire knowledge and skills about structures of bureaucracy and how to navigate institutions to enact change.
• Apply up to three leadership strategies to examine their role in serving as an academic JEDI leader and practitioner.
• Describe the expertise needed to lead JEDI efforts in diverse settings and understand the importance of balancing and prioritizing self-care and mental health.
• Develop a capstone project to apply JEDI and leadership theories in an academic setting.

2.3. Data/Materials Collection and Analysis Method

This case study draws on secondary, retrospective data from the JEDI course collected between 2021 and 2025. The materials analyzed include both quantitative and qualitative data: (1) Documentation and records of the course generated during its design and implementation processes; (2) Institutional communications and announcements; (3) Course syllabi and course materials (slides, readings, assignments) preserved on the digital learning platform from 2021 to 2025; (4) JEDI course learners’ profiles and applications; (5) Capstone project documentations and output; (6) Course evaluation data (quantitative + open-ended responses) collected at the conclusion of each course cycle; (7) The course instructor’s reflective materials, documented and shared by the authors as part of the course archive. Together, these sources provide longitudinal insight into the course’s development, pedagogical structure, and institutional positioning over multiple iterations.

All data were archived and stored in AHC University’s authorized, secure digital storage system and on the university’s digital platform for online learning and collaboration. The names and professional roles of the course instructor and invited guest lecturers are retained, as these individuals participated in the course in their public, professional capacities. To protect privacy, all personally identifiable information of enrolled graduate students and postdoctoral learners was removed from the dataset. Records were de-identified to protect the privacy of the 29 individuals included in the study.

A standardized course evaluation was administered across the past five cohorts using a standardized Likert-scale survey (1–5). The survey is organized into three domains: (1) course instruction, (2) course instructor, and (3) guest lecture and guest lecturers. Quantitative results are summarized using mean scores across items and cohorts.

We use the reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) to identify patterns and themes in qualitative and text-based data. RTA is well-suited to examine the underlying logic that shapes particular social practices (Braun et al., 2019); in this case study, it enables analysis of the JEDI course design and development as a site of pedagogical practice. Building on Braun and Clarke’s (2006, 2019, 2024) intervention in thematic analysis, we understand codes as representing the researcher’s interpretations of patterns of meaning across the dataset. The coding process and theme development are flexible and organic. Consistent with the RTA approach, we also highlight the active role of the researcher in knowledge production (Byrne, 2022). Themes are analytic outputs developed through and from the creative labor of our coding. Themes do not passively emerge from either data or coding; they are not ‘in’ the data, waiting to be identified and retrieved by the researcher (Braun & Clarke, 2019). Following Finlay’s (2021) distinction, our analysis method aligns with the ‘artfully interpretative’ approach, which embraces the inherent subjectivity of coding.

The first author A read and reread the course records and documentation to generate initial analytic reflections. Coding was conducted manually and refined through ongoing discussion with the corresponding author, who also served as the course instructor. This process was informed by multiple data sources and shaped by the authors’ evolving understanding of the course over time. We then identified recurring elements of the course design and implementation, including course application, weekly instructional design, mentoring circles, evaluation, and capstone projects. Through reflexive thematic coding, key analytic themes were further developed and organized around shared meanings, including a central concept of proactivity, community building, instructor’s intentionality, and the relationship between learner engagement and institutional structures. As Braun and Clarke (2006, p. 86) described, “writing is an integral part of analysis, not something that takes place at the end, as it does with statistical analyses,” we approached coding as an ongoing and organic process, responsive to our deepening engagement with data and our own positionality.

3. Results

Five key design dimensions emerged from the initial coding process as central to the course’s pedagogical innovation: (1) Designing Instructional Process: Course Application; (2) Course Implementation: Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Community Building; (3) Pedagogical Experimentation: Mentoring Circles; (4) Evaluation; and (5) Capstone Projects. Across these dimensions, we identified three shared themes: intentionality, community-oriented, and proactivity, which we see as an underlying logic of this course’s potential in creating opportunities for institutional change. Importantly, the course also functions as a bridge between students’ assets and institutional transformation, translating an anti-deficit orientation into concrete forms of institutional engagement.

