Midwest Vision and Change Leadership Fellows Midwest Regional Planning Meeting

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

An award has been made to Washington University to organize and conduct a workshop from April 12-14, 2013 in support of the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education (PULSE). Last September, the PULSE partners (HHMI, NIH, and NSF) appointed 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows to stimulate transformative changes in the undergraduate life science education community. All Fellows met in October, 2012 and have since organized into four working groups to address different challenges to reforming how biology is taught at all types of undergraduate institutions. The Vision and Change Leadership Fellows are focusing on how life science departments can encourage and reward faculty members' efforts to improve undergraduate life sciences education. Such improvements should increase student learning, should increase retention rates for students in the sciences, and should prepare all students to be more curious and scientifically literate citizens. The current award is to fund a workshop in St. Louis, MO for nine of the Leadership Fellows from a variety of institution types located within the Midwest and Great Plains region. One of the participants is a member of the Leadership Council that is coordinating the efforts of all 40 Fellow and the other participants are members of the four PULSE working groups. The major goal of this workshop is to plan a regional conference on adopting the Vision and Change recommendations that will coincide with a fall meeting of the Association of College and University Biology Educators (ACUBE). It is hoped that the conference will catalyze formation of a regional network that will begin coordinating educational reform efforts in this large geographic area. This regional conference will expand the impact of PULSE by reaching out to institutions from adjacent states such as North and South Dakota, Kansas, Illinois, Michigan, and Kentucky, that are currently not represented by the PULSE Leadership Fellows. While this regional network will be one of several "laboratories" for testing the resources being developed by the four PULSE working groups, the workshop organizers recognize that each region of the country faces somewhat different challenges in moving Vision and Change efforts forward. One challenge for the Midwest is to engage a larger number of community college faculty in future Vision and Change activities. Results from the workshop and the larger conference will be shared with the life sciences community, primarily via the www.pulsecommunity.org website.