Advancing Physics Education Where Diversity Resides: The Organization for Physics at Two-Year Colleges (OPTYCs)

Caption: Cohort 1 of the Creating Environments that Reach Every Student Program. Participants sort ideas during a brainstorming session. St. Louis, Jan. 2025.

Our Vision

We envision a future where two-year college (TYC) physics and astronomy thrive, where TYC faculty are embraced and empowered in the national STEM ecosystem, and where TYC students experience excellent, evidence-based, and equitable learning environments.

This is the bold vision for creating The Organization for Physics at Two-Year Colleges (OPTYCs).¹ OPTYCs was an NSF-supported project creating a national hub for physics and astronomy at TYCs, providing faculty with relevant professional development and networking so that all students can succeed.² This grant has been overseen by current and former TYC faculty (this typically includes Community Colleges, Technical Colleges, Junior Colleges) who teach physics and astronomy, with the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)³ serving as the fiduciary agent.

The title of our project (and this blog post) reflects the fact that TYCs enroll a greater proportion of students who are women, African American, Latinx, Native American, people with disabilities, first generation to attend college, working full-time, caregiving, and military veterans compared to four-year colleges and universities.⁴ The recent comprehensive national survey of TYC physics⁵ found 1,126 TYCs offered at least one physics, physical science, or astronomy course, and estimated 163,000 students were enrolled in those courses. In this blog post, references to physics include all these topics.

The Need

Not only are TYCs more diverse across multiple dimensions when compared with traditional higher education institutions, TYCs are more accessible to students because of lower tuition and open-enrollment policies. Small classes, wrap-around resources, and devoted faculty all contribute to more welcoming learning environments. However, several critical issues that TYC physics faculty face, first identified in 1990, are still relevant today.

Isolation:

Why do TYC physics faculty feel isolated and disconnected from the greater physics community? The first statistically valid national survey of TYC physics, done in 1996, revealed that 60% of TYCs offering physics courses had zero or one full-time physics faculty members.⁶ This proportion dropped to 52% in 2012,⁷ and was 64% in 2023.⁴ In 2012 and 2023, approximately half of physics teaching instructors at TYCs were part-time and they often teach at multiple institutions.

This sense of isolation is not just restricted to TYCs. High school teachers for physics are often the only ones to do so at their schools, other disciplines at TYCs also have solo faculty, and university researchers are often the only ones within their departments to have a specific subdiscipline. OPTYCs can provide a model for other groups to establish systems that reduce isolation.

Networking:

Not only are TYC physics faculty isolated, but programs and resources for networking are sparse. Most TYCs are funded by state and county governments, and some require that professional development funds stay within the state. Very few TYCs have financial support for travel to conferences or for learning opportunities external to the institution. Teaching loads for TYC faculty are high,⁸ limiting the availability of time away from classes to interact with peers and mentors. Networking has been shown to be more challenging for minoritized groups as well; this problem is widespread.

Professional Development:

Figure 1: Participants gather around equipment at a workshop on using sensors to teach physics concepts. St. Louis, Jan. 2025.

TYC physics faculty have received substantial benefits from prior grant-supported initiatives, but a sustained and wide-reaching effort is necessary to provide continuous and evolving opportunities for faculty growth.⁹ While faculty access to virtual, discipline-specific training has grown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a dearth of opportunities that recognize and address the unique challenges of teaching physics at a TYC remains. For example, existing conferences for physics department heads at four-year institutions are less relevant for the lone TYC physics faculty managing a physics program, or for a TYC Chair of a multidisciplinary department. This is true for many disciplines at TYCs and small four-year institutions.

Data about Students:

Nearly all physics education research (PER) comes from studies of student populations at selective, research-intensive four-year institutions,¹⁰ even though a large and growing percentage of students are taking physics courses at TYCs. Depending on how data are collected, 30-50% of students taking an undergraduate physics course do so at a TYC, and 13% of physics bachelor’s degree recipients started at a TYC.¹¹

Often, TYC student data are aggregated into results about undergraduate programs. This can lead to misrepresentation or obscuring of nuances. Data on students taking courses within a discipline, but are not majoring in that field, are rarely collected. This is a broad problem that limits our abilities to provide the best support for student success.