3.1. Designing Instructional Process: Course Application

The JEDI course lays the foundation for proactive engagement through an interactive course application process. Unlike the conventional course enrollment, the course was proactively advertised on the university website and through PhD program listservs. All students who had advanced to candidacy from basic and social and population sciences programs were eligible to apply. Applicants were asked to provide demographic and contact information, a copy of their CV, and responses to two short essay questions (see

Table 1. JEDI course application essay questions.

JEDI Course Application Essay Questions

Please explain why you are interested in taking this course and what you expect to gain. When answering, please consider how your background, experience (work, volunteers, leadership, or activism), and career goals make you a good fit for the course.

2. Please describe a JEDI problem you have noticed on campus and what idea(s) you have for a project. Be sure to include information about prior experiences and existing resources that may facilitate your work.

).

Each applicant was encouraged to provide a faculty statement of commitment from either their graduate program director or their faculty advisor/PI. Faculty were asked to address why they believed the applicant would benefit from participating in the course and how the applicant’s participation will benefit the department and fit with the department’s own work on educational reform. This was intended to ensure that efforts are supported on different levels within the institution, both from the students and from the faculty.

Students received notification of their acceptance to the course via email and were asked to confirm their participation and enrollment in the course. Students were also asked to provide a picture and their permission for their application materials to be turned into a short profile. Student profiles were circulated to all enrolled cohort members and shared with departments and graduate programs so that they could highlight and congratulate participating students.

Student applications and faculty statements of commitment were submitted via Qualtrics, and all applications were de-identified prior to review. Applications were scored on a four-point scale across six criteria: applicants’ prior experience, commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI), proposed project, and faculty support (optional). Scores were weighted such that prior experience and commitment to advocacy, community engagement, and educational reform accounted for 25% of the total score, the proposed project accounted for 50%, and the faculty support was considered as an additional, optional factor. All applications were read and scored by the course instructor. Importantly, the application process was intentionally designed as a pedagogical tool, rather than solely as a selection mechanism.

Across five course cycles, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from diverse disciplines, genders, and racial and ethnic backgrounds participated in the course as both enrolled learners and course coordinators. The demographic composition of participants indicates the course’s accessibility across graduate programs and to students from all backgrounds (See Figure 1 and

Table A2. Learner participants by gender pronouns *.

Gender Pronouns	Number of Participants
She/Her/Hers	23
He/Him/His	10
She/Her/Hers/They/Them	1
Total	34

* = Five students who served as the JEDI course coordinators are included in this table.

and

Table A3. Learner participants by racial/ethnic background *.

Racial/Ethnic Background	Number of Participants
Black	7
Arab	1
Latino/a/x	10
Asian	5
White	10
Multi-racial	1
Total	34

* = Five students who served as the JEDI course coordinators are included in this table.

). Since its launch, the course has attracted participation from across the campus, with students from 12 of 16 PhD programs enrolling over the past five years. It is important to note that some graduate programs were established more recently and therefore did not yet have students enrolled in the course during the study period.

3.2. Course Implementation: Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Community Building Within Intentional Curriculum Design

This JEDI course design and pedagogy are also rooted in Black Feminist, Restorative Justice (RJ), and community-engaged scholarship and tradition. As hooks (1994, p. 12) reminds us, “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” In this JEDI course, that possibility is operationalized as a site for transformative institutional engagement, moving beyond a transactional model of delivering abstract concepts toward practices that translate critical insight into action. In this sense, the course is both informed by and enacts Black feminist pedagogical commitments to relationality, critical consciousness, and community care (hooks, 2003). Complementing this perspective, community-engaged and community-organizing scholarship further illuminates proactivity as an intentional departure from reactive or service-oriented models of engagement with explicit commitments to social and educational justice (Haddix, 2015; Banegas & Gerlach, 2021; Peña-Pincheira & De Costa, 2021). Within the community organizing world, critical praxis is developed through sustained collective engagement with knowledge, dialogue, and action, often facilitated by workshops, shared reflection, and community-based learning (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007; Ginwright, 2015; Gómez & Cammarota, 2022; Farmer-Hinton & Closson, 2023). Although this literature often uses the language of praxis rather than proactivity, its emphasis exemplifies the core characteristics of proactive institutional practice.

