An award has been made to Georgia Gwinnett College to conduct a workshop from August 9-11, 2013 to plan a regional conference to promote the mission of the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education (PULSE). In September 2012 the PULSE partners (HHMI, NIH, and NSF) appointed 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows to stimulate transformative changes in undergraduate life science education as recommended in the Vision and Change report. Fellows were selected from two-year colleges, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive universities and research universities. The Fellows have organized into working groups with the overarching goal of helping departments transform their programs in a national effort to increase student learning of core concepts, increase student retention in the sciences, and prepare all students to be more curious and scientifically literate citizens.
The current award is to fund a workshop in Atlanta, GA in which the fourteen Leadership Fellows located in the Southeastern United States will plan a Southeastern (SE) Regional PULSE (SERP) Conference to be held in spring of 2014. The SERP Conference will provide a venue for institutional teams to build the awareness, skills, implementation plan, and support network to undertake reform on their home campuses. The Fellows will partner at the workshop with a scholar whose expertise includes evaluating the outcomes of academic conferences and with representatives from the Association of Southeastern Biologists and the American Institute of Biological Sciences to plan synergistic activities in the region. This regional network will expand the impact of PULSE by reaching out to institutions in states accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, many of which are not currently represented by PULSE Leadership Fellows. While this regional network will be one of several "laboratories" for testing the resources being developed by the PULSE working groups, the workshop organizers recognize that each region of the country faces unique challenges and opportunities in moving Vision and Change efforts forward. One opportunity for the Southeast is to engage the large number of HBCUs and other Minority Serving Institutions in future Vision and Change activities. Results from the workshop and the larger regional conference will be shared with other regional networks and with the life sciences community, primarily via the www.pulsecommunity.org website, but also through conference presentations and publications.
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.
