The Willamette Valley Biological Education Network (WVBEN) project entails the planning and initial development of a sustainable regional pedagogical community to engage faculty members in professional development activities that improve undergraduate biology education and provide a model for development of other regional networks. The pedagogical community will include public, private, 2-year, and 4-year institutions with faculty members from biology, chemistry, education and mathematics. This faculty development project emerges from the belief that individual faculty members acting alone generally do not have the knowledge, will, time, support or resources to mount and sustain pedagogical reform. The goal is to lower these barriers to reform by establishing a regional pedagogical community that is sustained over time, collaborative, and focused on evidence about student learning.
WVBEN will contribute to the growing base of data on the value of networks by documenting its progress and disseminating the lessons learned. It will develop and implement pedagogical audit and needs assessment surveys and assess the impact of activities on participants. The leadership team will document how well the organizational structure is working and determine how it can be improved. In addition, the number of institutions contacted and the response of those institutions to joining a regional pedagogical community will be documented.
This project will enhance the infrastructure for education in biological sciences by establishing a regional pedagogical network. By assessing, documenting and disseminating its work it will foster understanding of how we change institutional cultures and faculty activities through creating communities of practice. The network will be designed to serve as a model for other regions, contribute to data about the value of communities of practice, and serve as the foundation for the larger regional Northwest Biological Education Network.
This project is supported jointly by the Biological Sciences Directorate and the Division of Undergraduate Education.