Rooted in the Indigenous origins of restorative justice (RJ), the course also integrates RJ’s understanding of proactive: being proactive is being relational to create a culture of connectivity where all members of a community thrive and feel valued (Davis, 2019). Some scholars view RJ as a form of proactive pedagogy that promotes anti-racism and social justice (Abdou et al., 2023; Bailey, 2018; Song et al., 2020). Rather than responding only after a crisis or harm occurs, RJ advances an institution-wide emphasis on prevention and on repairing relationships as part of sustaining equitable learning environments (Evanovich et al., 2020). This emphasis on building a culture of connectivity resonates with Black feminist commitments to relational building and community care in educational spaces (hooks, 2003).

To illustrate how proactive partnership and intentional design are enacted at the course level, the following paragraphs examine selected weekly topics and learning activities, beginning with the course’s opening session. The first class meeting focuses on community building. Students are asked to introduce themselves, and the instructor reviews the syllabus and explains the course requirements. The instructor proposes an initial set of community expectations and asks students to provide additional recommendations. Finally, the students participate in a community-building exercise rooted in RJ practices, in which they are asked to share a meaningful object and explain its significance, discuss their goals and motivations for pursuing the course, and explore their values related to advocacy work.

The second and third weeks explore issues of power and oppression within and beyond academia. The invited experts with a sociology and education background discuss critical theory with the class. To prepare, students are asked to read an introduction to the critical theories covered in the course and to do additional reading on one or two theories they are particularly interested in. Students are also asked to review a concept and terminology primer to ensure everyone uses shared language around advocacy and reform. The course instructor, alongside the guest speaker, elaborates on the history of oppression and colonialism in academia, focusing on how the dominant (White) culture has used academia to exclude people of color from opportunity and to destroy the culture of indigenous people. After these two weeks, students are asked to use the ideas and theories introduced in these class sessions to write a problem statement that contextualizes the issue they want to address and explores how theory can be used to understand it.

The fourth week of the course examines the structures of bureaucracy and how to navigate the university to enact change. Guest lectures introduce students to the higher education’s bureaucratic organization, emphasizing where and how key decisions are made. This session also addresses organizational management and change-making within institutions, equipping students with concrete skills for planning organizational interventions. The guest lecturer also leads students in performing a SWOT analysis—identifying the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to their project. After this week, students are asked to identify key stakeholders, resources, allies, and the organizational home of their projects.

In the fifth and sixth weeks of the course, students explore and apply leadership theories. Instructor lectures on leadership theory in Week 5, leading the students in a discussion of how various theories might benefit or inhibit advocacy work. The course instructor also discusses the complexity of leading institutional reform work, particularly in large, bureaucratic organizations like the state-wide public university system. To prepare for this week, students read a primer on the selected leadership theories. As part of this week’s activities, the instructor leads smaller-group discussions about students’ leadership experiences and values and how to apply the leadership theories previously discussed to their work on campus.

The seventh, eighth, and ninth weeks of the course focus on preparing students to plan and implement their capstone projects, emphasizing flexibility and proactive adaptation as students refine their projects in response to changing institutional conditions. In earlier iterations of the JEDI course, these weeks included lectures on program planning and project management that guided students through the process of turning an initial idea into a concrete intervention, while introducing tools to support project planning and implementation.

In more recent iterations, this phase of the course invites guest lecturers who are community organizers and other nontraditional academic leaders whose work integrates research, education, policy, and community engagement to address health disparities often rooted in historical and institutional harms. The goal is to strengthen community partnerships and to demonstrate how JEDI-oriented projects, such as organizing for health and environmental justice and uplifting community-led science and solutions, are enacted in practice through guest lecturers’ perspectives and storytelling.