Data about Faculty, Programs, and Institutions:

As with data about students taking physics at TYCs, data about faculty and departments are not included in comprehensive surveys, or are aggregated within “undergraduate education.”¹² Since TYCs serve more non-traditional students (such as military veterans, working parents, part-time students), the needs and support structures of TYC programs are different from those at four-year institutions. Disaggregating these data would provide much needed information on students, faculty, and programs at TYCs. More comprehensive and nuanced data helps the entire STEM education ecosystem; a four-year institution accepting transfer students from TYCs would benefit greatly from knowing more about these students’ experiences prior to enrollment.

Our Programs

OPTYCs was funded for four years, beginning July 1, 2022, and has supported stand-alone events, cohort-based programs, and special projects to directly address these issues.

Stand Alone Programs:

Through our Continuing Professional Development Workshops program, we have offered 50+ workshops (virtual and in-person) to support faculty in making changes to curricula and pedagogy. In our PER Interest Group, we have hosted 20 virtual discussions and disseminations on PER results and ways to engage with this work. Most of the virtual events have been recorded and are publicly available on our website,¹³ with participants indicating they were likely to use what they learned (4.3 on 5 point scale), and worth their time (4.7/5).¹⁴ We have organized two TYC Tandem meetings, which are focused one-day conferences for TYC faculty, associated with national AAPT meetings. The camaraderie developed at Tandem Meetings contributes to the collegial and supportive culture of the TYC physics community; one participant said that the best thing about the Tandem was the “chance to network with TYC faculty, to discuss aspects of physics teaching at a TYC, learn new or different techniques that work at TYCs.”

Cohort-Based Programs:

Figure 2: Cohort 2 of the TYC Leadership Institute. Participants engage in a learning activity. St. Louis, Jan. 2025.

All three of our cohort programs include both virtual and in-person components, ranging from 10-20 participants per cohort, and two cohorts in each. All three of these programs bring together TYC faculty nationally to learn, mutually support each other, and build a lasting community. Collectively, more than 75 unique individuals have engaged in these programs.

Our New Faculty Development Series,¹⁵ is a 16-month-long transformative program that supports new TYC faculty to incorporate evidence-based instructional strategies. More experienced faculty can develop new skills and receive support in a change project during the 12-month Leadership Institute,¹⁶ arming participants with advocacy tools to effect change locally, regionally, and nationally. Faculty improve student success by implementing and developing evidence-based practices in the Creating Environments that Reach Every Student experience,¹⁷ designed to not only empower participants to develop new habits, but also to act as change agents in their local communities. Participants cite how these programs are life-changing, “I have learned so many ways to help create better learning environments both inside and out of the classroom. My students have made so many comments about how what I do makes physics approachable—and that is largely thanks to OPTYCs.”

Special Projects:

The Mentoring, Networking, and Affinity Groups Program facilitates both traditional and peer mentorship, as well as forms national collaborations;¹⁸ 25 groups have formed, reaching more than 75 individuals.

In late 2026 we plan to publish a new edition of the AAPT Guidelines for TYC Physics Programs,¹⁹ last published in 2002, to incorporate advancements in classroom technology, updated effective pedagogy, and best practices for administering courses, staffing, and resources.

OPTYCs funded and collaborated with the American Institute of Physics Statistical Research team to conduct a third comprehensive survey on TYC physics programs, faculty, and students. Data and analysis are complete, with reports underway.

A ‘one-stop-shop’ website for TYC physics and astronomy has been established through OPTYCs, providing resources, event registration, and archives of past activities. Institutionalizing these efforts helps to eliminate the cycle of each generation needing to rediscover methods to collaborate, network, and build expertise.

