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.
The Willamette Valley Biological Education Network (WVBEN) project entailed 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 included public, private, 2-year, and 4-year institutions with faculty members from biology, chemistry, education and mathematics. This faculty development project emerged 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 long-term goal was 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. This one year, incubator grant provided the opportunity to explore the ability of our regional network to be self-sustaining based on local expertise. WVBEN provided three faculty development workshops during the timeframe of this incubator grant. Feedback from all of the three workshops was positive with participants expressing support for a regional community of practice. We know of one campus that revised its science for non-science majors biology courses based on team participation in one workshop. Workshop participants included graduate students from Oregon State University, who indicated that they valued these types of professional development opportunities in addition to faculty members from various institutional types. We developed new materials for these workshops that could be used by other groups, such as the core competencies inventory chart created for the workshop "New Biology: From Courses to Competencies." One of our short-term goals was to evaluate a model for development of regional networks. The model we piloted was based on institutional memberships with campus liaisons responsible for promoting events and maintaining the campus data base of interests, expertise, and participants. This model was not successful. We were not able to obtain a memo of understanding from institutions or rely on campus liaisons. We attribute our success to partnering with Project Kaleidoscope. Since its founding in 1989, Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) has been one of the leading advocates in the United States for building and sustaining strong undergraduate programs in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). With an extensive network of over 7,000 faculty members and administrators at more than 800 colleges and universities, PKAL has developed far-reaching influence in shaping undergraduate STEM learning environments that attract and retain undergraduate students. PKAL accomplishes its work by engaging campus faculty and leaders in funded projects, national and regional meetings, community-building activities, leadership development programs, and publications that are focused on advancing what works in STEM education. Our regional network was started as part of a pilot program supported by funding to PKAL by the National Science Foundation then attempted to be self-sufficient with this incubator grant. We found we were dependent on PKAL for our web presence, list serve, event promotion, registration, and workshop materials. We planned meaningful faculty-development activities on our own then PKAL helped us produce and disseminate them. The outcome of this grant is that we are working with PKAL to create a national system of interconnected, multi-layered regional networks that are focused on STEM reform. Our experience supports the importance of having PKAL serve as the nexus of an interconnected and multidisciplinary web focused on systemic change in undergraduate education and we have collaborated with PKAL in submitting a full proposal to NSF entitled, STEM Reform Networks: Building Local Capacity to Lead Institutional Change.