This phase of the course has incorporated “the Dreamscape of Capstone Projects,” a session designed to support students in reimagining their project vision and implementation through reflection and creative exploration. Students are encouraged to spend time wandering, processing, and visioning their projects. These sessions emphasize cultivating deep community among participants and creating a space grounded in care, vulnerability, and mutual support, while continuing to engage with program planning frameworks and implementation tools. During this period, students are matched based on their interests and asked to present their projects briefly and to provide feedback to one another. Students are also asked to begin planning their presentations. Finally, in Week 10, students participate in another community-building circle, reflecting on their experiences in the course and their hopes for their advocacy work moving forward.

To support all learners’ journeys toward leadership roles in educational transformation, the course is intentionally designed to integrate a wide range of interdisciplinary expertise. Proactivity is central to the design. This section analyzes the course’s curriculum and assignment design, focusing on how interdisciplinary collaboration and community building are operationalized in practice. Drawing in part on first-person reflections from the course instructor, whose roles as instructor, facilitator, connector, and course designer, provide insight into both the challenges and opportunities of integrating guest lecturers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and lived experiences into the JEDI course.

Central to the course’s goal of advancing institutional change is the recognition that learners require an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge and skills beyond their everyday laboratory, field, and research work. Such an approach offers a response to the critique of disciplinary-based knowledge production, as a need to engage the complex nature of real-world problems (Jeffrey, 2003). Interdisciplinary collaboration fosters innovative, “out-of-the-box” thinking and addresses gaps produced by highly specialized graduate training (Holley, 2015). Interdisciplinary learning has become a widely shared principle in educational reform, particularly in efforts aimed at systemic change (Borrego et al., 2014; James Jacob, 2015).

In the context of the JEDI course, implementing this approach requires sustained, proactive engagement: identifying appropriate experts, communicating course goals, coordinating schedules, and cultivating trust demand weeks of advance planning and ongoing relationship-building. As shown in

Table A1. List of the JEDI course guest lecture information, 2021–2025.

Weekly Topic	Expertise	AHC University Affiliation
Combating Systems of Power and Oppression in Academic and Scientific Settings	History (2022, 2023)	External
	Educational Justice & Community Engagement (2021)	Formerly Internal
Understanding the Power of Healing in Academic and Scientific Settings	Restorative Justice Practices, Narrative Therapy & Community Work (2025)	Internal
	Trauma, life transitions, depression, anxiety, and racial/multicultural/intersectional identities (2025)	Internal
	Decolonial Healing, Racial Trauma, and Community Organizing (2025)	Internal
Theorizing Institutional Systems of Power and Oppression	Sociology (2023–2025)	Internal
	Sociology (2021)	Formerly Internal
	Sociology (2022)	Formerly Internal
	Sociology (2023)	Formerly Internal
	Sociology (2021–2022)	Internal
	Education & Community Engagement (2025)	Internal
Understanding Structures of Bureaucracy and Navigating Institutions to Enact Change	Career and Professional Development (2021–2025)	Internal
	Sociology (2021)	Formerly Internal
Teachings from Community Organizers and Other Nontraditional Academic Leaders	History (2024)	Internal
	History (2025)	Internal
	Racial Justice and Health Disparities (2023)	Internal
	Environmental Justice and Community Organizing (2023)	Internal
	Health Disparities and Policy, Community Organizing (2021–2022)	External
Building Your Toolkit for Program Planning	Sociology (2021)	Formerly Internal

, a total of 19 invited speakers between 2021 and 2025 include professionals from fields such as history, sociology, organizational and change management, community organizing, and health disparities and health policy, reflecting the course’s commitment to interdisciplinary perspectives as an intellectual foundation for learners’ capstone project making. Notably, instruction in community building and academic leadership itself is provided by the course instructor, whose institutional role and professional expertise position her to teach the components directly. Across the ten-week course, the partnership spans faculty, staff, students, fellows, postdoctoral scholars, and community leaders within and beyond the AHC University.

3.3. Pedagogical Experimentation: Mentoring Circle

During the ten-week course, students receive weekly one-on-one mentoring sessions with the instructor. Following the conclusion of the formal course, students continue to receive structured mentorship through mentoring circles for their capstone projects until August. Each mentoring circle was organized around students’ capstone projects and fellow students to extend the intentional community-building and collaborative support established in the course. Each mentoring circle had a specific theme and met with the course instructor once a month for 6 months.