What We’ve Learned

The work of reaching faculty, perpetuating community, building on-ramps to empowerment, and sustaining lasting change towards student success is an on-going and relentless effort. It is difficult to find, then incentivize already overburdened TYC faculty to engage. Once involved, however, faculty are grateful for the community; as one participant stated, “I didn’t realize how much I’d needed this or could benefit from this community until now.”

Being empowered by a national community requires forming productive and mutually respectful collaborations. TYC faculty tend to have more freedom over their course structures, allowing them to be innovative – this is both an advantage and a disadvantage of being a solo instructor in a discipline. TYC faculty are also fiercely dedicated to their students’ success, working with a wide range of students simultaneously. Showcasing these strengths has been productive in building relationships across institution types and educational levels. Working across disciplines is also vital to empowerment; learning how other disciplines frame similar scientific concepts, or use ideas from our classes in theirs, help us better understand and address students’ pre- and mis-conceptions.

Helping students succeed at their goals is our ultimate aim. We have no illusions that every student in our classes should work towards a faculty-researcher position. Instead, we focus our efforts on each student’s aspirations and reasons for being in our classes. This is a great strength of instructors at small, undergraduate institutions. And we know that OPTYCs has been helping faculty. Respondents to our last annual survey¹⁴ indicate that they have received meaningful support from OPTYCs: 90% feel OPTYCs has had meaningful impacts on their professional life, 87% feel more meaningfully connected to other TYC faculty, and 76% feel their support has increased since engaging with OPTYCs.

“Personally, staying connected with colleagues through myriad professional development opportunities has nurtured my soul… Professionally, OPTYCs has helped me connect with newer faculty, given me leadership opportunities, and pushed me to improve.” (Participant, April-May 2025)

What We’ve Lost

Unfortunately, NSF terminated our funding on May 9, 2025. We were planning to use our final year to broadly disseminate and build capacity by bringing over 100 TYC physics faculty together at the national AAPT Summer Meeting (Aug 2-6, 2025). Many who planned to attend have been active participants, both in OPTYCs’ creation and in its continuation. While we had been laying foundations for sustainability since our inception, we haven’t yet developed a complete roadmap. These plans needed the input of the entire community we serve. We have always known that the initial investment through a grant was to build momentum and to lay the foundation for a long-term sustained approach. We knew that these funds to help bring folks together at professional meetings would not last, but having these funds suddenly stopped, with folks having already committed to registration and travel costs, is a lost investment. We are not able to do a full analysis on our interventions and to disseminate our work as a model for other disciplines and groups.

Figure 3: Nearly all OPTYCs programs were meeting their proposed benchmarks for unique participants, with the exception of the CERES program, at the time of grant termination.

Resilience

We hope that the nearly three years of funding for this grant have created enough energy and laid sufficient foundation to continue strengthening our community. We will need to scale back, but we can continue if there is sufficient will and energy left to sustain these initial efforts. We believe in TYC faculty and students and so we continue this work.

To support more students persisting in STEM, it is imperative that we find ways to help TYC faculty feel connected to a larger community, and to enable continuous professional growth. OPTYCs is doing this on a national scale, providing free resources that are useful for a wide range of STEM instruction at all levels. We hope that sharing our project and its resources here will increase connectivity in the broader STEM ecosystem.

Figure 4: Some of the OPTYCs team having fun with our logo. Boston, MA. July 2024.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to our supporters, both within and external to the TYC physics and astronomy community, who have already expressed intent to continue with these efforts in spite of funding loss. Thank you to the OPTYCs team for being willing to adapt in-person events to virtual ones, and for agreeing to continue all of your tireless efforts without financial support. Thank you to our amazing participants and facilitators, who have worked together over the past three years to envision a physics community where all students can succeed. And thank you to everyone reading this, because by doing so, you’re showing support for science education.

This project was supported by NSF-DUE-2212807, and is now partially funded with a grant from the American Institute of Physics.²⁰