EAGER: Leadership Workshops and Fieldwork

Trinity University, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

Trinity University of San Antonio, TX is awarded a grant to support the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education (PULSE). PULSE will bring together 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows in a year-long, facilitated effort to identify the environment necessary for constant and robust evolution in undergraduate life science education in response to the call for action articulated in the Vision and Change report published in 2011. Fellows will be selected from among our nation's most driven, passionate, and accomplished chairs, former chairs, and deans - people in a position to initiate and sustain change. The process starts with a workshop to identify approaches and coordinate efforts. It is followed by an intense period of "field work" where initial ideas are tried, assessed and refined. And it culminates in a second workshop aimed at refining thinking, tools, documents, and approaches. The goal is to understand and establish an environment in departments and institutions that has the right selective pressures to foster the constant evolution of learning approaches for undergraduate life science education. The PI team from Trinity University proposes to support this complex, year-long activity by serving as mentors for the Fellows and by coordinating communication and logistics between the Fellows and KnowInnovation (KI). KI will play a crucial role in gathering data relevant to transforming undergraduate life sciences education and the impediments to implementation of reform. KI will plan and facilitate a workshop that has a goal of identifying key approaches for overcoming barriers to implementing change in undergraduate life science education. The ideas developed in the workshop will be shared, vetted, and implemented on a pilot basis. Fellows will share preliminary results with each other and the community via in-person and virtual meetings to maximize interactions. The Fieldwork stage will conclude with a second workshop to refine implementation recommendations to the PULSE partners and broader community. The experience of KI in encouraging participants to generate bold, new approaches is a strong addition to this unique and exciting program designed to mobilize change in undergraduate life sciences education. The award fits the EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) because of its high potential for producing an implementation framework for transforming biology departments within the nation's colleges and universities. The results of the Vision and Change Leadership Fellows project will move institutional reform efforts forward. Fellows will be a diverse group of leaders from research universities, comprehensive/public universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. The proposed activities are expected to make a significant contribution to an unprecedented transformation of the undergraduate biology education community's understanding of institutional barriers to change and of strategies for overcoming them. It is possible that the focus on department chairs for catalyzing educational reforms in biology might be a model for other disciplines as they work on issues of attracting and retaining undergraduate students in STEM disciplines. This project is being funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to support Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education.