A common agreement among the learners was the need for more mentorship opportunities, from peer-to-peer guidance to student-faculty advising. Mentorship is widely recognized as a critical support mechanism that provides individuals new to a field or profession with advising, networking, and socialization (Crumpton-Young et al., 2014; Luedke et al., 2019). However, prior work on mentoring and mentorship programs has focused on one-on-one relationships between mentor and mentee, in which guidance flows primarily from mentor to mentee. Although this method helps individuals get acclimated to a field, it often falls short in fostering collaboration and collective learning. (Darwin & Palmer, 2009).

To address these limitations and cultivate a more relational and collective model of mentorship, the course adopts mentoring circles as a core pedagogical practice. Mentoring circles have been implemented in other contexts, including the Massachusetts Association of Women in Science (AWIS) to promote women in STEMM and the Engineering Academic Career Club (EACC) at Purdue University (Minetti, 2024; Broberg et al., 2022). At the AWIS, mentors and mentees meet for ten 2 h sessions in which participants share their experiences and challenges, discuss career plans, and gain leadership skills (Association for Women in Science, 2026). At Purdue University, the mentoring circles were six biweekly meetings. Mentors and mentees led their own circles and were responsible for ensuring they met; they utilized prompts and suggested discussion topics provided by the EACC (Broberg et al., 2022).

While mentoring circles are often implemented as stand-alone programs, the JEDI course integrates them directly into its course design. The goals of the mentoring circles were four-fold: (1) each student provided updates on capstone project progression; (2) gather feedback about capstone project progression and/or receive guidance on barriers to implementation; (3) practice and refine skills on offering feedback and support on capstone project implementation among peers; and (4) continue to build community and connections with peers and the course instructor. These spaces prioritize regular check-ins around students’ well-being, values, and sense of belonging, reinforcing mentorship as a relational practice that supports collaboration on capstone projects oriented toward institutional change.

3.4. Evaluation

A standardized course evaluation and a customized learning-gains survey were administered across the past five cohorts. The learning-gains survey, designed by the course instructor, assesses changes in students’ knowledge and skills between pre- and post-course. It is structured across four dimensions, each with five items: (1) Terminology & Theories; (2) Institutional Power; (3) Bureaucracy and Leadership; and (4) JEDI Practice. A more comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of evaluation data and learning gains is presented in a separate manuscript currently in preparation.

The standardized course evaluation is organized into three domains: (1) course instruction, (2) course instructor, and (3) guest lecture and guest lecturers. In this paper, we highlight longitudinal data on selected indicators of course instruction as a focused illustration of student experience across cohorts (

Table 2. JEDI course evaluation: instruction questions (2021–2025) *.

Instruction Evaluation Questions	2025	2024	2023	2022	2021
The overall learning environment was inclusive of all people	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0
Student questions and participation were encouraged	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0
The course developed my ability to think critically about the subject	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	4.8
Assessments related to the course learning objectives/outcomes	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	4.9
This course was useful in progression toward my degree	5.0	5.0	5.0	3.8	4.6

* (1) Self-assessment items were measured on a 1–5 Likert scale (5 = Strongly agree; 4 = Somewhat agree; 3 = Neither agree nor disagree; 2 = Somewhat disagree; 1 = Strongly disagree). (2) Response Rate: 2025: 100%; 2024: 60%; 2023 = 67%; 2022 = 57%; 2021 = 100%.

). These indicators reflect students’ perceptions of inclusivity, engagement, critical thinking, alignment of assessment, and relevance to degree progression.

Complementing the quantitative findings shown in

Table 3. JEDI course evaluation: instructor questions (2021–2025) *.

Instructor Evaluation Questions	2025	2024	2023	2022	2021
The instructor presented content in an organized manner	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0
The instructor’s teaching methods were effective throughout this course	5.0	4.8	5.0	5.0	5.0
The instructor explained concepts clearly	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	4.9
The instructor’s feedback to you was helpful and improved your understanding of the material	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	4.9
The instructor related to students as individuals.	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0
The instructor’s lecture/presentation added valuable knowledge to your skillset.	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0

* (1) Self-assessment items were measured on a 1–5 Likert scale (5 = Strongly agree; 4 = Somewhat agree; 3 = Neither agree nor disagree; 2 = Somewhat disagree; 1 = Strongly disagree). (2) Response Rate: 2025: 100%; 2024: 60%; 2023 = 67%; 2022 = 57%; 2021 = 100%.

, qualitative responses further show how this course fosters a sustained sense of community and support for learners engaged in JEDI-related work. Students emphasized relational dimensions of collective learning. For example, according to a student from the 2022 cohort, “Not only has my knowledge grown, but my humanity and connection to others grew immensely throughout this course. I feel equipped to work on implementing my project as well as lead and support others in their JEDI work.” Another student from the 2023 cohort highlighted the role of instructional support and relationship-building: “[the course instructor] is supportive of each and every one of us. This positively impacted cultivating community and developing trust.” These responses showcase the importance of community-building as a core component of the course’s pedagogical design.

While the evaluation data capture students’ learning gains and experiences, we turn to the design and implementation of the capstone projects as a central pedagogical component of the course to understand how learning is enacted in practice and how the JEDI course bridges individual students to opportunities for institutional reform.

3.5. Capstone Projects

Each student develops, implements, and briefly evaluates a capstone project on campus as part of the course. Students may use the course to continue working on an issue they are already engaged in or to explore a new area of interest. Students with overlapping interests may choose to collaborate on a project. Descriptively, all the learners’ projects fall into nine categories: admission, outreach, mentorship, leadership, career development, community building, spatial design, storytelling, mental health, teaching, and training (see Figure 2). Assignments throughout the course serve as scaffolding to help students think about the problem they want to address, navigate bureaucratic systems to gain support for their idea, and plan the project’s implementation and evaluation. In the final weeks of the class, students are assigned to small groups based on their project proposals and asked to workshop their projects together. These groups also collaborate on the final presentations, crafting a shared problem statement and proposing each of their projects in turn as possible ways of addressing the problem they highlighted.

While students are not expected to plan a full-scale evaluation, they are encouraged to identify and collect some metrics of success and to report the results of their project back to funders, the class, and their target community. Students are encouraged to approach their evaluation as a process evaluation, demonstrating that they successfully implemented their project, rather than an outcomes evaluation. The student projects and their progress are highlighted on the course website, in the student newspaper, at an end-of-year symposium, and even published as an academic paper.

We select three projects as examples to showcase the current outcomes of student-led work and the distinct lessons they offer for institutional change. Most recently, a Summer Outreach Internship Program was developed by a biomedical science student from the 2025 cohort to support local community college students with limited access to research opportunities. With support from the JEDI course coordinator, the student conducted outreach and successfully matched four community college students to research labs at this AHC university for summer 2026 research training and mentoring.

Second, a 2025 cohort student specializing in cell biology designed a survey and workshop for students entering their second year, after selecting their thesis lab but before fully committing to their projects. The initiative aims to proactively encourage students to prioritize equitable research design by including scholars from the humanities and social sciences on thesis committees. This approach helps ensure that necessary questions about students’ commitment to diversity and equitable research practices remain central throughout students’ research trajectories, as these collaborators can raise critical perspectives on JEDI principles. At the same time, the project considers how to avoid placing additional burdens on the marginalized groups it seeks to support. The survey and workshop have been implemented and incorporated into a campus-wide student retention program, extending their impact at the institutional level.

Lastly, an interdisciplinary collaborative DE-SILO (Diversity, Equity, and Sociology Training in Laboratory Organizations) project was led by two students from the 2021 cohort with training in developmental biology and sociology. The project’s goal is to foster small but durable changes in laboratory environments by creating a toolkit, training modules, facilitation guides, and a resource repository for participating laboratories. These materials focus on educational and community-building content. The student leaders’ findings from the pilot year suggest that widespread adoption may be unlikely, as it requires sustained energy, committed leadership, and community in the lab. Nonetheless, the two project leaders have already turned their implementation and lessons learned from the DE-SILO Project into a published paper, demonstrating the broader impact of their work (Jeske et al., 2025).

To summarize, projects involving community college outreach, lab-based training modules, and student-designed surveys and workshops integrated into the institutional retention program demonstrate how a proactive, curriculum development approach can translate individual students’ ideas and experiences into collaborative interventions for institutional change. These capstone projects operated across multiple institutional levels, including research lab, academic program and department, the Graduate Division, and cross-campus collaborations. Students worked through existing campus programs, resources, and institutional networks to address issues they identified while also considering the long-term sustainability of their proposed interventions.

4. Discussion

Reflecting on the course design and implementation, the key dimensions, such as application process and capstone projects, position students as agents of institutional transformation rather than passive recipients of support. While anti-deficit frameworks have been critical in reframing students’ agency and challenge deficit narratives, this study extends this line of work by showing how curriculum development can translate learners’ assets into institutional engagement through a temporal lens. Anti-deficit orientations alone are insufficient to produce institutional transformation. Institutions may recognize individual students’ assets and foregrounding individual behaviors, experiences, and outcomes, yet remain largely reactive, responding only after crises or external pressure.

In contrast, drawing from key themes from our case study, we conceptualize proactivity as a future-oriented, intentional process embedded within curriculum design. A reactive approach responds to problems, conflicts, and incidents after they occur; usually through short-term and issue-specific interventions. By comparison, proactivity refers to the willingness and ability to take action for changes (Kirby & Kirby, 2006), or behaviors and self-initiated and future-oriented actions (Parker & Collins, 2010, p. 635) that are relatively unconstrained by structural forces and intentionally aim to change the environment (Akın, 2014). Proactivity is also linked to pioneering behavior, the pursuit of new opportunities, and attempts to lead rather than follow (De Jong et al., 2015). Importantly, Grant and Ashford (2008) conceptualize proactivity as a process that can be applied to any set of actions through anticipation, planning, and striving to have an impact, which can be enacted at the organizational level. Although much of the existing literature continues to treat proactivity primarily as an individual trait or set of behaviors (Kickul & Kickul, 2006; Kirby & Kirby, 2006; Parker & Collins, 2010; García-Almeida & Cabrera-Nuez, 2020), our findings extended this concept by demonstrating how proactivity can operate at the level of course innovation and proactive pedagogy. Specifically, our case study reveals proactivity as the underlying logic of JEDI curriculum development. In this framing, individual learning and institutional reform are linked through curriculum development as a community-based process that may lead to institutional transformation (See Figure 3).

By making the “how” of course innovation visible, the JEDI course offers actionable design principles and lessons grounded in a proactivity-based logic. These principles and lessons bridge knowledge, skills, and practices with the capacity to navigate bureaucracy and academic structures before specific crises arise, reflecting a future-oriented approach. The application process was intentionally designed as a pedagogical tool, rather than solely as a selection mechanism. By engaging with applicants’ experiences, commitments, and proposed projects in advance, the course instructor and coordinator were able to proactively shape weekly lectures, course materials, and mentoring structures to align with students’ needs and intellectual trajectories. This early engagement also informed the formation of mentoring circles, enabling the intentional pairing of students with overlapping interests and complementary project goals.

The seventh, eighth, and ninth weeks of the course focus on preparing students to plan and implement their capstone projects. A critical element of this course’s intentional design during this phase is its emphasis on flexibility and adaptation, as students are supported in refining their projects in response to shifting institutional conditions, emerging constraints, and evolving opportunities for engagement.

The wide range of capstone project topics reflects students’ driving goals, values, and the institutional issues they experience firsthand. Some students focused on educational equity in access and pathway design; others sought to strengthen their mentorship, career, and leadership development; still others aimed to create a stronger sense of belonging in everyday academic spaces with creative art-based design or podcast projects, or to rethink how training is structured and how knowledge is produced and taught (see Figure A1).

Mentoring circles further exemplify this approach. As discussed earlier, these circles intentionally paired students with overlapping project interests and extended well beyond the ten-week course schedule. Mentoring circles create spaces where students not only work together on projects but also build community across disciplines and backgrounds. These mentoring circles countered the isolation often experienced in STEMM training by fostering support, connection, and community.

Through these structures, the JEDI course cultivated a community in which students drew on their lived experiences alongside course-based frameworks to collaboratively design and implement projects for institutional change. The course provided the knowledge, skills, and support for students to translate concern into action. Rather than treating students’ experiences as individual grievances, this course explicitly recognized and valued them, supporting students in integrating their voices with the tools and knowledge developed throughout the course.

Identifying appropriate experts, communicating course goals, coordinating schedules, and cultivating trust demand weeks of advance planning and ongoing relationship-building. These efforts rely heavily on the course instructors’ existing community networks and, in some cases, lead to the formation of new partnerships during the course design process. For example, her long-standing relationships with experts and campus leaders in restorative justice and community outreach enabled the integration of this expertise into the JEDI course, while her proactive outreach to newly arrived faculty has developed into enduring collaborative relationships. As the instructor of the JEDI course noted, “You need to have a pool of experts to connect with.” As current scholarship has emphasized, interdisciplinary teaching requires not only access to expertise across fields but also an instructor’s capacity to integrate them effectively within a coherent pedagogical framework (Portillo-Blanco et al., 2024; Thibaut et al., 2018).

Twenty-three years ago, hooks (2003, p. 45) wrote that “without ongoing movements for social justice in our nation, progressive education becomes all the more important since it may be the only location where individuals can experience support for acquiring a critical consciousness, for any commitment to end domination.” In the current climate, this observation remains strikingly relevant, as the role and meaning of classroom, learning, and curriculum continue to shift.

At a time when many equity-oriented curriculum developments are facing increased resistance and structural retrenchment, this course has continued to receive institutional funding support. Although the JEDI course was designed to address issues before and beyond immediate crises, it cannot be denied that it is still embedded in broader institutional actions, including curriculum reform catalyzed in 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd uprisings and racial justice movements. Many enrolled students are connected to a campus-wide student retention program, further situating this course within a broader institutional change ecosystem.

While this JEDI course is innovative and proactive, it is resource- and labor-intensive. Long-term, collaborative, iterative work can be difficult to manage and sustain; therefore, another lesson emerging from the process of designing and sustaining an interdisciplinary coursework is the importance of “knowing your environment and institution so you know what is possible.” This quote is drawn from the instructor’s reflective notes, saved as part of the data for this paper. At AHC University, its status as an Academic Health Center, combined with the progressive political context and community organizing traditions of the surrounding community, constituted a critical enabling context for the development and implementation of the JEDI course.

5. Conclusions

By examining JEDI course design and implementation, our case study demonstrates how curriculum reform can create opportunities for graduate STEMM students to translate their assets and agency into collaborative interventions for institutional change. Across the course’s pedagogical and organizational practices, proactivity emerged as the central mechanism linking students’ learning, community building, and institutional reform. Key dimensions of the course, such as application process and capstone projects, position students as agents of institutional transformation rather than passive recipients of support. Various forms of institutional engagement emerge during capstone project implementation, including community college outreach, lab-based training modules, and student-designed surveys and workshops integrated into the institutional retention program.

The longitudinal data strengthen our findings and underscore the importance of sustaining course design and pedagogical innovation efforts with integrity and continued proactivity. Instead of responding episodically to isolated concerns through short-term workshops or one-time interventions, the JEDI course embeds project-based institutional engagement as a structured and sustained component of learning. In reflective materials documented in the course archive, the course instructor noted that “having a strong relationship with your students to create this course space” was foundational to the course’s iterative development across cohorts. Rather than relying on conventional, extractive needs assessments, the course emerged through ongoing, relational engagement with students, with insights continued to be incorporated into course design.

The JEDI course illustrates the value of working in community with students and recognizes their strengths and assets as central to institutional transformation. The course is shaped through a proactive process of community building among students engaged in advocacy, supporting their learning while connecting students to real-time projects and opportunities for institutional change in graduate STEMM. The same course might not be replicable, yet logic can be applied and adjusted based on the institutional context. This suggests that understanding what is possible requires close attention to institutional structure, culture, and constraints. In this way, the course functions as a proactive process that creates opportunities for institutional change, positions students as partners in reform, and translates their assets and insights into sustained institutional practices.